Ep. 136: In Trump v. Harvard, the stakes involve more than antisemitism
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Hello, and welcome to Jonathan Tobin Daily. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Now let's get started. When Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, noted that President Donald Trump was being far more aggressive in his campaign against Harvard than he's been against a Russian dictator, he wasn't wrong.

Whatever the merits of Trump's approach to the latter conflict, which centers on efforts to end the illegal and brutal war Russian President Vladimir Putin launched against Ukraine three years ago, the idea that there's something immoral about the administration's campaign against Harvard is as indefensible as any attempt to justify Moscow's behavior.

Or, one might add, as inexcusable as the fact that most people at Harvard seem to think that the real victims on their campus are wealthy students from abroad who use their entry to America to engage in anti-Semitism and not the Jews that they have been targeting.

As the placards and signs at the Ivy League school's graduation ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts indicated, along with their support for Palestinian Arabs and their opposition to Israel's existence, student activists are adopting the cause of international students as the nation's newest oppressed group.

But like Harvard's own defense of the toxic culture that it has embraced, the idea that the vast number of foreigners who are attending the campus and so many other top American schools are deserving of sympathy in their battle against Trump is a distortion of the truth. At schools like Harvard, the problem of Jew hatred has become a public scandal since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.

While, sadly, Harvard is far from alone in becoming a hostile environment for Jews, even its defenders and the school itself acknowledge that anti-Semitism has become a serious problem there in recent years.

And even when admitting that the scourge has become normative at Harvard, its loyalists believe and insist that Trump is wrong to be seeking to punish it by withdrawing billions in federal funding. They claim that the administration's focus on stopping it from admitting foreign students, a measure that has currently hit a roadblock in the courts, is simply unfair to the school and the students Washington is attempting to keep from attending it.

They assert that Trump's war on academia is, at best, overkill. More than that, they doubt his sincerity in wishing to fight anti-Semitism and claim that even raising the issue is an example of the president's xenophobia and a petty vendetta being pursued against his political opponents.

That indictment of Trump coming from the left, as well as those liberal Jews and groups like the American Jewish Committee, which claim to be alarmed about anti-Semitism, misses the significance of this issue and the administration's broader goals of reforming Harvard and other academic institutions.

It's true that the battle lines in the debate about Trump are largely being drawn along the same contours as those that divided America in last November's presidential election. In the fall of 2024, the single most important indicator of partisan preference between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris was education levels.

The Democrats, once the party of blue-collar voters and the working class, are now primarily supported by the credentialed elites. And the GOP, long the bastion of Wall Street, the wealthy, and the college-educated, has become the party of the working class. Seen from that perspective, it is hardly surprising that the second Trump administration is taking on academia.

It's true that conservatives largely agree with Vice President J.D. Vance's assertion that universities are the enemy, something he said in a 2021 speech the year before he won an Ohio U.S. Senate seat and three years before becoming vice president.

The reason why they think so is, contrary to the liberal narrative about Trump, not a function of their resentment of Democrats per se, nor does it primarily stem from the idea, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told his friends on the board of Columbia University, that only Republicans care about campus anti-Semitism.

Rather, it's because the Trump administration rightly understands that universities like Harvard aren't merely liberal institutions, but engines of destruction of the values of the American republic, as well as those of Western civilization and its canon.

It cannot be emphasized enough that as awful as the epidemic of anti-Semitism at elite schools like Harvard and Columbia has become, this plague of Jew hatred is just the byproduct of something far larger that has been brewing in academia and American culture in the last generation.

The problem at Harvard isn't just that the Jews must endure a hostile environment there. That's something that has manifested itself in its embrace of a culture that normalizes genocide opposition to the existence of Israel from the river to the sea and support for terrorism against Jews, globalize the intifada. It's also resulted in a precipitous decline in the admission of Jewish students to the point where, as Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College and the American Enterprise Institute wrote,

Fewer Jews attend now than when the school had restrictive quotas more than a century ago. The problem at elite schools, as well as many public state ones, is that the progressive takeover of American education has turned them into what they are, for all intents and purposes, woke madrasas. Fashionable leftist ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality, and settler colonialism are the new orthodoxy, with dissent brutally and efficiently suppressed.

