We’re happy to cheer Team Trump as it confronts Harvard University and the rest of US academia — but we’re not sure what the end game is here, nor if the president’s men and women even have one in mind.
Few Americans will sympathize with the “suffering” of a privileged institution with an endowment over $50 billion, not to mention the institutionalized antisemitism, the hostility to free speech and the record of nakedly racist admissions and hiring policies.
Nor, as iconoclast Steven Pinker put it (in a column defending the school) its demands that job applicants submit “diversity statements” that test “their willingness to write woke-o-babble.”
And we can certainly understand a focus on Harvard first to encourage its peers to get moving before the spotlight hits them, as witness MIT’s move to drop DEI.
Without a doubt, Harvard has to do far more than have its president tell NPR that he knows it needs to do better.
But even Harvard alum and harsh critic Bill Ackman, in a long post on these issues, allows that Team Trump’s maximalist April 11 list of demands was a mistake, even as he points to the April 3 requests as a fine template for reform.
It’s insanely confusing for most observers, what with all the grant cancellations, moves to cancel the school’s tax-exempt status, revoking of visas for its foreign students and on and on.
And if it keeps up, it’ll start to look purely punitive — which risks a slapdown not just by liberal district-court judges, but by Supreme Court justices who’ll expect the feds to hold all universities to some consistent set of standards.
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Harvard & Co. dealt themselves losing hands by becoming so dependent on federal largesse, but the country’s far better off if these once-great institutions can be salvaged.
On an informal level, they can and should show seriousness by replacing multiple board members with clearly committed reformers.
Meanwhile, Trump and his minions need to lay out hard, realistic specifics for what winning this battle will look like — or they risk making it unwinnable.