The news this morning is, as one headline puts it, “Federal Government Freezes $2.26 Billion Funding to Harvard after It Refuses to Comply.” These are fast changing times. By next week, Harvard may have clawed back that money, or President Trump may have doubled the cut.
Numerous American colleges and universities find themselves in peril of losing some or all of their federal research funding. Harvard has leaped to the front of the line. Until now, Columbia University, because it was named first, attracted the most attention. The other Ivy League universities are not far behind, and the Chronicle of Higher Education has published a list of 77 colleges that are in peril of such cuts.
The prospect has unleashed a torrent of words from worried and defensive college presidents and faculty members and rather terse responses from members of the Trump administration. The National Association of Scholars has published commentary from both supporters and critics of the potential cuts.
Battlelines
Do we have an official position? Yes, but it isn’t a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Most of the money at risk is from two federal agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Most of the jeopardy of the 77 colleges and universities is because of their tepid responses to murderous anti-Semitism on their campuses. The source of the funding and the target of the grievance are not self-evidently linked. It is not that thoracic medicine departments or computational proteomics researchers are hotbeds of anti-Semitism. It is simply that when the federal government asks itself what leverage it has over colleges and universities that coddle Hamas-supporting activists at the expense of Jewish faculty and students, the obvious answer is “research funding.”
And if those government officials further ask, “What are the deepest channels through which that research funding reaches colleges and universities?” the obvious answers are the NIH and NSF, though those are hardly the only sources of federal funding for colleges and universities.
The Harvard Letter
Fighting anti-Semitism on campus is not the only reason why the Trump administration has threatened this funding. That was the main focus in the case of Columbia University, but the letter that Trump officials (Josh Gruenbaum, Thomas Wheeler, and Sean Keveney) sent to Harvard President Alan Garber and Harvard Corporation Lead Member Penny Pritzker on April 11, goes much further. It calls for:
- Governance and leadership reforms
- Merit-Based Hiring Reform
- Merit-Based Admissions Reform
- International Admissions Reform
- Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring
- Reforming Programs with Egregious Records of Anti-Semitism or Other Bias
- Discontinuation of DEI
- Student Discipline Reform and Accountability
- Whistleblower Reporting and Protections
- Transparency and Monitoring
Those are just the subheadings. The body of the letter goes into substantive detail. The Potsdam Declaration, in which Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek set out the terms for Japan’s surrender in World War II, by contrast, may seem a gentler path, and certainly Grant’s terms for Lee’s surrender showed more respect for the dignity of the defeated foe.
But of course Harvard has admitted no defeat. It has, it may think, some cards to play: Four of the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court are Harvard Law School graduates. As of 2022, 111 federal judges had graduated from Harvard Law School. Will we see an unprecedented wave of recusals when the Harvard lawfare machine kicks into gear? Alternatively, will the American public rise up in defense of Harvard in the names of “academic freedom” or, perhaps, fondness for our overlords?
Malformation
The Harvard letter speaks for itself, but I’d like to go a little beyond its text to point out why the Trump administration has chosen these battles with higher education. It could be that the Trump administration looks with disfavor on institutions that it sees as engaged in the malformation of young people. President Trump, for example, issued an Executive Order on January 20, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to The Federal Government” that took issue with the ideology, popular on college campuses, that denies the reality of biological differences of the sexes.
Colleges and universities have in numerous ways shown themselves prejudiced against students, faculty candidates, and faculty members who dissent from progressive orthodoxies. This has been documented exhaustively by the NAS and other bodies that have undertaken the research. It is also apparent in the voter registrations and party contributions of faculty members where such data is available; i.e., whole departments in which all or nearly all the members have the same political profile. Then there are the matters of "diversity, equity, inclusion" programs and bureaucracies, and the willingness of universities to lean in on programs based on progressive grievances, such as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, or Queer Studies. The scouring of the curriculum of courses that focus on the American Founding, the legacy of the Western Classical tradition, and American achievement is yet another contributor to conservative and traditionalist skepticism toward the contemporary academy.
These concerns may feed some of the Trump administration’s readiness to threaten federal research funding for higher education. In the case of Harvard, that’s patently so, but in other cases it is a matter of inference, not supported by explicit declaration from President Trump himself or members of his administration. But even if Trump does not say so himself, many of his supporters view those threats as justified in part by the maliciousness of elite higher education in America.
The Enemy
Some of these concerns surface in administrative actions separate from the research funding issue. The U.S. Department of Education (ED), for example, has opened an investigation into 45 universities that were part of “The Ph.D. Project,” a racially-exclusionary initiative to advance the education of minority students in various fields. ED alleges that these universities violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
But the overall view can be summed up with J.D. Vance’s closing remarks at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. This was his now famous, “The professors are the enemy” speech, which began:
So much of what we want to accomplish so much of what we want to do in this movement in in this country I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society which control what we call truth and what we call falsity that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country and so I’m excited to close this conference with this particular set of remarks because I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.
All of this is worth noting as part of the background to the proposed cuts and a large part of the reason why a great many Americans are indifferent to whatever pain and disruption such cuts would bring.