It's no coincidence that the enforcement of the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, has created a faculty and student body that is inherently hostile to the Jewish minority. Acceptance of Jews and supporters of Israel, who are falsely labeled as white oppressors, is conditional on their renunciation of the Jewish state and the religious beliefs that bind Jews to their ancient homeland.

Harvard and its supporters claim Trump's demand that it create a more ideologically diverse faculty where conservatives and Republicans would no longer be rarities or extinct violates their academic freedom. This argument, however, is entirely disingenuous. Harvard, which has been ranked dead last in national ratings for free speech for the last two years in a row, has no use for academic freedom for anyone but those who subscribe to leftist beliefs. What does that say about diversity and inclusion?

The administration is also right to point to the way that foreign students have been particularly involved in organizing the anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrations, tent encampments, and building takeovers on various campuses, including Harvard.

That aside, the business of admitting these international guests is not contrary to the signs at Harvard's graduation ceremony, a case of the school helping the needy from abroad. To the contrary, admitting international students is good business for academia, as most of them pay the full freight rather than use scholarships or financial aid of some kind.

It's not that they are magnets for the best and brightest from across the planet as much as they are now places where countries like those in the Middle East or China can buy admission for young people who are more often than not already indoctrinated in hateful ideologies at odds with those of Western freedom.

That's why they make up an increasing percentage of the student body at so many academic institutions, including a whopping 42% at New York University, 37% at Columbia, and 27% at Harvard.

It is neither xenophobic nor prejudiced to note that these often wealthy foreigners are taking the places that American students, including those less wealthy ones who come from categories of the population that are not protected minorities under DEI rules, might have gotten.

The point to be made here is that while Harvard and Columbia have every right to become leftist indoctrination centers if they wish, the American people and their government are under no obligation to subsidize them. Nor are they obliged to let them become centers for bringing people into the country to harass Jews or agitate for leftist policies under the guise of education.

Some argue that Harvard and Columbia have learned their lesson and, as such, should be allowed to reform their campuses without the heavy hand of federal interference. But they can't seriously expect anyone to believe that these schools would change if not for Trump threatening to pull their funding and putting a stop to their foreign student business.

The fact that Harvard didn't seriously negotiate with the administration or seek clarification about Trump's demands, but went straight to the courts to sue the government in what they hope are friendly district courts, speaks volumes about their intentions. They've already signaled that they would rather risk losing funding for their science and medical programs than give up their DEI practices and wokest policies that encourage anti-Semitism.

At the heart of this battle is a struggle for a university system that isn't dominated by those who regard America as, that is dominated by those who regard America as an irredeemably racist nation, or those who wish to discard the Western canon and replace it with progressive doctrines that racialize society and divide us into permanently warring groups of alleged victims and oppressors.

We know what Harvard wants, as well as of the other schools that have been applauding from the sidelines as efforts make their way through the courts to keep their federal funding in foreign students. Their goal is to go on producing new elites steeped in woke doctrines that are at odds with the basic values of the American Republic and the Western canon, and that fuel anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

And they want American taxpayers, including working class kids who deserve better from their government, as well as these strongholds of privilege, to go on enabling and subsidizing all of this. The idea that Harvard, Columbia, or any such school is entitled to undermine this country and to do so on the backs of ordinary Americans is as outrageous as it is disconnected from any reasonable interpretation of the law.

What Trump is doing in this war on Harvard and academia is defending the interests of the American people, including Jews. Those who are opposing him aren't defending freedom. They are, whether they realize it or not, defending those people and ideas that seek the destruction of the West and the source of freedom. Seen from that perspective, Trump is right to oppose Harvard with more vigor than Putin, even though the Russian authoritarian remains truly awful.

Hard as it may be for some liberals who are still blind to what the progressives are attempting to do to the United States to comprehend, at the moment, Harvard and other elitist institutions are currently a greater threat to America than any foreign dictator.

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