6 Reasons Trump Should Nuke Harvard

How's that for a clickbait headline?

No less shocking to me than the Trump administration’s all-out war against Harvard is how little sympathy the university has elicited. Trump’s attack required a minimum of justification relative to the enthusiasm it generated. Jewish donors are happy about the crackdown on Third World, leftist, theater-kid performance art and MAGA understands reflexively that Harvard is a reviled political enemy. That apparently is enough to go after a scalp as big as Havard’s without much friction from the right. In retrospect, the institutions’ anathematization of MAGA was a tremendous miscalculation. Anyone in the institutions openly sympathetic to MAGA was chased out, and many who cooperated with Trump I were vilified and had career prospects harmed. The institutions’ failure to hedge against Trump II left them exposed as a pure enemy without any recourse when he was re-elected as a much more effective executive accompanied by a true, loyal counter-elite. (We’re getting to the point where we have sufficient data to demonstrate unequivocally that the people running the universities, the Penny Pritzker types, aren’t particularly bright and lack the capacity for good judgement.)

My personal preference would be that Trump doesn’t destroy Harvard which, given its tremendous value as a world-class university, is owed an attempt at reform. While Harvard is not a special place academically or intellectually (at least in terms of biomed), and plenty of other places do research just as well as Harvard including many state schools, a great deal of excellent work is done there by very smart people and the effort should be made to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I would also argue that the core charge of anti-Semitism is a red herring. Protesting against American support of Israel is legitimate politically. And if leftists want to protest illegitimately, screaming insults at Israeli students and disrupting core university functions, that’s fine too. The production of deranged leftist political spectacles is an important ‘signal’ that communicates the effects of the malevolent ideological programming that dominates these institutions – it shouldn’t be obscured. For anyone paying attention, it should be obvious that insofar that there is anti-Semitism on campus, it is a narrow, historically contingent iteration of a broader, more deeply entrenched ideology of revenge, revanchism, and class guilt assignation:

With that throat clearing out of the way and my preference for focused reform of Havard stated, there is a reasonable case for Trump’s maximalist attack on the institution, one that hasn’t had to be made because there’s already so much right wing enthusiasm and public indifference to Harvard’s plight. So here it goes, here are 6 reasons why Trump is justified in nuking Harvard:

1) The stakes need to be clear for what happens when an institution abrogates core institutional missions to ‘do politics.’

What are Harvard’s core missions? Are Harvard’s priorities the traditional ones of the university: education and disciplinary knowledge advancement? Or has Harvard morphed into something else?

In an interview with the Harvard Gazette prior to her ejection, Harvard president Claudine Gay portrayed Harvard as a key player in helping, ‘the world understand how to make democracies work: How democratic governance and democratic practices can actually — if well done — solve crises and solve people’s problems. We have rising inequality, a planet that’s warming — the list goes on. To the extent that we can provide a blueprint for how democratic governance can work more effectively, it would be a huge service to the world and to individual citizens who want to see their democratic governments actually solving their problems.’

This is clearly an allusion to managed democracy working in service of progressive technocratic projects and Harvard’s role in engineering them, an explicitly partisan proposition given the Dem uniparty’s claim to this sort of rule and its attempt to pathologize populist politics.

If Harvard wants to ‘do politics,’ and act like the United States Death Star analogue of a Caucasus Color Revolution NGO, should it face political penalties when it loses politically? Or having failed at politics, should Harvard have special privileges and be able to don its cap and gown and other academic regalia and claim immunity? There is a strong argument to be made that our politics are much healthier without ‘special actors’ immune to normative repercussions from participating in politics. Harvard lost at politics and Harvard should pay the price.

2) What norms?

You might have figured that libs would be happy in 2020 after they were able to push the barely sentient corpse of Joe Biden across the finish line via a whole-of-society effort that included coordinated participation from tech, nat sec, NGOs, and legacy media (ironically under the pretext of a ‘return to normalcy’). However, you’d be wrong. Libs were furious that norms (the filibuster) and institutions (the Senate, the Electoral College, an unfriendly Supreme Court) distributed power and precluded them from fully enacting their agenda. Mainstream, ‘reasonable’ libs advocated for packing the courts, adding new states (DC and PR?), abolishing the EC, and ending the filibuster. There was no limiting principal to what they saw as their rightful power, and they understood the Republican party (correctly) as a fake, captured opposition. If you’re playing with house money why not make a radical grab for what you want?

These were the stakes at play and they were defined by libs. As such, what remaining norms should restrain MAGA in going after a hostile institution and major lib power center? Libs explicitly advocated for changing the rules to assure themselves semi-permanent political rule. Going after Havard seems like fair game in return.

3) End discrimination.

