Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, President Donald Trump has escalated his struggle with Harvard University. Remember what the issues were. Harvard had not really followed the letter of the law according to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, which it and the University of North Carolina had lost.
In other words, they were, by court order, to stop giving preference in admissions, in hiring, in promotion, in retention on the basis of race, gender, etc., what we would call DEI. Harvard has been skirting that. And I think the data’s pretty clear how they have and no question that they’ve been doing it.
Second, they have also been getting a lot of money from foreign governments, not always fully accounted for, that is reported to the Department of Education, specifically Communist China and Qatar, over the years.
You could make the argument that there have been, in the past, graduations, dorms that have a racial basis, almost a segregation element to them.
You can make the argument that they don’t fully honor the First Amendment when you have guest speakers. Sometimes when they want to give a presentation at a formal lecture or even an informal class, students—while they may be officially discouraged from it—they are allowed, de facto, to shout the speaker down or to protest.
I think there’s no question that there is a climate of antisemitism throughout Harvard. Recently, two Harvard students who assaulted a Jewish student—one of whom was kind of rewarded with a $65,000 honorarium through the auspices of the law school, another one was given an honorific title at a graduation at the Divinity School of marshal. That sent the wrong message.
What I’m getting at is there was a lot of cause for Donald Trump to suggest, “I don’t need this, the country doesn’t need this.” But in his bill of complaints that were contingent on Harvard making compromises, he also got into elements of instruction, curriculum, and hiring.
He said, “Why are you hiring people from only one point of view?” Which I think is indisputable. Very few conservatives. Or one particular take on the American history, i.e., negative. That prompted the Council on Higher Education and other venues that have published it to solicit letters from people who would be called center-right—some of my colleagues at Hoover. And they objected to what Donald Trump’s add-ons were. And I think that’s reflected in The Wall Street Journal column by Jason Riley.
Essentially, they’re saying: We understand when Harvard’s clearly violating laws or charging too much for individual research grants—60% overhead. But now you’re entering the inner domain of the Harvard complex and you’re trying to micromanage and that’s wrong.
I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but I don’t know whether my colleagues and friends on the right have characterized it the way in which the argument is coming from the Trump administration.
They are saying, “This is analogous to immigration. When somebody is a guest and applies to come here in a visa, that’s an invitation. And we don’t have to give reasons why we don’t want a particular person to come to the United States. What the federal government does with its money vis-a-vis private education is kind of like an invitation. They invite us to give them money. And sometimes we don’t wanna do it. Maybe we say, ‘We don’t like Harvard. We like Fresno State.’ And we don’t have to give you a reason at all because it’s not a requirement. It’s a privilege. Some colleges like Hillsdale don’t take any money. They don’t want us to give them money.”
And so, I think the argument from the administration that maybe our right-wing friends are missing is not that the Trump administration doesn’t have a right to go in and micromanage. They’re just saying, “I don’t really wanna give Harvard any money. They’ve got $53 billion. They’re private. They’re not public institutions. But you know, if they ask us and they want money, then we have to look at why we would give it to them.”
And it’s kind of like Mr. Smith coming from Korea or Mr. Jones coming from Sweden. We look at them and we don’t really think they add to the Americans. So, we don’t have an invitation.
It’s kind of like foreign aid. Maybe Denmark wants foreign aid. Maybe Ghana wants foreign aid. And we look at it and then, we’re under no—we can say, “Well, Denmark, you have to give us Greenland—if we want—before we give you foreign aid.” We’re under no requirement to explain every decision we make for an optional gift.
So we would apply that logic. I think that’s what the Trump administration is doing: “Harvard, here’s some money. We don’t really care if you want it or not. But if you do want it, we would suggest that you broaden your curriculum, you give both points of view, and just try to hire more conservatives to balance out. And if you don’t want to do that, don’t worry about it. We’ll just give the money to trade school.”
This is as simple as that.
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