It can hardly be surprising that Donald Trump has picked a fight with Harvard. Bullying enemies has long been a central piece of Trump’s modus operandi.
If anyone is not entirely sure what modus operandi means — I discovered it’s a New Latin term, which is apparently somehow different from Old Latin — I’ve got a link for you and also a piece of advice: Don’t ask for help from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who doesn’t know her habeas from her corpus.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Noem can’t lecture Harvard on the ills of higher education, not to mention the ills of foreigners bringing their strange languages and ideas, even the ones that might someday win the Nobel Prize, to infect real Americans.
Or that she can’t ban Harvard from enrolling international students, leaving in the lurch those nearly 7,000 Harvard foreign students already there, not to mention the rest of us who have so greatly benefited from the scientific and medical advances discovered in elite university labs.
A judge has temporarily lifted the ban, but who knows how much damage has already been done? The international students at Harvard have been told they have to leave the school or lose their student visas. Cruelty, again, is the point.
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SUBSCRIBEAnd who knows how far this spreads? Does it stop with Harvard and the Ivy Leaguers or will we see something similar next month at, say, the University of Colorado Boulder? The Big Ten conference has already banded together to come to the aid of any member school Trump attacks. Should they be worried? Noem has written, so all can see, that her actions against Harvard should be a “warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
In the latest front of this battle with Harvard, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it has cut off all government ties with the nation’s oldest and arguably most prestigious university, one that represents the best of the United States to a world audience that must wonder what the hell Trump is doing.
What the hell is he doing?
You think he’s gone to war because there are antisemites at Harvard? Uh, no. I know he says that, but I also know he doesn’t mean it. Yes, there have been antisemitic acts on the Harvard campus and on others — and, as one who has been on the wrong side of antisemitism, I hardly discount the danger — but opposing the slaughter of civilians in Gaza does not an antisemite make.
In any case, if you’re looking for antisemites, the Trump administration, as an NPR report recently revealed, is a good place to start. It names three Trump officials who have direct ties to antisemitic extremists, the kind that Trump invites to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. Aren’t there very fine people on both sides of antisemitism?
But maybe it’s really about DEI. You might think so, because it seems that everything now is about DEI. But that’s just another pretext. Ask yourself what freezing $3 billion in funding for Harvard scientific research has to do with diversity, equity or inclusion.
I have some ideas.
One reason Trump is taking on Harvard is because he, and his base, really don’t like elites — and you can’t get much eliter, as Noem might say, than Harvard.
Another is that it’s of a piece with Trump’s war against the First Amendment, the part of the Constitution that he dislikes even more than the Emoluments Clause. They snatched and grabbed the Tufts University Ph.D. student off the streets because of an article she co-authored in the school newspaper. That’s getting pretty close to the bone for a poor columnist like me.
Another is that Harvard had the nerve to stand up to Trump’s bullying and continues to do so. And so the war has escalated with each blow Trump strikes against Harvard and each counter blow Harvard strikes against Trump. I’d love to see the Vegas odds on this heavyweight matchup.
Students of history know that the far right, and even much of the mainstream right, has long considered colleges and universities to be hotbeds of radical activity. For Joe McCarthy, professors were all commies. For Reaganites, it was all about the antiwar protesters. For MAGA world, Harvard is, in Trump’s words, “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left institution, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart.”
And maybe the most obvious reason that he’s doing it is because he can. Sure, judges might rule his every move unconstitutional, but as Andrew Jackson once said — I’m paraphrasing here — of the Supreme Court: They’ve made their decision, now let’s see them enforce it.
In any case, Harvard is just one Trump enemy. The list of his enemies is long, nearly as long as the number of people who have come to hate Elon Musk, starting with Marco Rubio and many thousands of Tesla stockholders.
It’s easy to make a Trump hate list. He’s pretty obvious about it: Bidens, autopens, Obamas, Clintons, Zelenskyy, Pelosi, the European Union, shithole countries, Black (and only Black) South Africans, DEI, USAID, NATO, Voice of America, “60 Minutes,” Rep. LaMonica McIver, New York AG Letitia James, books, migrants, asylum seekers, General Mark Milley, Jeffrey Goldberg, pet eaters, women, trophy wives (a topic he knows something about), James “86 47” Comey, JD Vance (I’m only assuming Vance because, I mean, who doesn’t dislike him?) and on and on and on and on.
But the war against Harvard is different. It’s the real thing. Trump is going after Harvard with everything he’s got — a demand for the government to play a role in which students Harvard can accept, which professors it can hire, which courses it can teach. It’s going after Harvard’s tax-exempt status and the huge Harvard endowment.
This is not like Trump’s rants at a West Point graduation or a Memorial Day celebration. It’s not like threatening to send Biden to prison. He’s moved well past that stage and past several more, and now he’s into all-out war. Ballistic war. War of attrition. War and no Peace. Take your pick.
Trump could have taken a stand against his buddy Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. But he seems to have given up on that, because standing up to dictators like Putin is not Trump’s style. Doesn’t Trump understand that, if Russia prevails, he’ll be remembered as the president who lost Ukraine?
Does he care — this is a rhetorical question — that he might lose higher ed, too?
That’s all that’s at stake. Polls show that a majority of Americans would prefer that Trump keep his hands off higher education. But Trump knows what his base wants — which is to stick a thumb in the eye of whoever qualifies as elite, unless that person happens to be a Trump-adjacent mega-billionaire.
Harvard is hardly perfect. It didn’t invent the word “hubris,” but it often personifies it. Harvard may have 52 Nobel Prize winners on the faculty — the same faculty that Trump calls woke “birdbrains” — but I don’t like trigger warnings any more than JD Vance does. There’s a great essay in the New York Times by Steven Pinker, a well-known conservative Harvard psychology professor and longtime Harvard critic, about what he calls Harvard Derangement Syndrome.
He lists what he calls Harvard’s flaws — now magnified in every MAGA take — and also its many attributes. He comes down on the side of the attributes. As a Jewish professor, he says, notably, he’s never encountered antisemitism there. He also points out that cutting funding affects many Jewish researchers, not to mention many Jewish students.
I don’t agree with everything Pinker says, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I’m a liberal, but I’m sure he’s a great professor.
One of the good things about this fight is that you can quote endlessly from the smart people who have taken it up. As free-speech advocate Jonathan Friedman said in a New Republic interview, “Here we are a country that supports the liberty to have ideas, to speak them aloud, to visit, to meet with people, to call for change. And all of a sudden, it’s clear that the current administration doesn’t believe any of that.”
I have to differ slightly with Friedman. It’s not all of a sudden that Trump has chosen the dark side. He is regularly found there. But now the war is here in force. And it’s a good thing, in a way, that Harvard Square is the battleground.
This is a fight that Harvard, and all of us, cannot afford to lose. And who’d you rather have on your side in this war of wits — 52 Harvard globalist Nobelists or Kristi “Habeas/Shmabeas” Noem?
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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