5 days ago
Trump's ‘Nihilistic' Crusade Against Harvard Is About Much More Than Harvard
Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, is not a left-wing academic. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and the editor-at-large of Compact, a heterodox online magazine that leans to the right.
In the case of Trump v. Harvard, Conti believes that the university, 'is close to being an appendage of the Democratic Party.' Harvard and units within it, Conti wrote in Compact, have
issued numerous public statements during the Great Awokening that aligned the organization with left-wing causes (a practice which Harvard has since ended). Self-censorship is generally prevalent on campuses across the nation, but is much higher among conservatives, who rightly sense that the university is largely hostile to their views.
Despite Conti's indisputably conservative credentials, he has come to believe that the Trump administration's approach to higher education — and toward Harvard in particular — not only violates due process but threatens to destroy the reputation of the United States as an international center of learning.
'It now looks like the administration has decided,' Conti wrote in a more recent essay in Compact, 'A Dangerous Turn in Trump's War on Universities,' 'that it will simply bludgeon Harvard, inflicting a lot of senseless damage until the latter makes a 'deal' of some sort.'
As a consequence, Conti continued, 'it is now within the realm of possibility that a fate I never thought I would see may come about: an end to American pre-eminence in science and scholarship. Such a result would be a tragedy not only for scholars, but for all patriotic Americans.'
In an email, Conti described the revocation of Harvard's certification to participate in the Student and Visitor Exchange Visitor program as a 'capricious and illiberal action, which one might fairly say borders on the nihilistic.'
I asked Conti whether the administration wants to bankrupt Harvard and other Ivy League schools as a demonstration of conservative muscle.
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