Recently, Columbia University caved into the Trump administration’s demands that unless the University reformed itself (mostly doing things to dispel the anti-Semitic climate), they would lose $400 million in federal funding. While most of the changes demanded were good ones, I object to the administration using science funding as a club to bludgeon Columbia into compliance. (On the other hand, Columbia wasn’t doing much, but why should science be the field to take the brunt?) And Columbia’s caving led to the forced resignation of the interim President, Katrina Armstrong.
It’s no surprise, then, that the next target of the administration is that bastion of Lefty Communist Woke Socialism, Harvard University. Yep, they’re being bludgeoned, too, and also about anti-Semitism. As the NYT reports (article archived here):
The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing roughly $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard, claiming that the university had allowed antisemitism to run unchecked on its campus.
In a statement on Monday, the administration said that it was examining about $256 million in contracts, as well as an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.”
The announcement of the investigation suggested that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus but was vague about what the university could do to satisfy the Trump administration.
“While Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized antisemitism — though long overdue — are welcome, there is much more that the university must do to retain the privilege of receiving federal taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars,” Josh Gruenbaum, a senior official at the General Services Administration, said in a statement.
“This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow antisemitism to fester,” he added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”
I didn’t know that, though, when I woke up this morning and found this email from the President Alan Garber, who was also an interim President after Claudine Gay’s resignation but now will be serving as a regular President until 2027. Read what I got and you tell me: is Harvard about to cave, too? I have bolded the parts that suggest that Harvard will do what the administration wants. Again, Harvard did, I think, need to change to get rid of its antisemitic climate, but I would prefer that it do so voluntarily rather than be forced to.
I’ve bolded the parts below suggesting that Harvard is about to cut a deal with the administration:
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I cannot interpret this other than as Harvard capitulating to the administration’s demands. Neither the administration nor Harvard are specific here, and Harvard does admit that it still has a “serious problem” of “antisemitic harassment” (I’m not sure how pervasive the problem still is.) Indeed, Garber says that he himself has been a victim of antisemitism. How did that happen? The NYT suggests one explanation:
He may have been referring to a poster showing him with horns and a tail that was displayed by a student group during Harvard’s encampment last year.
There’s a lot more in the NYT piece, so have a look if you’re following the Siege of the Universities. This is only the beginning!
The cut to Columbia funding was $400 million, not $400 billion.
You missed the joke. Today is 4/1/2025.
whoops, a typo. I’ll fix.
“I would prefer that it do so voluntarily rather than be forced to.”
Agree.
It never ceases to amaze me, hatred of … what, Judaism? Or just Jews? And how it concentrates in certain areas – e.g. University of North Dakota? Any State College? Any Community College? Not so much.
Meaning, where’s the anti-Scientologism? Anti-Homeopathism? Anti-flat-Earthism? Those targets could make sense, as they cripple the mind and body. It might remotely be hate-able (but of course much more valuable to hear about from their proponents with 100% clarity).
But no – the haters go for anti-Semitism.
It’s absurd to an absurd degree.
It seems strange to me that none of these universities are mounting legal challenges to the threat of the Trump administration’s efforts to deprive them of research dollars.
Yes, and although it is probably over my head, this is about funding that has already been awarded and budgeted for. It is the job of the congressional branch and roll out these expenses, not the executive branch. And so once again, like defying the orders of federal judges, this administration shows no concern about the normal checks and balances that the president took an oath to obey.
So why not mount a legal challenge? In this case, I must say that the optics could look pretty bad for Harvard. They are being threatened with punishment for being lax about antisemitism, and does going to court over it mean that they want to continue to be lax about antisemitism?
I prefer the heavy hand of government not be involved in such things, but are the universities going to demonstrate that they had the power for effective change all along and simply chose not to use it? (A bit like Biden and the border?) Are some administrators going to breathe a private sigh of relief that the federal government is forcing them to do what they, in the face of activist faculty and students, lacked the courage to do on their own?
Harvard. I don’t care about that. Those people don’t matter to me.
