Trump’s Harvard Whiplash

On Friday, the Trump administration insisted that Harvard comply with an updated litany of demands or risk losing billions in federal funding and grants. Ostensibly, the administration is trying to force the university to uphold civil-rights law, but it is obviously attempting to bring Harvard to heel as part of an ongoing effort to subdue institutions that could, in some shape or form, oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Few private institutions anywhere are as well insulated from outside pressure as Harvard, which has amassed a $53.2 billion endowment. This is doubtless one reason that Harvard—unlike Columbia University, certain law firms, and many giant corporations—announced yesterday that it would fight instead of capitulate. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” its lawyers said. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”

[Read: What Harvard learned from Columbia’s mistake]

I want to focus here not on Harvard’s response, but on the nature of the administration’s demands—which, among other things, are internally contradictory.

To start, Harvard would have to reduce “the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” Departments deemed lacking in viewpoint diversity would be forced to hire and admit “a critical mass” of new faculty and students that would provide it. In addition, the school would have to “abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests,” while at the same time commissioning “an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.”

Whether by design or accident, the imperative to screen for anti-Semitic beliefs and “ideological capture,” and to mandate viewpoint diversity, clearly contradict the dictates to reduce administrative activism and abolish the implementation of litmus tests in promotion and hiring.

In a letter addressed to the university community, Harvard President Alan M. Garber observed that “although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”

I would submit that the demands go much further, epitomizing a defining characteristic of the second Trump administration: the comprehensive repurposing of the “woke” social-justice movement’s most controversial and coercive tools for reactionary ends. And so this performative confrontation with the nation’s apex university has taken the form of a crusade for so-called freedom that is completely destructive of liberty and independence. The administration is not anti-woke; it is woke with right-wing characteristics.

Resentful of places like Harvard, jealous of their ability to confer status, Trump and his happy warriors of aggrievement have attempted to force themselves inside. To that end, they are all too willing to apply the full fiduciary might of the federal government to impose their very own diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy replete with mandated safe spaces that would preclude the slightest microaggression.

They are, among their countless other hypocrisies, pursuing the most ham-fisted program of affirmative action—this time for MAGA.