Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Yahoo

07-05-2025

The intensely hostile letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to the leadership of Harvard yesterday has a lot going on. But the most notable thing about it is what it leaves out.
To hear McMahon tell it, Harvard is a university on the verge of ruin. (I say McMahon because her signature is at the bottom of the letter, but portions of the document are written in such a distinctive idiolect—'Why is there so much HATE?' the letter asks; it signs off with 'Thank you for your attention to this matter!'—that one detects the spirit of a certain uncredited co-author.) She accuses it of admitting students who are contemptuous of America, chastises it for hiring the former blue-city mayors Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot to teach leadership ('like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation'), questions the necessity of its remedial-math program ('Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics?'), and accuses its board chair, Penny Pritzker ('a Democrat operative'), of driving the university to financial ruin, among many other complaints. The upshot is that Harvard should not bother to apply for any new federal funding, because, McMahon declares, 'today's letter marks the end of new grants for the University.'
What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration's ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left's highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.
Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism ('the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik'), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.
The effort started with Columbia University. In early March, the administration canceled $400 million in federal funding for the university. This was framed explicitly as punishment for Columbia's failure to adequately address anti-Semitism on campus. The administration then issued a set of demands as preconditions for Columbia to get that funding back. These included giving the university president power over all disciplinary matters and placing the Middle Eastern–studies department under the control of a different university body. Columbia soon announced that it would make a list of changes that closely resembled what the administration had asked for. McMahon praised the changes and said that Columbia was on the 'right track' to get its money back, though the government has still not restored the funding.
Having successfully extracted concessions from Columbia, the government moved on to Harvard. On March 31, the administration said that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard. As with Columbia, it argued that the university had not sufficiently combatted anti-Semitism on its campus. Harvard then began negotiations with the federal government. But on April 11, the administration sent Harvard a list of far-reaching changes that the university would have to make to continue to receive federal funding. These included screening international students for disloyalty to the United States and allowing an external body to audit faculty viewpoints to ensure diversity.
[Rose Horowitch: Endowments are next]
This was too much for Harvard. 'Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,' the university's lawyers wrote in a letter to administration officials. The university sued the Trump administration, arguing that the government had violated Harvard's First Amendment rights and failed to follow the procedures to revoke federal grants. The government retaliated. It immediately froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, announced that it would consider revoking Harvard's nonprofit tax-exempt status, and threatened the university's ability to enroll international students. Even as the war escalated, the putative rationale remained the same. Trump 'wants them to come to the table and change things,' McMahon told Fox News. 'It's a civil-rights issue on campus relative to the anti-Semitism.' McMahon never explained how cutting funding for biomedical research would help address anti-Semitism on campus. But the administration at least gestured in that direction.
No longer. The offenses enumerated in the McMahon letter are a disconnected grab bag of grievances. The closest thing to a legal theory for denying Harvard future grant funding is the accusation that the school has violated the Supreme Court's ruling striking down race-based affirmative action. But revoking an institution's funding under federal nondiscrimination law requires following a multistep process that takes months, Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, told me. The government has to investigate a complaint and prove that the university will not take any steps to resolve the discrimination. Without showing that Harvard has violated nondiscrimination law—as opposed to merely asserting it, without evidence, in a rambling letter—the government can't refuse to award it grants. 'They went from step one to step five or six in a week,' Black said. 'There's no 'We don't like you' authority in the federal Constitution or in statutory law. In fact, quite the opposite: You're precluded from that.'
Harvard's leaders have, under duress, acknowledged that the institution needs to make changes. Last week, the university released reports detailing incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias and a pervasive sense of non-belonging among Jewish students. It has announced that it will not support affinity-group graduation celebrations and that leaders will no longer make statements on political issues that don't affect the university's core function. 'We were faced with a set of demands that addressed some problems that I and others recognized as real problems,' Harvard President Alan Garber told The Wall Street Journal. 'But the means of addressing those problems is what was so objectionable.' The fact that the university is willing to make changes strengthens its legal case challenging the cancellation of funding. Several legal experts have predicted that the university will prevail in court.
In a 2021 speech titled 'The Universities Are the Enemy,' then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, 'make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.' The solution, Vance said, was to 'honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' We've been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty.
Article originally published at The Atlantic