The Trump administration has announced that it will suspend $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University. This is the result of the university’s failure to comply with a number of the administration’s policy initiatives, regarding—among other things—DEI, merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, and the way campus protests are handled. At present, Harvard is digging in its heels, and the Trump administration is withholding money.
At the 85-day mark, the Trump administration’s policies have met with mixed reviews. Trump’s actions aimed at curbing illegal immigration and securing the border have been popular, albeit draconian at times. The administration’s declaration of “two genders” was largely seen as a curb on gender-bending ideology that had simply gone a few bridges too far.
By contrast, Trump’s actions on tariffs provoked widespread alarm last week—including among some Republicans in Congress, and Trump supporters in the heartland. Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and making Canada the 51st state have been head-scratching. And while his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico was harmless, it’s difficult to see what that accomplished. (It reminded me of the left’s weird obsessions with politically correct nomenclatures.)
Trump has also gone after universities. Most of his ire is directed at the Ivy League schools. I’ve been reading over some of these debates, and at times I’ve been thinking, “Well, I don’t know about that one.”
The problem, for supporters of Harvard, is this: from the perspective of the rest of the country, Harvard has been a political monoculture since the late 1960s. The same could be said of Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League institutions.
For that matter, academia had already tilted decidedly to the left in the 1980s, when I was a student at the University of Cincinnati. This was especially true in the liberal arts and the humanities. During the 1960s, the more left-leaning college students disproportionately gravitated toward academic careers. By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 1986, they were in early middle age, and made up the core of the professorial ranks.
There is a sense among many Americans that our universities have become places of ideological and intellectual rot, and are among the many “swamps” that need to be “drained”. Yes, I realize that I’m painting a wide brushstroke here. But I experienced the closing of the academic mind for myself—forty years ago, and at a state university in Ohio.
The Ivy League, in particular, is not popular in the heartland. And it isn’t just the guys with gun racks in the rear windows of their pickup trucks who are scoffing at Harvard, Yale, etc. In recent years, corporate employers have soured on the Ivy League, too. Corporate employers have gradually discovered that ideologically stagnant universities, no matter how prestigious, don’t produce superior graduates. In practical terms, a graduate of the local community college might be a better hire.
Which brings us around to this whole notion of the anti-Trump “resistance”. I want a civil, intelligent anti-Trump resistance, just like I wanted a civil, intelligent, anti-Biden resistance. I have an equal distrust for social engineers on the left, and Bible-thumpers on the right. I don’t want either side to become too powerful. If different viewpoints compete in the marketplace of ideas, then hopefully we choose the best ones, and we land somewhere in the middle.
But for those of you who would seek to mobilize opinion against the Trump administration: pick another rallying cry besides, “Remember Harvard’s $2.2 billion!” Don’t expect anyone who doesn’t live in one of the liberal coastal enclaves to rally around Harvard. That just isn’t going to happen.
-ET