There’s something very Dennis Green-ish about this latest development from Harvard. And that’s not because the school is winning, either. It’s because the administration and faculty at Harvard are who we thought they were — and they don’t have any compunction about demonstrating it repeatedly.
The Department of Homeland Security explicitly cited the grant of a Harvard Law Review fellowship to Ibrahim Bharmal, who had assaulted a Jewish student in October 2023, as one reason among others to revoke their certification for the Student Education Visa Program (SEVP). Bharmal got charged in this assault, but he wasn’t alone. The video also shows Elom Tettey-Tamaklo participating, who at the time was an undergrad proctor. A month later, Tettey-Tamaklo got relieved of those duties, but he apparently needn’t have worried about it. Tettey-Tamaklo was allowed to continue his studies at Harvard’s Divinty School (!), and this week received an honor for his years at the school, as David wrote this morning.
Consider this for a moment: Was Tettey-Tamaklo the only graduate from the Harvard Divinity School this year? Was there no other graduate in that class that could have been chosen as marshal — say, a divinity student who didn’t manifest hatred on the basis of faith against other students? Not even one potential candidate?
Promoting Tettey-Tamaklo certainly sends a message to Jewish students and faculty about their value to Harvard’s administration and establishment: We are who you think we are.
And they will go to court to fight to remain a radical, anti-Semitic institution while demanding access to the federal trough:
Trustees discussed whether to sue or pursue deal talks after Trump first targeted the university in March. But as the president lobbed bomb after bomb at the school—pulling billions in federal funds, threatening its tax-exempt status, and now trying to block it from enrolling international students—the group stood firm.
By Friday, the school had filed two lawsuits against the administration, the latest to regain its foreign students.
Trump on Friday showed no signs of softening. “Harvard’s going to have to change its ways,” he said in the Oval Office.
Even as Harvard looks to the courts for relief, faculty and administrators back on campus are making contingency plans and preparing for a drawn-out war—one that threatens to leave Harvard a different place even if the school ultimately wins the lawsuits.
Tenacity in a good cause is a virtue. Obstinacy in defending an indefensible orientation is worse than a vice. It’s an argument for dismantling the institution itself. And that’s what Trump plans to do unless Harvard stops selling out its American students in order to pander to radical foreigners and the hostile money interests behind them.
The real question is how best to do that. The Free Press has two different takes today on how to get Harvard to change its ways, as is its (helpful) wont. Tyler Cowen argues that escalation has not proven fruitful, and that Trump should incentivize competition to Harvard instead. Escalation is only cutting off noses to spite faces, Cowen argues:
Right now America is in a talent race with China, and Harvard is one of our strongest assets. Do you think the Chinese Communist Party is happy or sad to hear about these Trump threats to one of our highest-quality universities?
By banning foreign students and cutting off funding, we are also hurting the financial status of Harvard, still one of our top universities in the sciences, most of all the biosciences. The school is consistently rated No. 1 in the life sciences. In other words, it is innovations from Harvard that may help us be healthier and live longer.
Trump’s actions also are making it harder for all other universities to plan for the future. After Harvard, who will be the next target? In the meantime, scientific and educational progress will be slower.
Cowen also cautions the burn-it-down crowd to recognize the precedents Trump will set along the way:
Most of all, by extending the powers of the executive we are paving the way for the Democratic Party to pursue its own strategy of escalation the next time around. Whichever right-leaning institutions may evolve, whether in higher education or elsewhere, they will be sitting ducks for executive branch action from a more left-leaning president. Why think that only Trump can pursue ideological campaigns against private institutions?
That’s not a bad point. However, it’s equally worth noting that Democrats set these precedents in leveraging federal funds to push radical Title IX policies in the past, too. The Obama administration forced schools to set up kangaroo courts without normal due process over allegations of sexual harassment and assault on campuses. Trump reversed those in his first term, only to have Joe Biden reinstate them. Trump isn’t setting precedents so much as he is following them. The real issue here is likely that federal funding gives presidents too much authority, but the only way to solve that would be to eliminate federal funding to schools altogether — not give schools impunity while making them entitled to taxpayer funds.
Solveig Lucia Gold offers a different incentive proposal. If academic universities want American public funding, then they should offer an American education based on its principles and history, rather than the gauzy ‘global citizen’ nonsense Academia has adopted since the 1960s:
Then again, these are the same universities that have sown so much of that dysfunction in the first place, from the class war to the culture war to, most recently and chillingly, the global intifada. For years they have cultivated an elite that is, on the one hand, unified in its disdain for the working class and all who do not buy its ever-evolving set of luxury beliefs and, on the other, divided by those same beliefs, perpetually sorting itself into so-called affinity groups based on perceived oppressor/oppressed status. The last identity with which the members of this elite wish to identify is “American,” because as Americans we must all—rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, Democrat, Republican—be categorized together as the most privileged and least oppressed people in the world.
Besides, educating “global citizens” is a whole lot easier than educating American citizens—because what does global citizenship mean? There is no particular knowledge that global citizens must possess, no legal obligations that they must fulfill, no decisions or compromises that they must, as a diverse and opinionated electorate, work through together. Global citizenship sounds important but generally amounts to kumbaya; American citizenship consists of real choices and sacrifices, alongside its many blessings.
As they pursue their global missions, American universities are failing to form an educated American citizenry.
Harvard is a special case here, too. Not only do foreign students make up over a quarter of the student body, Harvard allows them to intimidate and assault other students over their faith and ethnicity. They don’t just allow it, Harvard rewards it. Suspending their access to the SEVP seems more therapeutic than punitive in that light. (Also at the Free Press, Jed Rubinfeld sounds skeptical on the prospects for the DHS enforcement of that order.)
Harvard is exactly who thought they were. And Harvard is willing to fight to the last administrator to remain exactly who we think they are. So … let them.
But don’t let them off the hook for it.
Addendum: I had forgotten that Green redid this for a Coors Light commercial (note the different background). Can’t say that the late Coach Denny lacked a sense of humor! RIP, Coach. You were one of a kind.
