The intensely hostile letter that Schooling Secretary Linda McMahon despatched to the management of Harvard yesterday has lots happening. However essentially the most notable factor about it’s what it leaves out.
To listen to McMahon inform it, Harvard is a college on the verge of break. (I say McMahon as a result of her signature is on the backside of the letter, however parts of the doc are written in such a particular idiolect—“Why is there a lot HATE?” the letter asks; it indicators off with “Thanks to your consideration to this matter!”—that one detects the spirit of a sure uncredited co-author.) She accuses it of admitting college students who’re contemptuous of America, chastises it for hiring the previous blue-city mayors Invoice de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot to show management (“like hiring the captain of the Titanic to show navigation”), questions the need of its remedial-math program (“Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to show easy and fundamental arithmetic?”), and accuses its board chair, Penny Pritzker (“a Democrat operative”), of driving the college to monetary break, amongst many different complaints. The upshot is that Harvard shouldn’t trouble to use for any new federal funding, as a result of, McMahon declares, “immediately’s letter marks the tip of latest grants for the College.”
What you’ll not discover within the McMahon letter is any point out of the unique justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a authorized pretext for attempting to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic benefit. Many college students and college justifiably really feel that these faculties didn’t take harassment of Jews significantly sufficient through the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist assault on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that challenge, the administration was cannily appropriating for its personal ends one of many progressive left’s highest priorities: defending a minority from hostile acts.
Now, nevertheless, the masks is off. Other than one indirect reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the nice work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the topic. The administration is not pretending that it’s standing up for Jewish college students. The mission has been revealed for what it’s: an effort to punish liberal establishments for the crime of being liberal.
The hassle began with Columbia College. In early March, the administration canceled $400 million in federal funding for the college. This was framed explicitly as punishment for Columbia’s failure to adequately deal with anti-Semitism on campus. The administration then issued a set of calls for as preconditions for Columbia to get that funding again. These included giving the college president energy over all disciplinary issues and inserting the Center Japanese–research division beneath the management of a unique college physique. Columbia quickly introduced that it will make an inventory of modifications that intently resembled what the administration had requested for. McMahon praised the modifications and stated that Columbia was on the “proper observe” to get its a refund, although the federal government has nonetheless not restored the funding.
Having efficiently extracted concessions from Columbia, the federal government moved on to Harvard. On March 31, the administration stated that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard. As with Columbia, it argued that the college had not sufficiently combatted anti-Semitism on its campus. Harvard then started negotiations with the federal authorities. However on April 11, the administration despatched Harvard an inventory of far-reaching modifications that the college must make to proceed to obtain federal funding. These included screening worldwide college students for disloyalty to the US and permitting an exterior physique to audit school viewpoints to make sure range.
This was an excessive amount of for Harvard. “Neither Harvard nor every other personal college can permit itself to be taken over by the federal authorities,” the college’s attorneys wrote in a letter to administration officers. The college sued the Trump administration, arguing that the federal government had violated Harvard’s First Modification rights and didn’t observe the procedures to revoke federal grants. The federal government retaliated. It instantly froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, introduced that it will take into account revoking Harvard’s nonprofit tax-exempt standing, and threatened the college’s skill to enroll worldwide college students. Even because the battle escalated, the putative rationale remained the identical. Trump “needs them to return to the desk and alter issues,” McMahon informed Fox Information. “It’s a civil-rights challenge on campus relative to the anti-Semitism.” McMahon by no means defined how slicing funding for biomedical analysis would assist deal with anti-Semitism on campus. However the administration not less than gestured in that path.
Not. The offenses enumerated within the McMahon letter are a disconnected seize bag of grievances. The closest factor to a authorized idea for denying Harvard future grant funding is the accusation that the college has violated the Supreme Court docket’s ruling placing down race-based affirmative motion. However revoking an establishment’s funding beneath federal nondiscrimination regulation requires following a multistep course of that takes months, Derek Black, a regulation professor on the College of South Carolina, informed me. The federal government has to analyze a grievance and show that the college won’t take any steps to resolve the discrimination. With out displaying that Harvard has violated nondiscrimination regulation—versus merely asserting it, with out proof, in a rambling letter—the federal government can’t refuse to award it grants. “They went from the 1st step to step 5 – 6 in per week,” Black stated. “There’s no ‘We don’t such as you’ authority within the federal Structure or in statutory regulation. In reality, fairly the other: You’re precluded from that.”
Harvard’s leaders have, beneath duress, acknowledged that the establishment must make modifications. Final week, the college launched studies detailing incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias and a pervasive sense of non-belonging amongst Jewish college students. It has introduced that it’s going to not assist affinity-group commencement celebrations and that leaders will not make statements on political points that don’t have an effect on the college’s core perform. “We have been confronted with a set of calls for that addressed some issues that I and others acknowledged as actual issues,” Harvard President Alan Garber informed The Wall Avenue Journal. “However the technique of addressing these issues is what was so objectionable.” The truth that the college is keen to make modifications strengthens its authorized case difficult the cancellation of funding. A number of authorized specialists have predicted that the college will prevail in court docket.
In a 2021 speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of fact and data, “make it unattainable for conservative concepts to in the end carry the day.” The answer, Vance stated, was to “actually and aggressively assault the schools on this nation.” We’ve been seeing the aggressive a part of that formulation for 2 months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten a lot nearer to honesty.
