Harvard can’t claim they weren’t warned. Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter a week ago to Harvard president Alan Garber warning him to start complying with the administration’s interpretation of the Civil Rights Act and two Supreme Court decisions on discrimination.
Harvard ignored the letter until yesterday, when Garber tried sweet-talking McMahon out of her decision to disqualify Harvard from any federal funding until they acted to end discrimination and anti-Semitic intimidation campaigns on campus. Garber tried to argue that he and McMahon were sympatico on those goals, but just differed on how to achieve them:
Last month, the university took the government to court over what it has called unlawful intrusion into its operations. But on Monday, Dr. Garber’s tone was softer, saying he agreed with some of the Trump administration’s concerns about higher education, but that Harvard’s efforts to combat bigotry and foster an environment for free expression had been hurt by the government’s actions.
Dr. Garber said he embraced the goals of curbing antisemitism on campus; fostering more intellectual diversity, including welcoming conservative voices; and curtailing the use of race in admissions decisions.
Those goals “are undermined and threatened by the federal government’s overreach into the constitutional freedoms of private universities and its continuing disregard of Harvard’s compliance with the law,” Dr. Garber said in the letter to Linda McMahon, the secretary of education.
The university’s response came one week after Ms. McMahon wrote to Harvard to advise the university against applying for future grants, “since none will be provided.” That letter provoked new worries inside Harvard about the long-term consequences of its clash with the Trump administration.
How did that go over in the White House? Poorly. This morning, eight different agencies acted to cut off nearly a half-billion dollars in more federal funding to Harvard, just as McMahon warned:
The Trump administration announced Tuesday it was canceling another $450 million in grants to Harvard University after the Ivy League school “repeatedly failed” to quell race discrimination and antisemitism on campus.
“There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support,” members of Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement.
“Harvard, and its leadership group who are tainted by the egregious infractions under its watch, faces a steep, uphill battle to reclaim its legacy as a lawful institution and center of academic excellence.”
The task force cited a recent decision to reward a violent protester with a lucrative fellowship as one catalyst for the action:
That shameful legacy has continued on as recognized by Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which lays bare an appalling reality: Jewish students were subjected to pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation, with no meaningful response from Harvard’s leadership. Recent reporting has exposed the Harvard Law Review’s (HLR) pattern of endemic race discrimination when evaluating articles for inclusion in its journal. Even more troubling, the HLR awarded a $65,000 fellowship–meant to “serve the public interest”–to a protester who faced criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student on campus. The decision was reviewed and approved by a faculty committee, demonstrating just how radical Harvard has become.
Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement.
Ira Stoll and the Free Beacon covered this development a couple of weeks ago. The Harvard Law Review awarded a public-interest fellowship to Ibrahim Bharmal. In October 2023, Bharmal and others assaulted a Jewish student attempting to skirt past a pro-Hamas protest, repeatedly asking Bharmal to stop grabbing and touching him. The student reported Bharmal and others to law enforcement, who identified the perps immediately:
The student, who asked to remain anonymous, described being pushed and shoved as he tried to film them with his phone. A report to the FBI identified two of the people laying hands on him as fellow Harvard University graduate students, one a law student, Ibrahim Bharmal, a member of the Harvard Law Review, and the other a divinity school graduate student, Elom Tettey Tamaklo, who lives with Harvard undergraduate students in supervisory role known as a proctor.
Bharmal and Tamaklo did not respond to requests for comment.
A report has been filed with the Harvard University Police Department and the FBI’s Boston office. “An Israeli student on his way to class pulled his phone out to film the rioters and he was attacked. He was assaulted both physically and verbally. Throughout the assault he kept calm, but was aggressively attacked by Pro-Palestine rioters,” reads the report to the FBI, which was reviewed by the Free Beacon. “At least 2 of those involved have been identified as employees of the University and have not yet been dismissed from their posts.”
An earlier letter last month to Harvard from the Trump administration demanded the expulsion of all students involved in that assault, which took place on October 18, 2023. Rather than expel Bharmal, however, the HLR and the faculty of Harvard Law School rewarded Bharmal with a $65,000 fellowship … to pursue the “public interest,” at least in how Harvard defines it. Harvard attempted to distance itself from the HLR, claiming it to be an independent entity, but the Free Beacon points out that Havard faculty participated in that decision:
A Free Beacon review found that Harvard’s database for grant and fellowship opportunities, known as CARAT, advertises the fellowship. That advertisement states that a “committee of Harvard Law School and Harvard Law Review alumni in public interest careers chooses finalists from the set of applicants, and a faculty committee interviews the finalists to select fellows,” indicating Harvard faculty members signed off on Bharmal as a recipient.
Garber has been repeatedly warned to enforce consequences for violent students engaging in intimidation campaigns against students based on race, ethnicity, and/or religion, as clearly authorized under Title VI. Garber was specifically warned about Bharmal in particular. Garber refuses to do even that much to control his campus or to protect students who attend from anti-Semitic harassment and violence. Instead, he’d rather stand up to Trump and McMahon than his own faculty and student body, while mewling about how sympathetic he is to McMahon’s position on civil rights, viewpoint diversity, and student safety.
The time for talk is over at Harvard and other bastions of Academia. If they refuse to comply with the law and protect their students, then they can operate without access to federal funding. That’s a choice that Garber is making for Harvard, not Trump or McMahon.
Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up!
- Our long drought is over! Andrew Malcolm returns to our weekly podcast and discusses the media coverage of the Vatican conclave.
- We also take the Pultizer board to task for its disgraceful award announcement last week.
- Andrew also gives us some background on his most unusual assignment as a war correspondent, plus much more!
The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!
