Ilya Shapiro

1. Elite universities deserve all the opprobrium they’ve been getting. They’ve discriminated on the basis of race, required loyalty oaths/diversity statements, allowed agitators to disrupt classes, block access, and wage mass campaigns of intimidation and harassment. 

2. The liberal left hand knew what the illiberal far-left hand was doing—the explosion in DEI that spawned everything from intellectual corruption and indoctrination to antisemitism and cancel culture—but was cowed into placating it.

3. Harvard, besides being the biggest global brand in US higher ed, is at the epicenter of this crisis. For example, FIRE named it the worst school in the country for free speech the last two years. Other schools may be worse on other measures, but Harvard is a fitting lightning rod for popular displeasure.

4. Still, the Trump administration’s blunderbuss tactics threaten its reformist goal, with which I’m entirely sympathetic. Left-wing intolerance and perfidy have undermined universities’ core mission of open inquiry and truth-seeking, but executive-branch overreach and impatience with legal niceties have allowed Harvard grandees to don the mantle of academic freedom and educrats to dig in their heels.

5. The exec branch is fully justified in launching investigations of dozens of schools for violating civil rights: allowing antisemitism to flourish, using racial preferences in defiance of SCOTUS, subverting student rights to free speech/due process, a host of other pernicious practices.

6. Violations of that kind do imperil all fed funds, including grants to scientific/medical researchers who may want nothing to do with woke admins, because there’s no germaneness or even proportionality requirement in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and other relevant laws.

7. For more, read my latest post at Shapiro's Gavel:
https://ilyashapiro.substack.com/p/take-down-harvardbut-do-it-the-right