Trump v Harvard: University faces existential battle against an opponent that would have been unimaginable a few years ago

Irish Times

2 days ago

In a plummier era for sports writing – and for
Harvard University
, and for the
United States of America
– the renaissance man
George Plimpton
brought his nine-year-old daughter to see his alma mater play the annual football game against its nemesis, Yale. It was close to Christmas, 1981, and afterwards Plimpton banged out an eccentric, gorgeous (and plummy) piece for Sports Illustrated titled Medora Goes To The Game which was chosen as part of The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. It captured a place in time. Or, rather, out of time.
Plimpton's mission was to try to impress his daughter with a tour through the fabled campus, where he spoke to her about everything from how 'the Boylston professor of Rhetoric was, by tradition, allowed to graze a cow in the yard' to how six former presidents attended there, to the year when a pigeon, perched on the goal line, caused pandemonium and a temporary suspension of the Harvard-Yale enmity.
This week, Harvard finds itself confronting the most serious enmity in its four-century existence.
On Thursday, its 374th annual commencement ceremony took place against the backdrop of what is an existential battle against an opponent that would have been unimaginable a few years ago:
the White House
.
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It was during the speeches in the Tercentenary Theatre that news came through that a Boston judge had
temporarily blocked the department of homeland security from preventing international enrolment to the university
after Harvard's legal team sought an order arguing that: 'With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard's student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission. Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.'
A brief applause broke out. It was a small victory. But will a 'temporary' injunction make much difference? Can elite students from across the globe commit to a campus from which they may be ejected, by the government, at any time? Without the financial input of international students. Harvard's famous $50 billion endowment will quickly shrink.
A year ago, Harvard president Alan Garber was booed at the commencement ceremony after the decision was made to delay the degrees of 13 students involved in a pro-Palestine protest by a year. This week, he was roundly applauded for
not buckling to the pressures and demands of the Trump administration
. Meanwhile, an internal reckoning is going on concerning the charges levelled against it by the administration, including
anti-Semitism running rife on campus
and of extreme wokeness.
In a long editorial, the Harvard Crimson examined attempts to placate the government, settling two anti-Semitism lawsuits, suspending programmes pertaining to Palestine in three academic departments and placing the Palestine Solidarity Committee on probation.
'As its lawsuits prepare to be litigated in court, Harvard faces a monumental task in standing up to a hostile government as the guardian of higher education,' the editorial argued.
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Donald Trump lashes out at Harvard and says he could cut $3bn in funds
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'It cannot defeat the Trump agenda by mirroring its logic.'
Stev
en Pinker
, one of its more celebrated faculty members, wrote a New York Times essay recalling recent incidents of wokeness – the forced resignation of biologist Carole Hooven for stating that a person's sex is biological and binary; the dismissal of legal scholar Ronald Sullivan as the dean of a residential house 'when his legal representation of Harvey Weinstein made students feel 'unsafe''.
'For what it's worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members,' Pinker wrote.
'My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels 'physically unsafe' on campus 'an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day'.'
But Garber has acknowledged a problem with anti-Semitism in Harvard. And the tales of wokeism are grist to the Maga mill. 'Harvard wants to fight: they want to show how smart they are,' president Trump said recently. 'They're getting their ass kicked.'
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'Harvard people' squaring up for battle royale with White House over politics, power and privilege
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At the very least, they are in a ferocious scrap – and show every sign of being up for it.
Towards the end of his essay, Plimpton wanders into his daughter's room while she is out and discovers that she is in the midst of compiling a newspaper of family stories as a Christmas gift, including a brief report on the football game they had attended together. The closing lines read:
'A small story caught my eye on the last page of the paper. The headline read, HARVARD NOT DISCORAGED.
The story underneath, in its entirety, read: 'Harvard is not discoraged.''