Disaffection
And to this we can add several other factors:
- The extraction by college and university administrations of excessive “overhead” on federal research grants. The overhead recovery rate, which has been negotiated by individual universities with the federal government is, in principle, the funding the university receives in addition to the research dollars to provide the physical infrastructure and the support services the researchers need to get on with their work. But in recent years some universities’ have ballooned this overhead recovery rate to extraordinary heights. The pretense is maintained that this is still to support legitimate costs, but much of the public suspects grift. Are the universities siphoning these funds to support DEI programs or other undertakings that the taxpayer public might be less inclined to support if they were openly acknowledged?
- Inflated overhead costs (amounting to nearly $28 billion in 2023) have turned scientists into turnkeys for spigots of federal revenue, diminishing the ethic of discovery the advancement of science needs. Science itself has suffered.
- The continuous increase in tuition costs associated with bloated campus bureaucracies. This as previous student borrowers struggle to find jobs and pay off debt, for which the universities currently have no legal responsibility.
- The apparent unwillingness of some universities to abandon racial preferences in their admissions, in plain defiance of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
- The defiance and subterfuge many universities are employing to maintain illegal DEI programs.
These do not exhaust the reasons why many Americans look on the protests of college administrators and faculty members with an arched eyebrow. And to this we must add:
- The relentless declarations that mass deaths and disaster will follow for any cuts in federal research funding; a Dark Age will ensue and humanity will be plunged into profound misery if University “X” doesn’t get its Big Grants and Overhead.
- A lot of this money is tied up in one way or another with promoting global warming hysteria
- Some of this money is tied up with promoting transgenderism and the surgical mutilation of children.
- We have had no reckoning for the role of university researchers in COVID-19, including the promotion of gain-of-function research and public health measures that shut down the economy in 2020, and deception about the pandemic’s origin.
Whatever your views on these matters, a substantial number of Americans now look on claims to “scientific authority” with newfound skepticism. And when the scientific establishment continues to celebrate the contributions of figures such as Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Deborah Brix, the “you must trust us” appeals fall on deaf ears.
Doubts about the worthiness of all those university research programs that are now in peril are not quieted by revelations that they are in many cases cross-funded by the Chinese government and that the fruit of much of the U.S. taxpayer funded research fly out of U.S. university labs directly to the Peoples Republic of China.
All this is to say that while the fight against anti-Semitism is a powerful and good reason to hold back federal research funding for universities, the popularity of the cuts among Americans has plenty of additional reasons.
Ends and Means
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of the 77 colleges that “have the most to lose from Trump’s cuts” includes two of my alma maters (Rutgers and the University of Rochester) and several others with which I’ve had close association, but I don’t find myself fretting for their futures. I suspect all 77, as well as many others, are overdue for serious housecleaning—or that new, more strenuous version, “Swedish death cleaning.”
I am aware that some critics of universities doubt whether the Trump administration's ED should use the threat of funding in this manner to coerce universities. These critics generally agree with the goals of the reforms but think these procedures violate the letter or the spirit of the law. They also worry that the ED's actions can create a dangerous precedent for future administrations aimed at imposing further "woke" ideology by similar actions.
These are reasonable constitutional, legal, and prudential views, but I find myself unpersuaded. America is faced with an unprecedented situation in which a pivotal institution that plays an important role in all fifty states has been captured by ideologues who pose a grave threat to our constitutional republic. Vice President Vance is accurate in his judgment that our postsecondary institutions are poisoning our civil society and rendering impossible the continued functioning of our free republic.
A few—a very few—colleges stand outside this indictment. But America's colleges and universities will not reform themselves. The academic bureaucracies and professoriate are so deeply committed to their radical program of replacing American society with their own vision of a new order that we have no real choice but to fight back.
Our colleges and universities are the moral and practical equivalent of the Jim Crow South. They are privileged, in some cases immensely wealthy, and, because they act as a law unto themselves, are practically lawless. The battle at hand is whether we will have lawful higher education or rule by these well-entrenched cultural warlords. They amount to a state-within-a-state dedicated to perpetual discrimination and authoritarian illiberalism. They are, moreover, the Jim Crow South of the 1910s rather than the 1950s, which engages routinely in arbitrary persecution of dissenters and does not even follow its own laws. If we follow our ordinary rules, it will be DEI today, DEI tomorrow, DEI forever.
America ended the Jim Crow South by extraordinary measures. Brown v. Board of Education was an unprecedented intrusion of the Supreme Court into the ordinary business of states and localities. The Voting Rights Act subjected the entire region to federal control of its voting procedures—preclearance—for generations. A good argument has been made that much of the federal government's increasing arbitrary power derives from the general application of these extraordinary powers. Nevertheless, Americans made the moral, prudential, and constitutional judgment that such extraordinary measures were needed to remove ingrown tyranny from our republic.
Columbia is our generation's Birmingham. Harvard is our Little Rock. Princeton is our Selma. They are more dangerous even than their Jim Crow predecessors, because they have a fair chance to seize control of the entire republic. Americans should regard the peril they pose to our liberty as so deep-rooted as to require, and justify, extraordinary means to redeem them.
I would rather that Congress and the Supreme Court joined the Executive Branch as paladins of American liberty, to provide their endorsement of the extraordinary means needed to reform our postsecondary institutions. But I give the benefit of the doubt to the executive branch, as it works alone to discharge the poison of the ideologically extreme establishment from our postsecondary institutions. The purpose of our Constitution, of all our laws, is to preserve liberty. So long as the ED works to restore liberty to our colleges and universities, its actions are presumptively, although not unchallengeably, constitutional.
Photo by Xiangkun ZHU on Unsplash
