Take Down Harvard—But Do It the Right Way

Blunderbuss tactics threaten the righteous mission of reforming elite academia.

Elite universities deserve all the opprobrium they’ve been getting. They’ve discriminated on the basis of race in admissions and hiring, required loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements, and allowed agitators to disrupt classes, block access to facilities, and wage mass campaigns of intimidation and harassment. The liberal left hand knew what the illiberal far-left hand was doing—the explosion in DEI that spawned everything from intellectual corruption and indoctrination to antisemitism and cancel culture—but was cowed into placating it.

Harvard, besides being the biggest global brand in American higher education, is at the epicenter of this crisis. For example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) named it the worst school in the country for free speech for the last two years, the only one with a negative score. There are other schools that may be worse on other measures, but Harvard is a fitting lightning rod for popular displeasure with our gowned oligarchy.

Still, the Trump administration’s blunderbuss tactics threaten its reformist goal, with which I’m entirely sympathetic. Left-wing intolerance and perfidy have undermined universities’ core mission of open inquiry and truth-seeking, but executive-branch overreach and impatience with legal niceties have allowed Harvard grandees to don the mantle of academic freedom and educrats to dig in their heels.

The executive branch is fully justified in launching investigations of Harvard and dozens of other schools for violating civil rights by: allowing antisemitism to flourish, using racial preferences in defiance of the Supreme Court, subverting student rights to free speech and due process, making hiring decisions based on illegal criteria, and a host of other pernicious practices. Violations of that kind do indeed imperil all federal funds, including grants to scientific and medical researchers who may want nothing to do with woke administrators, because there’s no germaneness or even proportionality requirement in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and other relevant laws.