The Ivy League is taking home a bad report card this semester.
The Trump administration announced plans to review $255.6 million in federal contracts and more than $8.7 billion in multi-year grants to Harvard University and its affiliates on Monday. The Departments of Education (ED), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will head the investigation as part of the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.
“Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination – all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry – has put its reputation in serious jeopardy,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”
Harvard University President Alan Garber, appointed seven months after a scandal-tainted Claudine Gay resigned from the post, plans to cooperate with the investigation. Garber is no doubt conscious of the Trump administration’s inquiries into Columbia University, canceling $400 million in grants and contracts with the University in March for perceived failure to comply with federal antidiscrimination law. (RELATED: ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Can The Government Cut Off Funding For Woke Colleges? | The Daily Caller)
“We will engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism,” he wrote in a letter addressed to the Harvard community.
Garber went on to assume a defensive posture: “In longstanding partnership with the federal government, we have launched and nurtured pathbreaking research that has made countless people healthier and safer, more curious and more knowledgeable, improving their lives, their communities, and our world.”
Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 2023. Thousands of Palestinians sought refuge on October 14 after Israel warned them to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip before an expected ground offensive against Hamas, one week on from the deadliest attack in Israeli history. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The University President is here responding to the implicit challenge levied by the investigation: “Justify your institution.”
The case for gorillions in government monies, without end or accountability, is two-pronged:
- “Academic freedom” is a good in and of itself.
- Research is an instrument which produces goods (cancer treatments, bionic limbs, melanin-inclusive Band-Aids).
Garber stays focused on the latter, a stronger tactical decision given the Trump administration’s sympathies are unlikely to descend upon genderqueer pottery professors.
That’s where a rhetorical, and political, schism emerges between the administration and the faculty.
A March 24 letter addressed to Members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers has amassed 800 signatures from faculty and staff at the time of writing. The letter describes Trump’s actions as an “unprecedented assault” imperiling “bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and inquiry.” It further petitions Harvard’s leadership to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom.”
Harvard’s faculty conceives of the University’s purpose as inculcating the “bedrock principles” of democracy in their students. Therein contains an admission that academic freedom is not a good in-and-of-itself, but a means of value-production — nominally, a well-scrutinized belief in the goodness and efficacy of democracy.
Practically, the universities turn out a different type: the unthinking ideologue marching lockstep with the state and the Target corporation. (RELATED: ‘Return To McCarthyism’: Democratic Senator Calls Trump Authoritarian For Targeting Elitist Institution’s Funding | The Daily Caller)
Supporters of Palestine gather in Harvard Yard to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge. Thousands of Palestinians sought refuge on October 14 after Israel warned them to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip before an expected ground offensive against Hamas, one week on from the deadliest attack in Israeli history. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
“Universities are now under attack from the right; in the future, left-leaning politicians may demand that universities do their bidding,” warns Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber.
If universities are now “under attack from the right,” this is because an unspoken war for academic territory was already fought and won by the left. Left-leaning politicians do not have to make explicit demands of the universities, as Eisgruber surely knows, because the universities are already implicitly aligned with their politics.
The president of the United States and the president of Harvard University are parallel figures. Neither has the time to oversee the minutiae of his domain. Just as Garber entrusts the day-to-day management of Organic Chemistry 101 to a professor, Trump entrusts the management of HHS to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
At every level, appointing value-aligned administrators is an essential step of executive leadership. If the president of a university or a nation perceives his appointees as undermining the fundamental goals of his leadership, he has every right, and even the responsibility, to cut them loose.
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