(I understand the host’s history, it makes sense he’d care).
no disrespect*
D.A.
NYC
*If I owned WEIT every day would be “Doggie Day!” and there’d be a weekly squid and octopus photography competition… so there’s that. We all have bias! hehe
Good thing you do not own WEIT!
Trump cares about Jews in this anti-semitism business as much as he cares about women in his ant-trans ventures.
And yet one needn’t care a whit about whether Stalin gave a damn about the Jews, the French, or the British.
Stalin was overtly antisemitic (“The Doctor’s Plot”). However, he hated the Nazis even more. As a consequence, he sent weapons to Israel to help win the 1948 war. Why did he hate the Arabs that much? Because they had allied with the Nazis in WWII.
This is an authoritarian regime. This headline was from The Washington Post in 2024.
To please Putin, universities implement sweeping changes
Unfortunately it took a threat to elicit Garber’s response. Is it capitulation? I don’t know. The threat certainly got Harvard’s attention, and I don’t see how Garber could have remained silent. He had to say something like what he said.
I’d like to think that Garber is sincere and is already putting in place the appropriate protections against antisemitism. If so, his engagement with the government task force will go well. He needs to demonstrate that Harvard is capable of self-governance within the requirements of Title VI. I’m not happy about this, but I think that the federal government does have a role to play in enforcing the Civil Rights Act. Whether it does so appropriately or with ham-handed brutality is the question. (I suspect the latter.)
And now, Princeton.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/406256
The universities definitely let things get out of hand. From the NYT article, a reminder:
“Immediately after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, a coalition of Harvard student groups, under the banner of Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups, wrote a letter declaring “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
At the time, Mr. [Larry] Summers condemned the university’s leadership for not denouncing the student letter.”
Whether or not this is the way to handle it, I don’t know.
Some of the cuts affect hospitals associated with Harvard for example. Doesn’t sound good.
Garber’s language is wise. There are other ways to address Trump’s overreach. (I’d wager Ceiling Cat is aware of some of these strategies.) Signaling defiance to Trump will result in The Apprentice: You’re Fire–University Edition. It would go as well as the Trump-Zelenskyy fiasco. No reason to piss away 9 billion to give the finger to a f*cker.
My sense if that too many on the left truly lack the street smarts for dealing with bullies with power over them. There is wisdom sometimes, for instance, in a battered wife staying with her abuser, temporarily, if she has more to gain by doing so. If he’s not going to kill her, sometimes it is better to stay and secretly build up her monetary base and act strategically until she can leave safely and in a better place. No reason to go to a women’s shelter if being there makes her worse off than staying.
That’s kind of the decision universities have to make. They need to signal to Trump that they are willing to make amends. The more sincere they are, the better. The more they are willing to lead by reforming internally the better.
If Garber pulls a duplicitous move like the former interim president of Columbia, Harvard will be harmed and many people, including me, may no longer have a job.
OTS, I agree with Larry Summers here:
https://x.com/LHSummers/status/1907029265113088185
But I’m not sure about his words here, for the reasons I stated above:
https://x.com/LHSummers/status/1906836147591844342
If the University of Alabama did nothing about neo-nazi antisemitism, including vandalizing buildings with swastikas and shouting anti-Zionist slogans, and the federal government threatened to cut off funding until the university made a commitment to ending the harassment, would UofA be seen as capitulating to government demands if it took actions to curb the antisemitism on campus? In my brain, the only difference between neo-nazis and the pro-Hamas Jew-haters is that the pro-palestine crowd is made up of the cool rich kids rather than rednecks. So I’m fine attaching strings to the money that we dole out if it ends harassment of students and professors because of their ethnicity or beliefs.
Not only does Harvard have a serious antisemitism problem, it has been infiltrated by a tightly connected network of anti-Israel groups, causing the rise in antisemitism. I know because I recently did an empirical network analysis (with Python scripts that scraped Instagram) that uncovered some of this. I’m certain that various government orgs, especially those tracking the influence of Iran and its proxies, have done what I did (only much more extensively) and identified Harvard as a hotspot of foreign influence and coordinated hate.
