Trump’s Harvard Simply Isn’t Real

Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal’s stalwartly conservative editorial board published an uncharacteristically liberal op-ed: “Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard.” Though more moderate than most conservative opinion pages, as far as I’m aware, the Journal rarely criticizes the President or Republican leadership directly.

For many traditional conservatives, the administration’s recent confrontation with Harvard — essentially an attempt to nationalize a private University — is highly objectionable. Without being attuned to party politics, one could say this level of government overreach seems pretty close to, dare I say, socialism?

That is, if you don’t live in the world of alternative facts.

In the ecosystem of conservative news outlets and social media, Harvard is some combination of Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Ayatollah’s Iran all jammed into one — and your taxpayer dollars are funding it.

As a student here, the charges of pervasive antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and racial bias at Harvard seem ridiculous. But to the average consumer of conservative media, far removed from our campus, these charges are as true as the sky is blue.

Let’s look at some of the claims that are allowing conservatives to spin their arguments in defense of egregious big government overreach.

The most prominent charge is that, as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem put it, Harvard is a “cesspool of extremist riots” and rampant antisemitism. Of course, antisemitism is present here — as it is almost anywhere —but nowhere close to the degree which Noem and others have suggested.

As a Jewish student myself, I’ve never been personally attacked for my identity. To me, it seems that this popular perception of Harvard comes mostly from a few confrontations between vocal pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protestors.

Extrapolating that an entire university is antisemitic from these moments is akin to claiming that because David E. Duke is a Trump voter, all Trump voters are racist — it just doesn’t make sense.

Next, the spinners claim Harvard is some kind of anti-American, left-wing political entity whose purpose is indoctrination, not teaching. Imagine my fury and disgust when I found out that Professor David I. Laibson ’88 was entirely bent on turning me into a hardened Socialist when he was teaching me about credit markets in ECON 10B: “Principles of Economics (Macroeconomics).”

From my experience, professors here are remarkably adept at divorcing their personal politics from the classroom, even if most lean to the left. And far from being anti-American, the students and faculty here at Harvard represent this nation’s best and brightest, the people who are driving America’s innovation and destiny as a superpower in the 21st century. They are hardworking, innovative, and relentlessly driven: you can’t get more American than that.

Finally, Republicans are up in arms over the idea that taxpayers are subsidizing massively wealthy colleges and their teaching. After all, why should Joe from Topeka, Kansas, pay for the education of entitled Hamas-Loving-Flag-Burning-Communists?

The problem with this argument is that much of Harvard’s impacted federal research funding takes the form of competitive grants: It just so happens that Harvard affiliates win many of these for their cutting-edge research.

By freezing these grants and effectively destroying projects that have already been paid for in part, the government is wasting our money. Universities are not entitled to funding, but taxpayers are entitled to their money being used effectively. Destroying projects in progress is the opposite.

In the eyes of many citizens, distortions and falsehoods from the Trump media machine have transformed Harvard from a symbol of American excellence to a leftist hellhole. And crucially, they have facilitated an “ends justify the means” approach to policy that is allowing the government to commit legally suspect actions.

The idea that the government should decide who the University hires and which ideas it accepts, as the Trump administration has demanded with its mandates of viewpoint diversity, seems like a version of ideological DEI. It raises a conceivable scenario where Harvard cannot hire a Nobel Prize winner because it needs to fulfill a viewpoint quota. Far from being reformist, these dictates seem less American and more Soviet in design.

It’s healthy for the media to criticize those whose ambitions have clearly overshadowed their principles. What’s unhealthy? Molding the world around obeying the leader and toeing the party line.

Henry F. Haidar ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.