Harvard University is earning praise for standing up to the Trump administration’s attempts to place burdensome restrictions on the school’s federal funding. The argument is essentially that while there are always strings attached to government cash, in Harvard’s case the strings have become bungee cords, making it inevitable that the funding will be yanked violently back.
The Trump administration is seeking to make the federal funds conditional on the school’s commitment to rooting out anti-Semitism on campus. Harvard’s defenders say the very survival of academic freedom is at stake. The truth is more complicated once we take a look at the central arguments in the case.
Harvard has employed several disingenuous arguments on its behalf, but it has two legitimate reasons for objecting to Trump’s latest demands. The first is that in January the university settled a lawsuit brought by Jewish students over anti-Semitic discrimination by Harvard. As part of the settlement, Harvard agreed to certain make certain material changes to its policies, the most notable of which was the adoption of a consensus definition of anti-Semitism for use in its anti-harassment student-conduct regulations.
The definition, developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, essentially closes the “anti-Zionism loophole” through which Jew-baiters smuggle anti-Semitism. Because Harvard is applying the IHRA definition to its harassment policies, it does not punish mere speech and therefore might prove to be an effective accommodation without infringing on plain speech rights. (So-called free speech groups who claim otherwise haven’t carefully read either the IHRA definition or Harvard’s student-conduct policy handbook, and therefore these groups are simply spreading misinformation about both.)
So Harvard can argue, with justification, that it has already taken steps to alleviate anti-Semitism on campus, and therefore it is due a lighter sentence than other schools.
The second argument is an extension of the first: Harvard is being treated more harshly than even Columbia University, which has done nothing material to change its campus culture. Trump’s demands include the establishment of a third party to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity,” among others that are not directly tied to fighting anti-Semitism and would be difficult to comply with.
But the fact remains that the civil rights of Jewish students on campus are being violated at Harvard and that Harvard takes federal money that requires the school to be in compliance with civil-rights law. Harvard therefore must still reform its campus procedures. Also, the school should want to crack down on anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism is evil and its rampant presence at Harvard suggests it is an institution that coddles, fosters, and rewards evil. Any institution that must be forced to treat Jews as equal citizens is an institution that is doing a great deal of harm to America, and that harm must be mitigated.
In a fit of pure chutzpah, one of the disingenuous arguments Harvard employs in its defense attempts to use that very funding as a shield. And Harvard isn’t the only one. Defenders of these schools’ millions and billions in grants have tried to cynically turn the question back on the administration. Do you really, they ask the president, want to cut cancer research?
This is what is known as extortion. The government gives grant money to schools with certain strings attached. The schools agree to the terms—which include following civil-rights law. The schools then break the terms of the agreement but insist they should keep the money anyway, because that money is helping people.
In other words, the schools take taxpayer money and then when accountability comes knocking they put a gun to the head of cancer research and say don’t make me pull the trigger.
However much good those research projects do, they do not exempt universities from following the law. The Trump administration must abide by its legal contracts and obligations but so must Harvard and the rest of the taxpayer-funded country clubs masquerading as educational institutions.
Similarly, while the government must protect academic freedom, no one should be fooled into thinking that the elite universities value academic freedom. The status quo is one in which Jews on campus do not have the same level of academic freedom as others. At Columbia (and Barnard), for example, if you are Jewish your class might be invaded by pro-Hamas psychopaths who stop the teacher from being able to give the lesson while also threatening the lives of Jewish students in the classroom. Pro-Hamas parades have caused canceled classes, disrupted exams, and even campus closures.
The defenders of these institutions are merely demanding that Trump let them go back to the status quo of having academic freedom for some but not for others. If these groups would as emphatically demand the protection of Jewish academic freedom, we’d know they were sincere. As of now, there are zero such groups.
Same goes for free speech and free expression. On these campuses, Jewish and Israeli students have been repeatedly singled out, student organizations have placed exclusions on Jewish participation and identifiable Jews have been systematically attacked, harassed, and prevented from enjoying the same free expression that is routinely granted the pro-Hamas mobs calling for death to the Jews.
Harvard’s Jews were told they could not keep their Hanukkah menorah up overnight because the school would not guarantee its safety. That’s the status quo Harvard that its defenders seek to return to. Not a single one of them is truly interested in free speech, free expression, or academic freedom.
These institutions also take money from authoritarian, anti-American regimes such as Qatar. A 2022 study found that “as funding from Middle Eastern countries increases — and becomes less transparent to the public — certain campuses experience campaigns to silence academics, an erosion of democratic values, and a lack of response to attacks on students’ freedom of expression.” Harvard was part of this trend.
Does Harvard abhor the deleterious effects of government funding on academic freedom? Or does Harvard abhor the effects of U.S. government funding while ignoring the effects of cash infusions from anti-democratic regimes?
These institutions and their defenders would likely find more sympathy in dealing with the Trump administration’s overreach had they ever defended academic freedom, freedom of speech and expression, and true independence from government when it mattered.
