Latest news with #TheUniversitiesAretheEnemy
Business Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- Business Times
A weaker Harvard is a weaker America
IMAGINE if China or Russia tried to destroy a US asset that generates tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, plays a major role in American leadership in science and technology, and turbocharges our prestige and soft power. We'd expect our government to go to war to defend it. But in attacking Harvard University, that's exactly the kind of damage the Trump administration is trying to do. Despite the school's failures and flaws, it remains a vital national asset – and the administration's actions are far more dangerous to America than they are to Harvard. When you tour the UK's Cambridge University, your guide will show you empty niches containing stone fragments. They're the remnants of statues smashed by Puritan fanatics during the English Civil War. But Cambridge survived and flourished. Resilient Universities are enormously resilient and count time in centuries, not electoral cycles. Long after the Trump administration is gone, there will still be a Harvard. But an America deprived of everything Harvard contributes will be far poorer and weaker. I have a stake in this battle: I spent seven years on the faculty at Harvard Business School and still teach in the Harvard Kennedy School's Senior Executive Fellows programme. But I'm also the first to agree with colleagues who say the university has fallen short of its ideals. Its own reports on anti-semitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus contain devastating revelations about the school's inability to maintain an orderly and safe learning environment for everyone. Harvard should better protect its students – even, when necessary, from each other. It must guarantee freedom of speech on campus. And it should find ways to have more diverse political representation among both students and faculty. But the Trump administration isn't trying to fix Harvard. It's trying to control it via blatantly illegal tactics. Authoritarians have always feared universities because of their role as centres of dissent. It's not an accident that (Ohio State and Yale University graduate) JD Vance gave a speech titled The Universities Are the Enemy in 2021. If President Donald Trump breaks America's oldest and wealthiest school, no other university and few institutions of any kind will dare stand against him. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up The administration's ostensible concern about anti-semitism is so obviously a pretext that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon's letter declaring Harvard ineligible for federal funding never mentions it, even as it attacks the school for giving fellowships to Democratic politicians. Three of the last four Harvard presidents were Jewish (including the current one), as is Penny Pritzker, chair of the Harvard Corporation, the ultimate authority over the university. This makes it an odd target for those whose primary concern is anti-semitism. And an administration sincerely concerned about the issue might start by not hiring multiple senior staffers with close ties to anti-semitic extremists. Government control would destroy what makes Harvard – and any other school – valuable in the first place. Universities play a disproportionate role in producing revolutionary ideas because they embrace freedom of thought and dissent. Taking orders from politicians is antithetical to that spirit. Crippling Harvard, and along with it, American higher education, would be a grievous blow to the US. The university's contributions to American history and wealth are difficult to overstate. It has produced eight presidents and countless members of Congress, governors, Supreme Court justices, CEOs and entrepreneurs, along with more Medal of Honour recipients than any school except West Point and the Naval Academy. Over the last 20 years, Harvard founders have averaged nine unicorns – startups valued at more than US$1 billion – every year. That's first among all world universities. And in just the last five years, companies founded by Harvard alums have gone public with a combined value of US$282 billion. (I'll also note that a quarter of all unicorn startups have a founder who came to the US as a foreign student – exactly the population Trump is targeting at Harvard and other schools). Both the US economy and the country's international pre-eminence depend on primacy in science and technology. That leadership is under threat as never before: American universities, long leaders in basic and groundbreaking research, are falling behind. When Nature ranked the top 10 research universities in the world in 2023, eight were in China. Well, most of them are falling behind; Harvard was No 1. If you really believe in America first, attacking it is the last thing you'd do. Global reputation Then there's the university's global reputation, which functions as an emissary of American excellence. I once spent time as visiting faculty at Tsinghua University, China's MIT. While I was there, the dean would routinely bring visiting dignitaries to my office so he could show off the Harvard professor teaching at Tsinghua. (I used to joke that I expected them to toss me peanuts like an elephant at the zoo.) The school is also a powerful instrument for the propagation of US values. In the last 25 years, the leaders of countries from Canada to Taiwan have studied at Harvard. The next generation will look similar: The future Queen of Belgium is a current Harvard student, and the daughter of China's President Xi is an alumna. The global elite, in other words, pays for the privilege of sending their children to Harvard to experience the best of American life and be indoctrinated with American values. The attack on Harvard is really an attack on America. Harvard, like every old and important institution, including our nation, is far from perfect. But like America, Harvard is worth fighting for. BLOOMBERG
