Harvard v. Trump Showdown: Harvard Strikes Back!
The University is suing, but the damage has already begun.
Well, this is good: Yesterday Harvard filed a big federal lawsuit against a whole bunch of defendants in the Trump administration to get its frozen funding restored. But this is bad: Getting funding unfrozen could take years, and could still do lasting damage to Harvard in the meantime, even if they prevail. Good: Now more than 150 college presidents have signed a letter denouncing “government overreach,” and the Big 10 Universities are working on a “mutual defense compact” to support one another against the administration’s attacks. But bad: The administration is still attacking!
A week ago, you may recall that Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, told Trump to fuck off to his fucking face, after he demanded control of pretty much everything: what they teach, approval over the school’s leadership, what departments it can have, governmental access to student records, control over admissions, the power to audit departments for years for “viewpoint discrimination,” and much more, leaving the school with no actual choice but to fight or be destroyed forever as an independent, respected institution.
PREVIOUSLY!
And Trump did not like being told to fuck off to his fucking face, or having the administration’s brazen demands exposed in public. And so, after we last left this story, the administration bizarrely and ridiculously claimed that the demand letter they sent Harvard on April 11 — on letterhead — was a “mistake” and “unauthorized,” bonkers-ly adding: “It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks. Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.” How dare you publicly tell us to fuck off when we’re trying to destroy you!
They know they’re lying, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, we know they know we know they’re lying, and they just don’t give a fuck.
Anyway, at the same time it was claiming the letter was a “mistake,” and within hours of Harvard President Alan Garber telling the administration to fuck off, the government pulled $2.2 billion (with a b) in federal funding, plus another $60 million multiyear contract, and Trump TruthSocialed a threat to remove its tax exempt status.
And then the next day Kristi Noem wrote a letter demanding detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ “illegal and violent activities” by April 30, 2025, or “face immediate loss of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification.” Loss of the program would be major, as foreign students are about 27 percent of their enrollment, and a big part of what makes it one of the most prestigious and respected research universities in the world.
And THEN the Trump administration cut $2.7 million more for studying research on mass violence and human trafficking prevention efforts, and a grant for Implementation Science for Targeted Violence Prevention, because it “branded conservatives as far-right dissidents in a shockingly skewed study.” SURE, JAN.
And THEN they cut ANOTHER billion for public health research on top of that.
So now Harvard is suing to stop the funding freeze, and will almost surely eventually prevail, because all of this is illegal a hundred ways to Sunday, from the part where they’re stifling free speech at a private university to where they’ve stopped payment on government contracts right in the middle of the contracts, to how there are already laws and procedures in place for investigating civil rights complaints and the administration has followed none of those procedures. It’s the definition of arbitrary and capricious, just like everything this administration has done in the past 92 days.
But in the meantime, Harvard (and also the other universities that have had their funding surprise-frozen) still has to deal with the sudden loss of funding. At $53.2 billion Harvard does have the biggest endowment in the entire world, but that money is not sitting in a checking account. Eighty percent of it is earmarked for specific purposes, and money for cancer research can’t be shifted to pay for, say, janitors. Researchers are already getting stop-work orders, and the medical school and school of public health have already announced layoffs.
All of these demands are coming from an administration group called the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, but, of course, Trump and company do not give one actual shit about antisemitism. Would a guy who gives one shit about antisemitism be best friends with Sieg Heiling antisemitic-conspiracy-theory reposting Elon Musk? Would he say men with tiki torches screaming in Charlottesville that “Jews will not replace us” were among “people that were very fine people, on both sides”? Would he be having dinner with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, and Kanye West, a month after West got banned from Twitter for posting antisemitic conspiracy theories?
Also, the president of Harvard is Jewish, and Harvard has already agreed to undertake new measures and training to combat any antisemitism, without admitting to any wrongdoing. It is the flimsiest of pretexts in order to go after Muslim students and scholars, and chill any kind of protests on campuses before they start.
It’s no secret that conservatives have been drooling to control America’s elite institutions for almost a hundred years, and Harvard is the elite-est. Capture the courts, capture the media outlets, take over the schools, and you can rule America! From bolsheviks in the ‘30s to 1954 when Joseph McCarthy went after Harvard’s president (71 years ago this month!) and other professors suspected of communism, authoritarian types have always longed for it. Just like they always do, from China to Hungary to Soviet Russia.
And elite Yalie JD Vance has been harping on a takeover of universities too, since at least 2021, complaining to to podcaster Jack Murphy that universities “are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies,” and giving a speech in 2021 subtly called “The Universities are the Enemy” at the National Conservatism Conference, that creepy bunch of rightwing thought leaders we’ve mentioned previously at Wonkette. Vance, of course, would probably be manager of a Dollar General if he hadn’t gone to college. Education is the main way we have in this county to create class mobility, unless you count the lottery, professional sports, or being an influencer.
Anyway, Vance’s hypocritical hard drive was apparently installed by a monarchist named Curtis Yarvin (Brown, ‘92), who thinks America needs a dictator CEO, an idea with a lot of appeal to guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Yarvin wants to rip out the American ruling class “like a tumor,” starting with Harvard. He’s an extreme nutcase, and the fact Vance has ever uttered his name should have been disqualifying.
Last week Yarvin fantastized on his Substack:
Now, if you had an army, an army with the staff and energy to go around the Harvard history department, and every other humanities department, and every other humanities department in every university in America, and eradicate the progressive woke communist mind virus, like so many antibodies—great. It would be like turbo McCarthyism. It would be McCarthyism on steroids. Imagine how great America would be if McCarthy didn’t just go after the communists, but also the liberals too. [...]
The most frustrating thing about this situation is that the administration, though it does not have the power to crush Harvard under its tank treads and sell the trademark on the blockchain, may well have the power to strike effective blows which satisfy the fundamental criterion of action: an action is effective if it makes further action easier.
[...] if the Harvard administrators accept, by the end of the Trump administration they will have a totally new student body which has been selected entirely for intelligence. It will not be aligned with the existing faculty. Its instinct will be to rebel against the old Harvard.
Because Harvard doesn’t select for intelligence, riiight. People who got into Brown but not Harvard are always so bitter.
Anyway, all of this suing will take a while, possibly years. It may even wind up at the Supreme Court, which has four Yalies (Alito, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, and Thomas), four Harvard alumni (Roberts, Gorsuch, Jackson, and Kagan) and one Notre Dame Law School (Amy Comey Barrett). Probably the administration will lose in the end, but like Yarvin says, action can be effective even without winning. At the least, other schools will think twice before standing up, is the hope.
But if any institution can withstand the next 185 weeks, it is Harvard. So let’s hope they do.
[The Crimson / Wall Street Journal gift link / Washington Post archive link / New York Times archive link]
Perhaps BILLIONAIRES should lose THEIR tax exempt status, huh Donny?
Dow is going for the worst April since the Great Depression
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