We are infested at Harvard.
Yesterday, I watched a Zoom seminar on “The Antisemitism Funding Network” which was excellent. It has direct relevance to the issue of campus infiltration and its funding, and goes into the nuts and bolts of the legal issues surrounding funding, reporting, and transparency.
Danielle Pletka, the presenter, is bright, succinct, and quite a treasure. The seminar was a product of CAMERA, and is already available on YouTube. One may subscribe to CAMERAorg channel on YouTube:
THANK YOU!
You’re welcome! 🙂
From this morning’s Hili post and related to this post: ” . . . Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel asserted that students and postdocs from his lab alone — largely funded by Federal grants — co-founded 12 companies with a combined market value of hundreds of billions of dollars.”
How wonderful for these students and postdocs – and from that lab alone, to boot. (Specifically how many “hundreds of billions”? At least $200B?) Do they occasionally silently offer a few crumbs of gratitude to the U.S. taxpayer? I trust that the American citizenry/taxpayers have benefited from their altruistic entrepreneurial efforts. Sounds in the ballpark of “socialize the risks and privatize the rewards.” Would private investors have simply given grants? Being good capitalists, they’d expect something in return.
AI tells me that as of June 30, 2023 UC Berkeley’s endowment was valued at $6.95 billion. Would that Berkeley had perhaps instead worked out a deal with these entrepreneurs that would have benefited the endowment and not obligated the federal taxpayer.
As of June 30, 2024, Columbia University’s endowment was valued at $14.8 billion, while Harvard University’s endowment stood at $53.2 billion. With such a comparatively “small” endowment, perhaps Columbia is a bit antsy dealing with Trump over $400M, about 2.8% or its endowment. In Harvard’s case, perhaps somewhat more antsy, the $9B in question being about 17% of its endowment.
(Considering the U.S.’s $30T-plus national debt, I wonder how much of grants to universities is borrowed money, whatever the source, including Social Security and Medicare taxes.)
I agree with our Host on Trump’s infuriatingly holding scientific research, beneficial to Americans, hostage.
As to Columbia: $400M of an endowment of $14.8 billion is 2.7%, not 0.03%. [The math is (0.4/14.8) x 100.]
For Harvard $9B of an endoment of $53.2 billion is (9/53.2) x 100 = 16.92% (not 0.17%).
Per cent literally means per one hundred.
Those percentages are way off. Just calculating in my head, you are too low by two orders of magnitude.
Harvard may indeed be capitulating. However not capitulating at this point would mean not making any effort to end the terrible anti-semitism on its campus.
I don’t trust Trump’s long range objectives at all…. I think he starts with things one can’t really object to – say antisemitism but is it a lead to later controls for proper political dissent … it remind one of the oft quoted “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
We just watched months of protest after protest of Jew-haters vandalizing buildings and statues, and screaming for the abolition of Israel, glorifying the rape, torture, burning, mutilation, kidnapping, and murder of Jewish men, women, and children, actively harassing Jewish students, shouting down speakers, and terrorizing university staff, while the administrators sat on their hands and were silent as they indeed “came for the Jews”.
With this background, one could view the Trump administrations actions against antisemitism within the universities as “speaking out when they came for the Jews” when others did not.
If nothing else, it provides cover to those university leaders who were too afraid of upsetting their spoiled rich-kid antisemite, swastika-scrawling students to take action against these racists by providing a scapegoat that they can now blame for the discipline that they may have wanted to enact anyway but lacked the stones to do.
“… but why should science be the field to take the brunt?”
Is it? Is this simply because the sciences receive the lion’s share of all government funding?
Edit: Are the sciences being targeted is my question?
I have two theories about Harvard and Garber. The first is easy, Harvard is GAH and discovery would be too embarrassing to Harvard. My second theory, is that Harvard can read the election returns and may be capitulating because the zeitgeist calls for it. Above, Darryl R offers a third theory (which may be correct).