For Trumpism, the Universities Are the Enemy. Just Ask JD Vance.

This administration evidently considers the production of knowledge worthless.

Columbia University had been struck with a denial of $400 million in funding, but in its case the school opted to accommodate the Trump demands, earning it scalding criticism for appeasement. Most
Columbia University.

odious, the university said it would appoint a senior vice provost to review the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, and Center for Palestine Studies, caving in to the administration’s support of Israel and its willful blindness to Gaza atrocities. Princeton was told by the Education Department that is is being investigated, which says $210 million in research grants is at risk. Brown stands to lose $510 million. Cornell at least $1 billion. And as indication that anti-Semitism acts as a surrogate for wider aims, the reason that the University of Pennsylvania was docked $175 million was because it had allowed a biological male transgender to compete on its women’s swim team in 2022.

To go through the stunning demands made by the Trump administration in its letter to Harvard’s president and Penny Pritzker, Lead Member of the Harvard Corporation, is to come away with the realization that not only did Harvard have no other choice than to refuse, but that the authoritarian intrusion into a private educational institution needs to be actively combatted. And, indeed, Harvard has sued the administration.

One needs to do a deeper dive than the quick summaries the media provides to get why Harvard took the virtuous course. We urge you to plow through this:

Looking for an “agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard's financial relationship with the federal government”, the letter makes the following demands:

Under “Governance and leadership reforms”, Harvard must empower “among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most …committed to the changes indicated in this letter”. The power of all others, including students, must be reduced.

The government requires under “Merit-based Hiring Reform” that by this August Harvard “cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among faculty, staff, and leadership.”

And all hiring data “shall be shared with the federal government” subject to audit until the end of 2028, which is the end of Trump’s second term, should he choose not to end-run the Constitution and go for a third term.

And then, in an outlandish overreach way beyond the government’s purview, the letter then insists that “all existing and prospective faculty be reviewed for plagiarism”.

Also to begin by August and persisting to end-2028, the same banned preferences of race, color, etc. are to be replaced by “Merit-based Admissions Reform…throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.” Admissions data, too, are to be “shared” with the federal government, and made public, “including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” The government does have under civil rights law the oversight role of seeing to it that schools adhere to anti-discrimination law, but here we have oversight that goes well beyond, even to grades on tests.

Under “International Admissions Reform”, international students “hostile to the American values” inscribed in our founding documents or “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism” must be turned away.

By August, to satisfy “Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring”, the University must commission a federally-approved…

”external party…to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse… department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit”.

To defeat Harvard’s liberal bias – and presumably replicated in the demands made to all other educational institutions in the administration’s purge — the government will install thought police. What is the “viewpoint” that qualifies? Will a teaching or student applicant be asked if he or she supports President Trump? Will disagreeing that the 2020 election was stolen be disqualifying, as has been reported by applicants for government jobs who were asked this question?

Moreover, every year wherever a unit is found lacking in viewpoint diversity, it must hire “a critical mass of new faculty” or admit “a critical mass of students” to reach that diversity. And if that proves not viable, another compliant unit must be found for the derelict unit to merge into so as to effect the desired diversity.

“Reforming Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias” says that by August the University must commission yet another external party “to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture”. The inclusion of “ideological capture” makes clear that the administration is out to destroy any vestiges of what it would call “woke” practices and indeed this section calls for – in a long list of the schools that make up Harvard’s university – the elimination of every vestige of diversity-equity-inclusion – the DEI that Trump is eradicating throughout the government:

”The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name.”

The administration then calls for “immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming” in the letter’s section on “Student Discipline Reform and Accountability”. That at least should invite no disagreement given how out of hand the student demonstrations were allowed to go unchecked, with tent encampments, building takeovers, and vandalism.

Under “Transparency and Monitoring”, the letter – in addition to all the commissions and reporting and audits that have been mandated to this point — orders the University to submit every calendar quarter a report – “certified for accuracy—that documents its progress on the implementation of the reforms detailed in this letter.”

Beyond that, Harvard must disclose all foreign funds received, their purpose, and how used.

Trump apparently wants to run Harvard. One expects at the close of the letter’s five pages that he has named himself the university’s president, much as he declared himself the chairman of Kennedy Center. Short of that, but with breathtaking temerity, the letter concludes with…

“We expect your immediate cooperation in implementing these critical reforms that will enable Harvard to return to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.”

…effrontery that on its own must have been enough to cause the Harvard leadership to tell the government to bugger off.

Trump’s master plan calls for destruction of the federal government, upending the world’s trading system, shattering international alliances, and doing maximum damage to the power structure of the nation's universities. Beginning almost four centuries ago, the United States has built up an unparalleled universe of higher education institutions that has won the respect and envy of the world. Christopher Eisgruber, Princeton University’s president, says,

“The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security.”

Trump’s attack on America’s universities puts that at risk. The world sends its sons and daughters to these shores for their undergraduate and graduate educations. About 30% of the Harvard student body is from abroad. There are three quarters of a million foreign students in our universities in any year, a third of those from China, although this is declining in reaction to the threats of the Trump regime. They gain an understanding of our country and an appreciation for our freedom of inquiry, at least until recently. Their education here often wins them high status in their home countries. If you've ever wondered how it is that so many foreign heads of state, foreign ministers, etc. speak such good English when interviewed on television when visiting here, this is why.

None of this is appreciated by Trump, who has threatened to cancel the visas of foreign students if Harvard does not capitulate to his demands. He has head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem demanding the names and records of all foreign students who participated in what the administration considers illegal campus protests. Failure to comply will result in revocation of their visas. The Trump administration has cancelled the visas of some 1,500 students, although, as with so many of their blunders, this has just been temporarily rescinded. Foreign students are now afraid to come here, worried that they may be snatched off the street and sent to foreign prisons like others, which newscasts in home countries are reporting happening in America.

Trump and his following harbor a pronounced animus against American universities. We have a vice-president in JD Vance, who earned a BA on the G.I. Bill at Ohio State And a JD from Yale Law, saying "the universities are the enemy”. In a 2021 speech to the National Conservatism Conference, he said:

“I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

The objective is to drive out the liberal bias that characterizes the great majority of our institutions of higher learning. To be sure, that is a sizeable problem. It is perhaps the natural state of those who hold idealistic wishes for society but shielded by the cloister of universities have not “been mugged by reality", to borrow from Irving Kristol’s famous phrase. Universities should work to right this imbalance, but cutting off their funding is decidedly not how to go about it.

Since World War II, the government has chosen to fund the many universities across the land in the pursuit of medical and scientific advances. Repeat: the government elected to make national progress this way. To suddenly destroy that, ending the work of thousands of the best minds in the country as a means to force change, ostensibly to expunge anti-Semitism or a despised ideology, is blind idiocy. Consider the harm in this very partial list:

 With funding principally from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard funds research at a long list of Cambridge area hospitals, such as Boston Children’s, Brigham and Women’s, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — that are now cut off. What does that accomplish? Harvard is engaged in research aiding stroke survivors, treating sickle cell disease, A.L.S. Research in newly-rising tuberculosis has stopped.

 Cornell says the Trump administration’s freeze of $1 billion affects research into “new materials for jet engines, propulsion systems, large-scale information networks, robotics, superconductors, and space and satellite communications, as well as cancer research.”

 Northwestern says the freeze would hinder its research on robotics, nanotechnology, foreign military training and Parkinson’s disease.

 The transgender offense in 2022 caused suspension of $175 million in federal funding affecting seven different schools at the University of Pennsylvania, impacting research on preventing hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against deadly viruses, and protections against chemical warfare. Where’s the relevance and common sense in that, or any of this?