Plumbers and welders can do awful things, too. Let us concede that much at the outset so as to avoid glorifying what Marxists condescendingly call “the proletariat.” We are all sinners.
The sin of pride, however, has a peculiar grip on Western elites and others who truly think themselves good people. Destroy entitlement, therefore, and you go a long way toward destroying wokeness.
Tuesday on his social media platform Truth Social, President Donald Trump suggested that Harvard University, an epicenter of woke entitlement, could lose its tax-exempt status over University President Alan M. Garber’s stated refusal to abandon the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Trump wrote.
In a statement issued on Monday, Garber announced that Harvard would resist federal demands to dismantle DEI and combat anti-Semitism. The Trump administration had placed approximately $9 billion of Harvard’s federal funding under review.
“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,” Garber wrote, per the university’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
Imagine the pure, concentrated sense of entitlement required to accept billions in federal funding while still calling your institution “private.”
In any event, the Trump administration responded by pausing $2.2 billion in grants and another $60 million in contracts.
Is Trump’s fight against these universities justified?
“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” the federal anti-Semitism task force said in a statement of its own.
Meanwhile, Harvard and other universities continue to propagandize students.
For instance, undergraduate Matthew R. Tobin, an editor of the Crimson, opined that the university had not adequately defended DEI.
In fact, in an editorial titled “When They Go Low, We Go DEI,” Tobin offered a very telling definition of that hideous acronym.
“I would define DEI in a similar way to how Jane Fonda described being ‘woke:’ giving a damn about other people,” the editor wrote.
After decades in academia, I still cannot bring myself to harangue undergraduates, for I know the forces arrayed against them.
After all, if you sincerely believed that DEI simply meant caring about people, you would defend it, too.
Perhaps one day Mr. Tobin will recognize that his misguided definition of DEI actually reflects unconscious moral preening. It is the sort of thing people say when they think themselves good. It flatters their pride.
Moreover, only elites and those whom they have propagandized could possibly believe that compassion consists in dividing people into identity groups for the purpose of assigning status and allocating resources.
Indeed, that kind of nonsense could only originate with those who regard their own status and resources as secure. It goes without saying, therefore, that DEI-loving elites never subject themselves to the consequences of their own identity-based preferences.
Trump, of course, knows a winning issue when he sees one. Americans will certainly back the president over an entitled group of Ivy Leaguers.
Thus, Trump has continued to hammer away at Harvard on social media.
“Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges. Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” the president wrote Wednesday morning on Truth Social.
According to NBC News, Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment ranked as by far the largest among U.S. universities in 2024.
In other words, Harvard does not need federal funding of any kind. Apparently, the fact that it receives such funding merely fuels the already gargantuan sense of entitlement that prevails there.
Clearly, therefore, Trump has picked the correct fight: destroy entitlement, and he will help destroy DEI.
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