Harvard’s Latest Public Relations Challenge

Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on April 16, 2025. Learner Liu/The Epoch Times

Commentary

Here we go again. Harvard is back in the news for at least the fourth time in the past couple of years, and once again its reputation is taking some serious “dings.”

In the summer of 2023, the Supreme Court decided in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that Harvard’s admissions policy was racially discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional. Later that year, it came to light that Harvard’s president, its chief “diversity and inclusion” officer, and a renowned professor had committed plagiarism on multiple occasions. Harvard then received more unwelcome negative publicity as encapsulated in this headline: “Harvard donations plunge 15% as alumni cut ties over weak response to campus antisemitism.”

Now, Harvard is once again in the media spotlight in an unfavorable way. The Trump administration is in the process of blocking or canceling more than $2 billion of federal grants to the university, and President Donald Trump has threatened Harvard with loss of its tax-exempt status if it doesn’t make certain reforms. What Trump has demanded publicly has been for Harvard to end all DEI programs, policies, and practices, that it promote viewpoint diversity, and that it implement merit-based hiring.

Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber, has publicly said the university has no intention of complying with the Trump administration’s demands. I have sympathy with Garber’s stance that a president shouldn’t have the power to issue edicts dictating how a school should be run.

I also agree (as do millions of other Americans) with Trump that un-American practices, such as DEI’s race-quota obsessions, the suppression of certain (mainly conservative and libertarian) viewpoints, and hiring for ideological reasons and not on the basis of merit, are abhorrent. But for a president to have the power to exercise control over universities is too close to Big Brother for comfort. Furthermore, what is to keep the next president from reversing Trump’s policies? In a free society, the government shouldn’t be telling educational institutions how to operate any more than it should dictate what businesses produce, how citizens should worship, or what opinions they are supposed to have.

At first glance, Garber’s defiance might seem like a principled stand for independence, but it isn’t. Garber’s stance is: Get off our backs, but keep the federal money coming to us. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

A truly principled position would be for him to say: “We wish to return to being a truly private institution, self-funding and therefore free from federal subsidies and mandates. As long as we are not breaking any laws, we should be free to run our school as we see fit, even if many members of our society don’t like our policies. So please keep your money and leave us alone.”

That is the policy at the college where I taught, Grove City College (GCC). Because GCC has always refused federal aid, it has retained the freedom to chart its own course without having to kowtow to federal agencies and decrees. The college is unabashedly Christian in a nondenominational sense, and traditionalist and relatively conservative in terms of curriculum, exposing students to Austrian free-market economics and many of the classic books of Western civilization. That is the college’s identity. Harvard should be just as free to shape its own identity in accord with its preferred values. It should be free from federal interference, an independence that can be achieved by ceasing to accept federal financial subsidies.

In the real world (a concept that remains hazy in the ivory tower) money often comes with strings attached. Trump’s instincts here are right on: Harvard is receiving significant support from American taxpayers, and so it shouldn’t have policies that are repugnant to tens of millions of those taxpayers. As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently expressed, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

Harvard counters that without federal grants, scientific research will decline. The problem here, as I wrote a year ago in another commentary about Harvard, is that a scandalously huge amount of scientific research has been politicized and corrupted. The most spectacular unhidden example of scientific corruption is the decades-long alarmist global warming propaganda campaign.

Science is a search for truth, just as religion is. We should no more have government fund science than it should fund religion. Let venture capitalists fund scientific research and profit from successful research efforts. Or let the fabulously wealthy pharmaceutical industry fund medical research and reap the resulting profits.

In practice, government grants to Harvard are not about science—they are subsidies to a university that has woke policies. Legally (but not, I believe, morally) one can make a case that a truly private, i.e., privately funded, Harvard University should be free to implement a woke agenda and practice as much ideological and racial discrimination as is permitted by our civil rights laws.

Yes, Harvard should be free to have policies that millions of American oppose, as long as they aren’t illegal. That is their right. What isn’t their right is to continue to receive taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.