Public trust in our universities is lower than it’s ever been, with 32 percent of Americans having “very little to no confidence” in higher education. That’s up from 20 percent before October 7, 2023, when the higher-ed crisis was thrust into the national discourse by virulent pro-Hamas protests and encampments. It’s amazing that the heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and so-called progressive people in the country.
As Bill Ackman put it in a revelatory essay the day Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues. It’s a leading indicator of underlying pathologies, which here means everything from cancel culture to ideological indoctrination, intellectual corruption to moral decay. We’ve seen a subversion of the core mission of universities to seek truth and knowledge, and of classical-liberal values like free speech, due process, and equality under the law. It’s been a shift from education to activism.
The root cause of all of this is a noxious postmodern ideology that contends that truth is subjective and must be viewed through lenses of race, gender, and other identity categories, according to some privilege hierarchy. Your rights and freedoms depend on whether you’re part of a class deemed oppressor or oppressed.
After the Trump administration demanded that Harvard address its rampant antisemitism, end racial discrimination in admissions and hiring, curtail political litmus tests for faculty, ensure open academic inquiry, and otherwise reform its governance structures and processes, the university’s leadership indignantly rebuffed the government. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote that “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.” The administration responded by announcing a freeze on multi-year grants and contracts worth $2.2 billion and $60 million, respectively.
The only thing surprising about these developments is that they took so long. What we’re seeing isn’t the decades-old conservative complaint about liberal professors, but weak leadership that placates the illiberal left that now drives campus culture. University officials facilitate and even foment social-justice mobs who would consider the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which sparked universities’ leftward turn in the 1960s, to be a bastion of white supremacy.
Federal law is meant to prevent such things, at least at schools that accept the copious strings that come with federal funding. That includes everything from accounting standards to prevent waste and fraud to basic civil-rights obligations. Harvard has been lax on complying with these requirements. Indeed, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression named Harvard the worst school in the country for free speech for the second straight year.
Of course, there are certain federal demands that Harvard has been more than happy to accommodate. These range from the Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letter suggesting that schools remove due-process protections for sexual-harassment allegations to the Biden administration’s insinuation of DEI commissars into every nook and cranny of university governance.
The Trump administration’s focus, on the other hand, is on fighting the far-Left illiberalism that has especially pervaded “elite” places like Harvard. Its demands include increasing discipline for faculty, administrators, and students engaged in racism and antisemitism. Earlier this year, Harvard settled several (but not all) lawsuits by agreeing to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance when evaluating complaints of bullying, providing training on antisemitism to staff who review discrimination complaints, and undisclosed monetary payments. It’s understandable that the government sees these as largely cosmetic reforms, particularly given the spectacular failures of an earlier antisemitism advisory group and task force (created in parallel with one on anti-Muslim bias, of course).
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But the Trump demands aren’t merely a response to post-October 7 events. They also enforce the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, which found racial preferences in admissions to be unconstitutional. While promising to abide by that ruling, Harvard reaffirmed its commitment to diversity while seeking illegal proxies to maintain racialist policies (which have decreased Jewish enrollment).
The Claudine Gay scandal, even beyond her plagiarism, crystallized the larger problem. Gay is a mediocre academic who was elevated for advancing progressive orthodoxy while checking intersectional boxes. She is the apotheosis of an anti-intellectual movement that values identity and activism over merit and education.
But Gay’s resignation didn’t end Harvard’s troubles. The school is still plagued by a toxic culture, ideological corruption, and bureaucratic bloat that stifle open inquiry and free discourse. There may be schools that are worse on these measures—Columbia comes to mind, although it recently agreed to implement reforms at the behest of another federal investigation—but Harvard is the biggest and richest “brand” in American higher-ed, and thus a fitting target.
It doesn’t take long to destroy reputations built over decades and centuries. The question is whether higher-education grandees are willing to “do the work” to restore their tarnished stature. There’s still a long way to go before universities return to their mission of seeking truth and conveying knowledge, but the Trump administration is trying to get them there.
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