Ah, the poor little rich people at Harvard.
At one of our nation’s most elite institutions (unless you’re a Kennedy, then it’s a safety school if Stanford rejects you), President Donald Trump’s Department of Education had a few simple requests. While the list was detailed so as to eliminate loopholes, the gist was basically this: Stop hating Jews and whites, and stop students who hate Jews and whites from harassing them.
This would include transparency procedures so that notorious student groups and departments which inculcated and incubated anti-Semitism can be subject to transparent external monitoring, and so that DEI programs at the university can be dismantled. In addition, admissions preferences based on race or identity had to be thrown out the window.
Harvard wouldn’t do this, either assuming the Trump administration would blink or that the school would win in court. The Trump administration has proved remarkably adept at this staring contest and while the case will no doubt work its way through the court system, I do not remember private universities receiving federal money being a constitutionally guaranteed right, particularly when said private university has an endowment worth tens of billions of dollars.
That being said, the school has already lost $2.2 billion in grants, and the administration is considering revoking the institution’s tax-exempt status. So, naturally, the university is recons… ahaha, no, they’re just taking pay cuts because hating Jews and whites is more important than educational excellence.
Harvard University President Alan Garber will voluntarily cede 25 percent of his salary for the 2025-26 school year, according to a Fox News report earlier this week.
The outlet also noted that a “Harvard University spokesperson told Fox News about the pay cut, adding that other leaders across the institution are making their own voluntary contributions, given the significant challenges the school faces.”
No merit pay increases will be given to staff during fiscal year 2026, as well, and capital projects and other spending deemed “non-essential” will be put on hold.
This comes after a hiring pause in March and a request for “schools and administrative units to scrutinize discretionary and non-salary spending, reassess the scope and timing of capital renewal projects, and conduct a rigorous review of any new multi-year commitments,” per the spokesperson.
Now that the grants have been suspended, should Harvard’s endowment be taxed?
Now, let’s leave aside the fact that we were giving over $2 billion in taxpayer money to an institution where non-essential capital projects and “discretionary and non-salary spending” could tighten the belt enough where tens of billions in endowment cash can’t. Let’s also leave alone the fact that, while Garber’s exact salary isn’t known, the Harvard Crimson has reported past presidents of the university have taken $1 million salaries, leaving him with a salary at least in the high six figures.
First, if you’re doing this so you can continue hating Jews and whites, why not just zero out your salary? I mean, I know you have bills to pay, but this is apparently some sort of academic freedom hill that the university has decided to die on — at least until a friendly administration takes the White House. (If that doesn’t happen in 2028 — if this act of #Resistance2.0 lasts that long, that is — watch this quietly change in a hurry.)
Fine, die on that hill — but don’t take money for it. Other CEOs, in times of dire crisis, have taken that step. In many of those cases, they weren’t the ones who caused the issue in the first place. Garber, I’m sure, is not a poor man — and while $250,000 is a lot to any individual not running, say, Oracle, it’s still a small price to pay if this really is about a life-or-death principle of academic freedom.
Of course, it isn’t, which brings us to the second possibility: Why not just, like, stop hating Jews and whites?
There is no educational imperative for DEI leviathans or “From the River to the Sea” radicals at America’s elite institutions. They serve no purpose other than setting the ideological tone, not the intellectual standards, of a school. We are not bettered by them.
The ivory towers have been mostly insulated from political interference because, despite their leftward slant, they are supposed to produce the best and the brightest — and while that mission hasn’t always been an unalloyed success story, it has worked well enough that conservatives have grumbled but gone along. William F. Buckley may have started the American conservative movement by writing “God and Man at Yale” as a criticism of the intellectual backsliding of his alma mater, but we must remember that Yale and schools like it produced William F. Buckley and many other luminaries.
The radicalization of the ivory towers, however, has rendered this devil’s bargain largely moot. Harvard is now teaching incoming students remedial math because its admissions standards reflect not excellence, but the ideological and identitarian make-up of what the academic left wants the elite to be. It isn’t scholastics so much as social engineering.
Harvard was merely asked to end the most pernicious aspects of it. It refused. The poor little rich university now must go without because it simply couldn’t stop institutionally hating people.
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