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts
In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled 'The Universities Are the Enemy.' It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large. Comparing universities to the sci-fi totalitarianism of 'The Matrix,' in which parasitic machines have seized control of reality itself, he said, 'So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities.' Why, he asked, have conservatives consented to such intellectual tyranny? Vance, then a Senate candidate, described being at a donor event and talking to a supporter about the absurdity of encouraging kids to take on debt to go to colleges that will brainwash them. The supporter asked, 'What's the alternative? I don't want my kid to become an HVAC specialist,' installing and repairing heating and air-conditioning systems. With that attitude, said Vance, 'we're going to continue to empower the colleges and the universities that make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.' Put aside, for a moment, the hypocrisy of this message coming from a man catapulted into the highest strata of American society by Yale Law School. The striking thing about Vance's speech was its deep hostility to the entire academic enterprise, not just the so-called woke parts. He wasn't talking about making more room for right-wing ideas in universities or even dreaming of taking them over. He wanted to destroy it all. And now he's part of a government taking steps to do just that. I've written about Donald Trump's plan to crush the academic left, but it increasingly looks as though he and his allies are targeting academia more broadly, including the hard sciences that have long enjoyed bipartisan support. 'I think the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities however possible,' Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America, a public policy think tank, told me. 'It's not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It's just a desire to inflict pain.' This is the context for the Trump administration's attempt, currently being challenged in court, to slash research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The details sound technical and very boring: The new policy would limit reimbursements for schools' overhead expenses to 15 percent of grants' value, instead of the 50 to 70 percent that universities often receive now. But if this goes into effect, the damage will be tremendous. As H. Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, wrote, for every dollar spent on academic research, roughly another dollar is needed for lab equipment, support staff and systems for managing grants. Right now, the government funds a big chunk of these indirect costs, with universities picking up the remainder. If the government reduces its contribution to 15 percent, universities could try to close the gap by raising tuition and eliminating departments, but it wouldn't be enough. Crucial research projects, including those investigating cures for devastating diseases, would have to be scaled back or jettisoned altogether. These cuts could hit some Trump-voting states particularly hard. In Alabama, North Carolina and others, universities are among the biggest employers, which is why some Republican senators are at least gingerly objecting to the new reimbursement rules. But that's only one reason the administration's full-spectrum war on academia defies rational self-interest. The post-World War II system of government-funded research universities has fueled American scientific and technological dominance, but our continued pre-eminence is in no way assured. China, after all, continues to invest strongly in its universities. 'Part of our decline as a culture and economy would be our disinvestment in higher education,' said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. 'Maybe we'll just invest in World Wrestling, but I don't think that's going to mean that other countries and other cultures won't continue to invest in the capacity of their citizens to learn in such a way as to create new modes of living, new modes of fighting disease, new modes of creating companies.' To torch America's advantage in these realms seems like madness. But there's a lot of madness in the air these days. In December, Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute published an article about how Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive whom Trump nominated to be secretary of education, could give the 'college cartel' the 'body slamming they deserve.' One of the first items on Eden's list was capping the reimbursement of indirect research costs at 15 percent, exactly as the Trump team is trying to do. From there, Eden proposed that McMahon 'should simply destroy Columbia University' — home, among other things, to one of the best medical schools in America — as a warning to other schools about the price of tolerating anti-Israel protest. Ultimately, however much some in the Trump administration want to gut American universities, Carey doesn't think they'll fully succeed. These are deeply rooted institutions, some older than the Republic itself, many with powerful constituencies. After four years of Trump, he said, 'they'll still be there, but they certainly could be weakened. The quality of their work could certainly be diminished in ways that will take time to recover from.' Their weakness could be an opportunity for others. Eden suggested that Trump take steps to make it easier to start schools like the anti-woke University of Austin, 'and even newer ones that no one has dreamed up yet. Musk University?' But why stop there? Trump University could be due for a comeback.
