Keller: Why Harvard is an attractive political target for President Trump

CBS News

15-04-2025

The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
Harvard University is pushing back hard against
Trump administration demands
for major changes in the way it operates.
But while the new federal policies are surely questionable, there's no question Harvard makes an attractive political target.
The Crimson face an escalating war with Trump.
Freezing $2 billion
worth of federal grants was just the opening salvo, with the president Tuesday posting online: "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."
It's too much even for critics of Harvard's handling of anti-Israel sentiment on campus like former President Larry Summers. "Universities are in need of a great deal of reform and it's come too slowly, but that's not a reason why the government can entirely suspend the law," he says.
But good luck generating broad public sympathy for Harvard and other elite schools the administration is going after.
According to a 2024 Gallup/Lumina Foundation
poll
, only about 10% had no confidence in higher ed a decade ago. Now, about a third of people have no confidence in higher education. And the survey found the percent of people with high confidence in higher ed had plunged by 21 points over less than a decade, with almost a third expressing no confidence at all.
For Harvard, this moment has been brewing for a long time. "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University," conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. famously said more than 60 years ago.
And the contempt it reflects has spread beyond just political conservatives.
"So many Americans see them as out of touch, overpriced, exclusionary, not a place for them," said Courtney Brown of the Lumina Foundation. "That's why when they get targeted, the general public isn't as concerned."
After all, the core philosophy of the MAGA movement is that elites have abused their power and neglected working-class Americans. Harvard and other elite schools have seen their brands tarnished by campus protest and other hot-button issues. What a perfect way for the White House to change the subject from its economic struggles to a war on a central-casting villain