Trump has Harvard on the run

The Orange Man knows how to use his power in this presidency.

The Jerusalem Post reported, “One of two Harvard students who assaulted a Jewish classmate during an anti-Israel protest in October 2023 has been appointed as class marshal by Harvard Divinity School at the upcoming graduation ceremony.

“This comes just three weeks after the other assailant was awarded a $65,000 Harvard Law School fellowship to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.”

The attack on an Israeli student came days after an unwarranted attack on civilians by Palestinians soldiers—aka Hamas—triggering the latest Palestinian War against Israel. The list of international war crimes by Palestinians includes soldiers attacking in civilian clothing, rape, torture, mutilation, murder and hostage-taking.

The two Muslims who attacked a Jew are divinity school students, which shows the quality of a Harvard education today. The anti-Semitism of yore is back as Harvard abandons American principles in favor of international students who pay the full retail price for tuition without discounts or “scholarships.”

Oh, Harvard will take Asians all right, but only those from Asia. Homegrown Asian-Americans have to have near perfect test scores and GPAs to get in.

27% of Harvard students now are foreigners. Ka-ching!

Can anyone save us from this madness?

Enter Donald Trump, Penn ’68. As president, he is wrecking the Ivy League’s ability to flout U.S. laws on discrimination while collecting billions in grants. The central government gave Harvard $686 million. While the college claims it was for medical research and other scientific endeavors, the vast majority of the money—69%—went to Harvard’s bureaucracy.

The money gets steered to Harvard for good reason. 5.5% of the members of the current 119th Congress are Harvard grads. Pocahontas isn’t a grad. She just taught there.

So you can see what Trump is up against. But Congress gave presidents enormous power over universities. The power of the purse strings in higher education is one of them. Power over the issuance of visas is another. In this presidency, Trump has mastered controlling the levers of government.

It’s like using a buffer. The first time you try, you slam it into the wall. But with practice, you can make it float like Muhammad Ali and wax like a beehive.

Trump’s turning the halls at Harvard into ice rinks. Harvard’s president better lace up his skates.

NYT’s Jess Bidgood interviewed NYT’s Michael S. Schmidt to cry about Orange Man Bad.

Their verdict? “Why Harvard Has No Way Out. Even against one of the nation’s oldest institutions, the Trump administration holds the levers of power—and it’s using them aggressively.”

The two have no shame.

Bidgood: You have long covered the way Trump has used the power of the government to target his perceived enemies. How is this time different?

Schmidt: There’s been an audacity and creativity to the way that Trump has tried to use his power in the second term, and this is the latest example. Coming into this, we concentrated on his threats to lock up his enemies, like Liz Cheney or James Comey. The use of the government’s power for purely political ends has manifested itself in ways that I think go beyond what we had imagined, and even beyond what Project 2025 contemplated.

Cheney is not a perceived enemy. Comey is not a perceived enemy. Harvard is not a perceived enemy. Everyone on Nixon’s enemies list really did hate him, even Art Buchwald. Everyone on Trump’s list hates him.

Trump’s audacity pales compared to Obama having the FBI spy on him, FJB having the FBI raid his home, suing him in the kangaroo courts of New York and trying to assassinate him.

Yanking Harvard’s ability to have international students is a billion-dollar blow to the blowhard college.

Bidgood: I’d imagine that for international students, this makes the prospect of attending Harvard feel deeply uncertain—even unappealing. Where would the university find itself, even if it wins?

Schmidt: Even if Harvard runs the table in court, it’s still persona non grata with the Trump administration, and that means that it’s going to continue to face investigations, including from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

Harvard finds itself in this impossible position. If it continues to fight the administration, it will continue to get hit with these extraordinary uses of federal power to punish the university.

The federal government has more levers to use against an institution like Harvard than certainly I had appreciated. If you are persona non grata with Trump, he’s got you by the lapels in a way that is extraordinary. And Harvard is feeling it. What we saw yesterday is just the latest pressure point.

My, my, my. Trump is going after Harvard the way FJB went after Tesla and other companies run by Elon Musk.

The public is behind Trump because college administrators tarnished the Harvard brand long ago. Higher education in general suffers a backlash over trillions in unpaid student loans, DEI, LGBT and the promotion of communism in general.

In an age of AI, college may be defunct. NPR reported, “Colleges and universities have been trying to fight against students using tools like ChatGPT to do class assignments and communicate. But here’s a twist: Professors and educators are now turning to A.I. to prepare lessons, teach, and even grade students’ work.”

Well, cut the middleman out and replace students and faculty alike with AI.

With all the subtlety of a brass band at a funeral, Trump is going to rob from the elitists and give to the welders.

Reuters reported, “U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he is considering taking $3 billion of previously awarded grant money for scientific and engineering research away from Harvard University and giving it to trade schools.

“His comments on his social media platform Truth Social come less than a week after his administration sought to block the Ivy League school from enrolling foreign students as part of Trump’s extraordinary effort to seize some government control of U.S. academia.”

I’m not Mike Rowe, but I approve this message.

NYT totally missed Trump’s dig at Harvard.

NYT reported, “Much of the money for Harvard that the administration has frozen involves research funding for scientific studies of disease. The unit at Harvard hardest hit by Mr. Trump’s campaign has been the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where work had been underway on efforts to stop the spread of tuberculosis and to find the cause of multiple sclerosis, among other projects.

“That type of research is not typically conducted at trade schools, which specialize in practical skills ranging from automotive repair to cosmetology and generally do not engage in scientific research.”

By practical skills, NYT means actual skills. Paying 69% of a medical research grant to the bureaucracy is not science; it’s a scam.

Harvard can come back. NYT can’t because nobody needs newspapers, but Harvard can. The first step is to drop the anti-Semitism and to quit being so darned greedy.

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Tampon Tim dedicated Memorial Day in Minnesota to Saint George Floyd.

The replies to his tweet were wicked, but one person saw the positive side:

You’ve got to ac-cent-tuate the positive.

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My wife would never do this to me.

I’m a foot taller.