Harvard's elitism makes it a soft target for Trump's attacks

Globe and Mail

28-05-2025

Its football team faced Oregon in the 1920 Rose Bowl football game. It competes with Yale, Princeton, and Stanford for America's top students. It has fought with city planners over its aggressive expansion into nearby Brighton, Massachusetts.
But Harvard – the oldest and richest university in the United States, alma mater to eight presidents and almost half the Supreme Court – has never faced an opponent like Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump has pilloried the Massachusetts institution as a shelter of antisemitism. His administration has charged it with being 'hostile to American values.' He has cut its federal funding. He is moving to prohibit it from enrolling foreign students. On Tuesday morning, he ordered the government to cancel the final US$100-million in grants. He's considering directing Harvard's funds to technical and vocational colleges.
'Going forward,' the administration said in a letter to nine federal agencies, 'we also encourage your agency to seek alternative vendors for future services where you had previously considered Harvard.'
The American educational establishment has rallied around Harvard, giving the Cambridge behemoth strong support from a group that recognizes that as Harvard goes, they soon will follow – but that also often seethes in resentment toward a university that has an endowment four times the size of the annual budget of the city of Toronto.
For all his colourful excesses, even the many Harvard skeptics, critics and green-eyed wannabes acknowledge that Mr. Trump has a special gift for identifying juicy targets for his rage.
And there is no juicier target in the 50 states than Harvard. For generations, it was said that you could always tell a Harvard man – but you couldn't tell him much. Now fully merged with its historical female counterpart, Radcliffe College, the same often is said about Harvard women.
No one disputes the elite profile of Harvard undergraduates, its graduate schools and its garlanded medical, law and business schools. The acceptance rate for its current freshman class was 3.59 per cent. Among the members of the class of 1976 – which will mark its 50th reunion next spring – are John G. Roberts Jr., chief justice of the United States; Yo Yo Ma, the celebrated cellist; and Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times.
Its putative rival, Dartmouth College's 1976 graduating class included linebacker Reggie Williams, who played in two Super Bowls, and baseballer Jim Beattie, who pitched in the World Series.
Trump administration moves to cut $100-million in federal contracts with Harvard
'Panic and confusion' for Canadians at Harvard after Trump bans foreign students
Indeed, as a bastion of elitism, Harvard has no peer – not in its Cambridge neighbour the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nor in the seven other Ivy League institutions. That very elite status is exactly what attracted Mr. Trump for his latest target of opprobrium.
The President is not the first to focus his ire on Harvard.
Founding father Benjamin Franklin criticized colonial parents for allowing their 'blockhead' offspring to attend Harvard without the sufficient capacity to master even its extremely modest demands. He thought that those parents were more interested in social advancement than intellectual achievement, for 'most of them consulted their own purses instead of their children's capacities.'
The great American novelist Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, played the anti-elitist card when he said, 'a whale ship was my Yale and Harvard.' For generations, Dartmouth students have sung a beer-drinking song that spoke of teaching a child to yell ''to hell with Harvard,' like his daddy used to do.'
Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded a Harvard man (John F. Kennedy) as president, said he would never get sufficient credit for his foreign policy, 'no matter how successful it is, because I didn't go to Harvard.'
Three Canadian prime ministers – William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Mark Carney – have Harvard degrees. But with a Harvard PhD and a post at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, former Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff can testify to how the Harvard tie can be a disadvantage in popular politics.
Harvard infiltrated – or in the Trump way of thinking, infected – the American presidency almost from the start, with John Adams, class of 1755, becoming the second American president. The most recent is Barack Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991. He appointed Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School, to the Supreme Court in 2010.
Five dozen members of the elite Cabot and Lowell families went to Harvard in the century, beginning in 1849. One member of those clans, Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, said the combination of the death by assassination of President James Garfield and the defeat of the Harvard football team ruined her weekend.
Harvard graduates like to tell the story of how Franklin D. Roosevelt – class of 1903 and collector of Harvard graduates in his second 'brain trust': Benjamin Cohen, Felix Frankfurter and Thomas Corcoran – brandished the Harvard alumni directory and said something along the lines of 'if a man's in there, he's fit to join the administration,' adding, 'If he's not, who is he anyway?'
In truth the remark was made by Edmund Quincy, the son of a Harvard president.
But the point stands and might even be acknowledged by some of Harvard's greatest contemporary antagonists: Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
That elitist colouration makes Harvard especially vulnerable to the President's attacks. Even some academic institutions would want to take Harvard down a peg. Stroll around Centre College (current enrolment 1,350) in Danville, Kentucky, and you will see the legend 'C6-H0' plastered around its leafy campus. It commemorates Centre's 6-0 upset of the mighty football team from Harvard (enrolment 21,258). The game was played 103 years ago.
For seven seasons Jake Crouthamel, Dartmouth's football coach, stood before his forces and yelled the same question each day before his Big Green team faced the Harvard Crimson. 'Do you hate them?' he asked.
They answered with a resounding 'yes.' That's exactly the answer Mr. Trump would give today.