“Nation can’t believe it’s on Harvard’s side” was the headline on a spoof story in The Onion last week.
Too true. Americans, stereotyped as We’re No. 1 types who love a winner, who speak loudly and still carry a big stick, actually often despise anyone who either is the best or pretends to be so.
Witness the national hatred outside of four Southern California counties of our beloved Los Angeles Dodgers, who are indeed winners who are better than anyone else, excepting when they make the stupid mistake of going to the current White House — the one in which the hallowed Oval Office has been remodeled to look like gold-plated Versailles crossed with a whorehouse — after which they have broken down into an internal team dissent so bad that they lost 16-0 to the Cubs the other day here in Chavez Ravine, the worst home shutout loss in franchise history.
Anyway, actually, nobody loves a winner.
And so Harvard, the richest, oldest — founded in 1636, 140 years before the nation itself — and in many ways best university in America, is not generally beloved by Americans. Too big for its britches and all that.
Except, that is, when an unprecedentedly authoritarian president wants to literally tell Harvard what it can teach, who it can admit and how much power its professors can have.
Harvard is a private institution. It can teach what it wants, school who it wants, hire who it wants.
Endowed by its alums and others with a wild $53 billion, it also, yes, accepts federal money in research grants.
But the very idea that an anti-intellectual who doesn’t read books, much less know how to teach them, tries to tell a Harvard how to run its academic affairs is a horrifying joke. If you don’t want your kids taught by Massachusetts liberals, fine, send them to Liberty University. Send them wherever you like.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in an open letter on Monday.
And, while this is all a show trial, a fight a know-nothing administration wants to pick with an elite Northeastern school to curry favor with its base, make no mistake — the White House is literally trying to tell Harvard what to teach, and get it in writing. If Harvard agreed to its demands, three administration officials wrote, they could begin work on a “more thorough, binding settlement agreement.”
In the end, the absurdity of it all, the lack of subtlety and distance from bucks-up and proud Harvard’s actual situation, drove the swiftness of the school’s response to the Trumpsters. Other, less-fancy, schools had to dither and hand-wring a bit when the current feds began to put the ideological squeeze on. But as Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary who is also a former Harvard president says, “the extremity of the demand letter made this an easier decision than it might otherwise have been.”
I can make fun of it all — and I do, and I will continue to — but the awful thing is what the cuts in funding from the federal government are aimed at. And it’s not at teaching my unlucrative, impractical academic field, English literature. While Trump has not said how they came up with the figure of $2.2 billion in grants they say they will freeze since Harvard won’t let them run the university, apparently at least $650 million of the cuts are aimed at medical research. The school of public health confirmed to The New York Times that “Sarah Fortune, an infectious disease specialist, had received a stop-work order. Dr. Fortune’s tuberculosis research was supported through a $60 million National Institutes of Health contract involving Harvard and other universities across the country.” That’ll teach those effete Crimsons! Bring back TB, and tell RFK Jr. the good news!
A prominent conservative scholar applauds Harvard’s backbone here. “This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge from Texas. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
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