They are both heavyweights in their respective fields. Their supporters and detractors are equally vocal and vehement. They are both arrogant and hyper-sensitive to criticism. So it is no surprise that Harvard University and Donald Trump are fighting.

But as three-degree Harvard alumnus Henry Kissinger said of the Iraq-Iran War, “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.” It’s a tough call, but I’m going to side with Harvard on this one.

To lose.

The case against Harvard is laid out in a 311-page report of a Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias that is an attempted mea culpa for the institution’s history of antisemitism. The report describes the Jewish Experience at the University up to Oct. 7, 2023, the date of the Hamas attack on Israel that inspired 31 Harvard student organizations to side with Hamas, but primly begins with the 1960s, when “longstanding barriers to the admission of Jews … fell away.”

If you want a flavor of how bad it used to be for Jews at Harvard, you’ll have to look beyond this “searing report on antisemitism,” as the Boston Globe called it, to actual accounts of what it was like in the bad old days. Consider the experience of Delmore Schwartz, a Jewish-American writer who was a graduate student there beginning in 1935 and an instructor beginning in 1940. He received anonymous threats and, until his death, worked on an unfinished novel about the antisemitism he encountered at Harvard. (RELATED: The Fall of Harvard: How America’s Oldest University Became Its Most Expensive Liability)

Students were not allowed to speak because they had typically Jewish surnames, pro-Palestine activists disrupting classes, and an antisemitic cartoon shared by Harvard faculty. A grandchild of Holocaust survivors was told not to bring up his family history at a student forum because it was “distasteful.”

With all this weighing against them, Harvard is, in some minds, the good guy because it is Trump who is going after them. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, those for whom Trump is the devil consider anyone he opposes to be an angel.

The leverage that the federal government holds is federal funding. Harvard’s endowment stood at $53.2 billion with net assets of $64 billion as of the end of its 2024 fiscal year. Support by the federal government during that period totaled $686.5 million. While it may surprise many to learn their tax dollars support a wealthy institution that allows noxious doctrines inimical to American values to poison an academic environment, it has been ever thus.

The University was founded in 1636, and has been on the public dole ever since; it received 400 Massachusetts pounds (colonial currency) the same year, and the money never stopped flowing. In 1913, Harvard was awarded a million dollars by the state; adjusted for inflation, that amount would be approximately $32 million today. It was enough to make a member of the 1917 Massachusetts Constitutional Convention say, “For this poor old tax-ridden Commonwealth to offer Harvard College that sum was just about as sensible as it would be for me to walk up to John Rockefeller and offer to lend him a quarter.”

The insult added to this injury is that while all Massachusetts taxpayers contributed to these sums, not all benefited. Excluded from this largesse were Catholic and Jewish institutions; looking back from 1917, Catholic legislators complained that out of funds given to private institutions over the previous six decades, Protestant schools such as Harvard (and in lesser amounts, Amherst and Williams) received $17 million, while only one Catholic institution — a Boston hospital — received any state money, the paltry sum of $49,000, two-tenths of one percent of the total.

Among the reasons for the founding of Boston College and Brandeis University in the Boston area were the difficulties that Catholic and Jewish students faced in gaining admission to Harvard, which discriminated against them. For many years, Harvard held annual “Dudleian Lectures” devoted to “detecting, convicting, and exposing the idolatry, errors, and superstitions” of the Catholic faith.

In other words, the current state of affairs reflects Harvard’s traditional business model; align yourself with the prevailing orthodoxy — in this case, the fashionable antisemitism that blames Hamas atrocities on Israel — and get paid handsomely for it by the government.

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Cornelius Chapman is the author of The Know-Nothing Amendments: Barriers to School Choice in Massachusetts.