Trump’s Clumsy Attack on Harvard

The Trump administration’s war on left-wing universities has intensified. This week, the White House froze more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University after the school refused to comply with an extensive list of demands—including hiring a “critical mass” of intellectually diverse faculty in each department and submitting to an audit of its hiring practices.

After decades of racial discrimination in admissions and faculty hiring, the federal government is well within its rights to demand reform. But as Heather Mac Donald argues in a new piece, the administration’s demands may have been too ambitious. “Disentangling the federal government’s academic subsidies from their often-unworthy beneficiaries,” she writes, “is much more difficult than the initial entanglement—especially as traditions around the sacred untouchability of universities have evolved.”

Read her assessment here.

During last year’s anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, student activists held custodians hostage and left staff to clean up swastikas spray-painted on campus. Adding to the irony, the local United Auto Workers graduate student union helped organize the demonstrations—pitting white-collar academic activists against the very blue-collar workers unions are meant to protect.

“Most union members want fair pay, good benefits, and job security,” write Jake Altman and Will Sussman—not the radical campus politics of elite academia.

The late New York Times journalist Richard Bernstein foresaw how ideas like “anti-racism” would come to dominate America’s elite institutions. In his 1994 book Dictatorship of Virtue, he acknowledged the rhetorical appeal of such ideals but warned they would deepen polarization.

He was exactly right. Even then, Daniel Shuchman notes, Bernstein “was especially troubled by university leaders’ lack of courage and their weak commitment to free expression and intellectual diversity.” Read more about Bernstein’s powerful reporting here.

In 2023, California failed to verify the eligibility of thousands of individuals receiving unemployment benefits, resulting in an estimated $198.8 million in potentially improper payments. During the Covid lockdowns, the state paid out $55 billion to people who either didn’t qualify or were outright fraudsters. Meantime, its long-delayed high-speed rail project is running another $7 billion short—on top of initial projections that pegged the total cost at $33 billion.

This outrageous pattern of waste and fraud, Steven Malanga argues, is exactly why California needs its own Department of Government Efficiency.

New York City now requires residents to separate food waste into compost bins—or face new fines.

John Tierney calls composting “the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling.” As he points out, it attracts rats to composting facilities, increases truck traffic, and diverts tax dollars from basic sanitation. It’s also wildly impractical in a city like New York. Strict plumbing regulations have long prevented most buildings from installing garbage disposals—meaning even elderly residents will now have to haul bags of rotting food down to basement recycling bins.

Read more from Tierney here about why composting is a solution in search of a problem.

“Had a Muslim student made the same posts, would he have been interrogated by the school’s tormentors?”

Photo credits: JOSEPH PREZIOSO / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images