It has always been easy to dislike Harvard. Their smug superiority and class condescension is famous, but recently the facade carefully built over almost 400 years is showing lots and lots of cracks. Their vaunted undergraduates have been exposed as mostly illiterate, enumerate buffoons who cheer on genocidal maniacs like Hamas, simply because it is what the cool kids are doing. Their bloated management structure is filled with affirmative-action hires who can barely communicate, and when they do, it is often plagiarized.

And perhaps even worse, their teaching ranks are filled with a combination of Muslim-funded anti-Western, anti-Semitic rabble-rousers, or mush-brained fools who pretend to be academics while writing nonsensical polemics about intersectionality, transsexualism, White Privilege, and on and on...

But Harvard crosses the line between typical academic stupidity and far more malign behavior. They have failed to protect their students from obvious discrimination by professors, and even more obvious physical intimidation from the mobs whipped up by Harvard's curious support for every anti-Western organization and philosophy. Harvard has also failed to revamp their admissions and hiring practices to fall in line with basic civil rights law.

Which would be distasteful but acceptable if Harvard did not accept government funds. But they do, so they should be bound by federal civil rights laws.

And hilariously the administration and many faculty are crying about academic independence! They are suing, claiming they are a private university and the government can't tell them what to do! Hey Harvard...use your $53 billion endowment and be independent of government funding!

But the best part of this whole mess is the possibility of Harvard losing its tax-exempt status. That would be absolutely delicious!

Trump Right: Ending Tax-Exemption for Universities Can Be Done

As the Internal Revenue Code makes clear, discriminatory policies "cannot be viewed as conferring a public benefit within the 'charitable' concept" of the common law" or "within the Congressional intent" in establishing tax-exempt categories under federal law.

In the foundational case of Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574, (1983), the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the IRS that "government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating . . . discrimination in education" and that this public interest "substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places" on an offending institution.

The high court found that this applied even to First Amendment rights, to which both Bob Jones University and Harvard appealed to justify their policies.

Bob Jones’s loss of tax-exempt status was accordingly upheld and only restored after the university abolished its discriminatory policies in full.

Read the article...it is worthwhile. It points out that a loss of tax-exempt status would also kill donations, which would be a lovely bonus. Harvard might discover how dedicated their alums are if those donations aren't deductible!

My guess is that Harvard will prevail in court, at least in part. But going forward their position at the front of the government funding trough is in jeopardy. What prevents the federal government from rejecting all future funding applications from Harvard? Is there some legal entitlement to public money?

It will be interesting, but even if Harvard ultimately digs its way out of this mess, their reputation has been tarnished, and it will take a very long while before Harvard can claim to be the greatest university in the world.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter] And the Apple and Spotify feeds for CJN's podcast should be working!