A lot of people I know, coming from the upper-crust of the educated class, are deeply disturbed that President Trump’s administration is picking a fight with Harvard over its civil rights violations and cooperation with China’s government.
Unfortunately, while few of these people would deny that Harvard has made a few “mistakes” in dealing with growing antisemitism on campus, and they might even tut-tut that Harvard’s admissions and hiring policies are a bit extreme when it comes to choosing students based on racial and religious characteristics, they insist that as a private institution Harvard should be left alone to manage itself.
It’s a First Amendment issue, they insist.
On its face, this defense has the sheen of plausibility, but the reality is that Harvard breaks laws and agreements with the federal government every day, and on a daily basis lies in legal documents in order to get federal money that would be denied it were it not such a prestigious institution.
That it has systematically broken civil rights laws by discriminating on the basis of race has been established by none other than the Supreme Court in the recent case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in which the court ruled that Harvard broke the law in using racial categories to make admissions decisions. While the Court didn’t rule that Harvard should be punished for lying to the US government in order to get federal subsidies, a corollary to the findings is that it did certify that it followed civil rights laws under pretenses.
As egregious as it is that Harvard, for decades, broke civil rights laws, the current controversy makes clear that Harvard’s commitment to racial and religious discrimination goes far beyond mere admissions fraud.
It actively encourages assaults on students by rewarding students who harass and even assault others based on their religion and ideology.
In the wake of the deadly shooting at a Jewish event in D.C., it’s time to confront the consequences of allowing Jew-hatred to fester—on campus and beyond.
On October 18, 2023, Israeli student Yoav Segev was surrounded and harassed on @Harvard‘s campus by fellow students… pic.twitter.com/hlfX9pPRaQ
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) May 22, 2025
You no doubt remember the case where two graduate students–one of them the editor of the Harvard Law Review, and the other a Harvard Divinity student who was also a proctor appointed by Harvard to advise first-year students– assaulted a Jewish business school student and prevented him from crossing the campus. It was caught on video and became viral on the internet.
Ibrahim Bharmal was a Harvard Law School student and an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He was also a law-school teaching fellow in a civil procedure class. Elom Tettey-Tamaklo was a student at Harvard Divinity School. He was also a residential Harvard proctor, someone who advised first-year Harvard College students and lived in their dorm.
The Boston police charged both of those students, but Harvard engaged in a year-long delaying tactic that stymied the Boston police. The Free Press has a good article on the details of the case.
An investigation by The Free Press into the October 18 confrontation caught on video and the resulting criminal case reveals that Harvard and its police department played a very significant role in delaying the case and thereby influencing its course and outcome. In doing so, Harvard and its police department, whose chief resigned this month in the wake of a nearly unanimous no-confidence vote against him, worked at cross-purposes with the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney’s office—and with the pursuit of justice itself.
None of this might even have been an issue if Harvard had dealt with the incident immediately and decisively.
Because the incident at Harvard happened on campus, the Harvard police were in charge of the investigation. That investigation, especially because the evidence was on video, should have been completed within weeks, and the case probably should have taken one to two months at most, according to current and former prosecutors who spoke to The Free Press.
Instead, Suffolk County prosecutors were stymied by a lack of cooperation from the Harvard police, who wouldn’t help them identify three additional people who were shown on video menacing Segev.
Suffolk County assistant district attorney Ursula Knight told the court last fall that there were “additional individuals who had been identified to the Harvard police department. They, of course, were expected to investigate those individuals, but they have essentially refused to do that work, which is, as you might imagine, a surprise to the Commonwealth.” Knight also said that “we have made several requests to them to look into this information. And they have been unwilling to follow up.”
It’s not at all striking that the assault happened–much worse has been done on college campuses. But Harvard’s response has gone far beyond shielding their students from the consequences of their actions. Both students have been greatly rewarded by the university, with praise and prestige being heaped upon them by the university itself, and Bharmal was rewarded with a $65,000 fellowship at the same time he was performing community service in a court-ordered pre-trial diversion program.
Full article here 👇https://t.co/xiRoHNL7p6
— Yehuda Teitelbaum (@chalavyishmael) February 16, 2025
In the normal course of events, you would have expected that Harvard would have gone out of its way to discourage assaults on its students. And you can rest assured that if Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo had been wearing white hoods and harassing black students instead of waving keffiyahs and screaming “shame” at a Jew, they would have been immediately expelled.
This is the Harvard Law admissions blog front page — featuring Ibrahim Bharmal, one of the two students who was charged with assaulting a Jewish student at Harvard in October 2023. This is the third positive profile of him on a Harvard website in the past month (see replies). pic.twitter.com/LQNcoZxE47
— Ben B@dejo (@BenTelAviv) May 9, 2025
Instead, Harvard Law writes glowing profiles of Bharmal and features him in its recruitment. Elom Tettey-Tamaklo is being rewarded with the prestigious Class Marshal honor for his graduation.
In other words, both are being held up as examples of civic virtue. (Tettey-Tamaklo, by the way, has worked at the UNRWA, the UN, and his LinkedIn shows that he has been a “conflict resolution” trainer at…The US Institute of Peace, of all things. This is our technocratic class in a nutshell).
BREAKING:
There are two Harvard students who physically accosted a Jewish classmate on campus.
The first assailant was rewarded a $65,000 by Harvard Law School fellowship to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
As of this week, the second assailant was… pic.twitter.com/v8ks3QBMaO
— Shabbos Kestenbaum (@ShabbosK) May 25, 2025
There is nothing new about the federal government denying benefits to institutions that discriminate based on race, religion, or other “protected” characteristics. It is the law.
In other words, the First Amendment argument is a distraction, thrown out there to muddy the waters and provide a sheen of respectability–and it only works because the members of the cultural elite prefer Harvard to Trump, no matter who has the better argument. It is about class loyalty, not morality or the law.
Students at Harvard are seen as part of the club and, short of being conservative activists, can do no wrong. Trump is a traitor to his class, on the side of the plebs, so he can do no right.
Harvard sees this battle as an existential threat, and it could very well be. As wealthy as it is, that $60 billion endowment will evaporate quickly if it really does lose its $9 billion/year in federal funding, and it could bleed students and faculty long before then.
But the Trump administration has made clear that it is not committed to destroying Harvard, nor punishing them for a long history of lawbreaking. Their only demand is that they quit breaking the law and help Homeland Security identify students who broke the terms of their visas.
Will Harvard do it? It’s doubtful. Impunity is built into their culture and their history, and their network extends to the highest positions in the country and the world. Giving in to Trump would be a massive blow to their prestige, which is the currency that is elevated above all others in academia.
It is also the currency in which they paid these students whose assaults on a Jew for his religious identity. They deserve everything they get.
