Trump's Attack on Harvard

His attack on universities is part of his ceaseless war on the truth

In its first four months, the Trump administration has engaged in many acts that are illegal, unconstitutional, or destructive. The ongoing attack on Harvard University has managed to combine all three of those trademark features. The President is targeting a particular institution with illegal and unconstitutional methods to serve destructive and nihilistic ends.

Our elite universities are far from perfect, but they are one of America's significant achievements. They draw many foreign students, individuals of exceptional talent and capability, because they are global centers of learning. Many if not most of those students will go on to contribute to America’s prosperity. In addition, their tuition helps to subsidize the tuition of American students of limited means. This attack on Harvard in particular, and universities more broadly, is an attack on American strength. The Trump administration offers no vision for how to improve American education; it is promising only to debilitate it.

The attack on Harvard follows an elemental fascist playbook. The idea is to coerce cultural and scientific institution to conform to the ruling party’s ideological agenda. The demands behind the administration’s illegal hostage-taking, to the extent that they can be discerned, are that Harvard must permit the MAGA power clique in Washington to control its hiring of faculty, the curricula, and the indoctrination of students. This is precisely the kind of government manipulation of the pursuit of knowledge that democracies abhor but authoritarians promote.

The attack on the universities, like almost everything this administration does, is also in part about performance—specifically performance related to the culture wars. It’s aimed at people who are indoctrinated by Fox News and other propaganda outfits to believe that all the courses Harvard teaches have to do with how to conduct your gender surgery operation, or how to be the most “woke” person in town. The performance is also aimed at those who don't understand, for example, that the money Harvard gets from the government isn't in fact a subsidy; it is overwhelmingly funding for research and for services that the government asks for through competitive bidding, along with fairly rigorous grantmaking processes.

Like almost everything else the administration does, the attack on the universities is also characterized by a degree of incompetence. The orders it has made against Harvard are poorly thought out and almost certainly illegal. Unfortunately, this incompetence is a typical feature of regimes that are headed toward fascism. The absolute premium on loyalty to the leader means that individuals with professionalism and integrity are largely unwelcome in the administration. The need to appeal only to a misinformed base means that bad outcomes can be covered with more lies.

The attack on higher education is of a piece with this administration’s attack on democracy on other fronts. It has declared war on the “administrative state” because a functioning government, run by rational decision-making processes, subject to ethics rules and expertise, is inimical to dictatorial power. It has attacked America’s scientific research apparatus for the same reason. What kind of administration destroys the agencies that handle food safety and approve new medications, guts the scientific research apparatus that has made us the envy of the world, and fires the people who handle nuclear codes and air traffic safety? The fundamental issue is that facts and rational inquiry are detrimental to autocracy. The governing practice of the present administration amounts to a ceaseless war on truth.

One of the most distressing aspects of the administration’s authoritarian approach is its ability to spin the public debate by putting out false representations of its motivations. According to the standard, both-sides framing that characterizes reporting in functional democracies, we are supposed to take seriously the administration’s claims that its assault on Harvard is intended to cure the institution of anti-semitism. While Harvard is hardly immune to instances of anti-semitism, I will suggest that a government administration headed by a leader famous for finding “very fine people on both sides” of a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where some protestors chanted “Jews will not replace us,” an administration staffed with several individuals known for their fondness for Nazi political theorists and Holocaust deniers, is not a credible force for a new crusade against bigotry of any sort.

The good news is that we don’t need to reinvent the U.S. Constitution to stop this kind of assault. But some people may need to remind themselves of what its First Amendment actually says.

Remember when the biggest thing on the Right was the outrage of “cancel culture”? We were supposed to take all those social media mobs as an attack on the freedom of speech. Well, guess what: people saying basic mean things about you on social media is not a violation of the First Amendment. The suppression of our constitutional right to the freedom of speech happens when the government uses its coercive powers to ban books, issue speech codes, seize control of university curricula, and fire people for being tagged as a “DEI hire” or “woke.”

In keeping with this anti-constitutional spirit, the administration recently issued a four-page memo limiting the rights of news media to publish information that has been leaked to them “that undermine President Trump’s policies.” Because who wants the media to report on the rampant corruption in the present administration? Even as it is mounting a nihilistic assault on universities, federal agencies, and scientific research, it seems the administration hasn’t forgotten that “the enemy of the people” is also the free press. Here’s hoping the American public and its representatives in the judiciary remember what our constitutional rights are all about.