Donald Trump is upping his threats to Harvard, and I am okay with that as long as he stays within the law in doing so.
Trump’s first shot across the bow came when he froze some funding for Harvard, rightly accusing them of violating civil rights laws. The accusation itself is clearly true–as I wrote yesterday, Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force outlines a pattern of violations that are sweeping in scope and longstanding. Every dollar given to Harvard in recent years has been done so in violation of federal law, and if Trump really wanted to hurt them, he could bankrupt them with fines.
Now, Trump is threatening to take away their status as a nonprofit institution, which would make them subject to enormous tax liabilities.
Are you sure? https://t.co/qDvrZAu1QY
— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) May 2, 2025
No doubt the intelligentsia will go into full freakout mode–Harvard IS the establishment concentrated into a few acres in Boston–but the pattern of lawbreaking is so pervasive and so easy to prove using evidence conveniently provided by a 300-page report that, legally speaking, it should be a no-brainer to win a case stripping Harvard’s nonprofit status.
Despite my distaste for Harvard University’s brand of progressive politics and disappointment in its leaders’ lack of respect for First Amendment values and intellectual diversity, I expected to disagree with the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw $2 billion in funding for the school and threat to remove its nonprofit status. When I started reporting for this column, I thought this was a direct threat to the First Amendment. That’s what the folks at The Wall Street Journal editorial page found. But I am not so sure anymore. After I talked to several lawyers, I found that the case for Trump’s approach is better than I thought. It all goes back to 1983 and an 8-1 Supreme Court decision called Bob Jones University v. the United States. Back then, the Christian university didn’t allow interracial dating, which it considered a violation of biblical values. The IRS decided that since the United States was firmly opposed to racial discrimination as “public policy,” the school should lose its nonprofit status. The Supremes overwhelmingly agreed.
Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/david-mastio/article304457596.html#storylink=cpy
Assuming that when the elite say “nobody is above the law,” they mean it. They don’t, of course, because they will point out that they are not included in the category of “nobodies.”
That’s blatantly illegal.
Every American who cares about free speech should find this revolting. Is this a power we want to give presidents? https://t.co/OUAP0O14n6
— David French (@DavidAFrench) May 2, 2025
My one caution to Trump should be obvious: follow the law scrupulously when stripping Harvard of its status. Cross every T and dot every I, both because you can’t make the case that Harvard broke the law without ensuring that the government follows it, and because Harvard will have the best lawyers on Earth and a friendly judiciary to back them up.
But the case itself would be solid.
Another example of Harvard’s indifference to civil rights laws popped up yesterday. You may recall that at the height of Harvard’s anti-Israel protests, a Harvard Law student assaulted Jewish students as they walked across campus. He was arrested for doing so and is currently in a diversion program to avoid prosecution for an obvious crime caught on campus.
Harvard isn’t responsible for his behavior, but he not only violated the law, but he also violated campus rules, and his motives were indisputably antisemitic. This is a violation of civil rights laws, which Harvard is bound by its contractual relations with the government and incompatible with its mission as an educational nonprofit.
He has been rewarded, not punished for his actions.
Harvard Law Review Awards $65k Fellowship to Student Charged in Assault of Israeli Classmate: Reporthttps://t.co/fjOiR3wX3l
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 1, 2025
As the Presidential Commission prominently gave a mea culpa for antisemitic and other racist acts, calling for massive reforms at the campus, the Law School spat in the face of Harvard’s president, all fair-minded people, and the federal government by handing over a plum fellowship award to this lawbreaking antisemite who attacked fellow Harvard students and created an atmosphere of fear for Jewish students.
They endorsed his behavior.
The Harvard Law Review is awarding a $65,000 fellowship meant to serve “the public interest” to Ibrahim Bharmal, the Harvard Law School student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate, according to a new report.
Bharmal is one of this year’s recipients of the Harvard Law Review Fellowship, Ira Stoll of The Editors reported. The program supports “recent Harvard Law School graduates”—Bharmal is set to graduate this month—with “a demonstrated interest in serving the public interest through their work and scholarship.” It comes with a $65,000 stipend that funds each fellow’s work “in a public-interest related role at a government agency or nonprofit organization.” For Bharmal, that work will come at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Los Angeles office, according to Stoll.
Harvard Law’s public position–backed, apparently, by Harvard’s president, who is fighting against Trump–is that promoting antisemitic assaults on their own campus is in the public interest.
That isn’t debatable. It’s wrong and against federal laws.
In its April 11 letter to Harvard outlining the policy demands necessary to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government,” the Trump administration called on the Ivy League institution to permanently expel “the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student,” a reference to Bharmal and his fellow defendant, divinity school graduate student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo.
On that day, in 2023, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were shown shoving and accosting their Israeli classmate in a video first reported by the Free Beacon. Keffiyeh-clad individuals, who assembled outside of the business school as part of a “die-in” protest condemning Israel’s days-old retaliatory war on Hamas, surrounded the Israeli student, as he attempted to walk through the crowd. They repeatedly shouted “SHAME!”
Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged with misdemeanor assault months later, in May 2024, one year before their expected graduation dates. As their assault case progressed, both students remained in good standing with Harvard, which did not say whether it would award them degrees if they were convicted or if their proceedings remained active.
Both Harvard Law School and the Harvard Law Review, meanwhile, stood by Bharmal throughout his court appearances.
Harvard may believe that committing assault is an expression of academic freedom; even the Biden administration may have implicitly endorsed that policy, but it is clearly contrary to federal law.
I don’t deny that, in principle, the country is better off with institutions of higher education that give wide latitude to scholars who get to enjoy the benefits of academic freedom, even if that freedom entails their holding views many of us find disturbing or disgusting. But academic freedom does not include a systemic encouragement of overt acts of discrimination or outright approval of lawbreaking.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that the federal government is obligated to fund such institutions.
Harvard long ago forfeited its right to public support. That, to me, is a sad thing. Not that I believe the government should pour billions into higher ed–doing so has made them worse, overall, rather than better–but that Harvard and so many prestigious institutions have become hotbeds of revolution and revolutionary violence is indicative of a decline in our elite class.
I see no possibility that these schools will reform on their own. They are cesspools of hatred, whose only connection to the nation is a demand that we fund their efforts to destroy Western culture.
We should decline their request.