In admissions, hiring, and promotions, has Harvard routinely violated the Civil Rights Act and actively engages in discrimination based on race and sex. The United States cannot tolerate having civil rights law that is used as a cudgel in one direction, and then, in the other, is openly and gleefully flouted. It is clear that Harvard believes it is above having to comply with both a Supreme Court decision and the Civil Rights Act and that with a minimum of subterfuge and retro-engineering it can go about business as usual until the political environment becomes friendlier. It is also clear that Harvard, as a matter of self-governance, lacks the will, if not the capacity to stop engaging in unlawful discrimination. Many of the ‘voices of reason’ within Harvard oversaw and abetted discriminatory practices at Harvard. See this exchange between Chris Rufo and Jeffrey Flier who was the dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016:

Flier is a smartest-guy-in-the-room type who what? Never saw it coming? Didn’t have the ability to act? Thought it was a good thing, ackshually?

If the ‘reformers’ at Harvard abetted and oversaw its descent into its current state, what can be expected of them? Harvard’s internal failures to check the institutional insanity that led to the current moment are strong evidence in support of the need for the sort of binding external supervision and accountability that would be imposed by a consent decree.

4) Harvard is evil.

Many people carefully observing the institutions perceive a deep rot. There is a sense that with the glow of Christianity fading (along with its ethea of forgiveness and egalitarianism), a much more malevolent ideological tendency has taken root. Steven Pinker recently wrote a ‘don’t-worry-things-at-Harvard-aren’t-that-bad’ essay for the New York Times entitled, ‘Harvard Derangement Syndrome,’ where he argues that malevolent identity gnosis and revenge ideology represent only a small proportion of Harvard’s intellectual portfolio:

However, Pinker simultaneously contradicts himself by noting the ordeals of Carole Hooven, Tyler VanderWeele, and Ronald Sullivan which could have not have occurred administratively if these ideological tendencies did not govern and dominate the institution. Interestingly, Pinker does not mention the persecution of Roland Fryer Jr. whose transgressions were almost certainly ideological (and involve providing empiric evidence that contradicts several social science lib shibboleths) and who was punished by Claudine Gay preceding her elevation to university president. If Harvard is not a deeply sick place, why was an apparatchik like Gay (who had a thin academic CV and was a key player in the disgraceful spectacle of Fryer’s punishment) elevated to president?

Pinker argues that, ‘Simply enumerating cancellations, especially at a large and conspicuous institution like Harvard, can overshadow the vastly greater number of times that heterodox opinions are voiced without anyone making a fuss,’ but it is more likely that the high profile ordeals of Hoover and Fryer represent the tip of iceberg, and that there were hundreds of instances of ideological intimidation that occurred over the years of which only a small handful reached the surface and public view.

5. MAGA’s vision for education and research

It’s been hinted at, but part of MAGA’s vision for higher ed may include redistributing educational and research funding to state institutions in regions of the country that have undergone the most post-industrial decline. It’s unclear why federal technical and biomed research funding needs to be concentrated among a handful of ideologically hostile private institutions in the Northeast. If biomed and technical research are so important societally and economically why tether them to blue state ideological insanity when this work could be equally well performed in state universities with the safeguards provided by legislative supervision? Talented researchers can be relied on to ‘follow the funding.’

Those of us in biomed are probably also due for a reappraisal of just what our value is to the public - it’s likely something that we overestimate and that we need a little humility on. Let’s perform a thought experiment: do you think the public would forgo all of the scientific advancements of the past 25 years (and there have been many) if our two largest disasters (COVID and the opioid epidemic) could have been avoided? I think a lot of the public would take that tradeoff.

Part of MAGA’s agenda may be to shrink the footprint of biomed and technical research and let’s be honest: they have a rationale for doing so, given both the magnitude of the catastrophes we’ve engineered and our failure to own up to them in a meaningful way.

6. Ideological clarification.

Let’s caricature a Trump enthusiast: middle aged white guy, an affluent petit bourgeois, perhaps an owner of a chain of boat dealerships in Florida or something similar. Let’s further imagine our Trumpy boat dealer has a son with tremendous athletic and academic gifts. What does Harvard have to offer our boat dealer, absent cultural and ideological opprobrium and hostility? What are the chances his kid could gain admittance to Harvard as an undergraduate absent a bizarre and attention-grabbing esoteric social performance, an extraordinary contingency (school shooting?), or the financial wherewithal of the father to fork over an 8-figure gift? The answer is close to if not precisely 0%.

On these terms, Harvard is a good political target. Trump II has an opportunity to define itself against a key institutional enemy of its core constituency and whatever victories can be achieved against Harvard can serve as a template for how MAGA handles the rest of elite, private academia.

In defending itself, Harvard has enumerated its responsibilities and obligations, to science to social justice to international governance, but is unable to account for why it seems to offer so little to such a broad swath of the American public who see it as an enemy and for which it has no legitimizing narrative.

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And…. I’ll stop there. I could go on (the initial title of this poast was, ‘9 Reasons Trump Should Nuke Harvard,’) but I think the key points have been made: that Harvard, as an avatar for the institutions, is in trouble. It has unwisely involved itself in partisan politics that it is poorly equipped for, it has been warped by malevolent ideological tendencies, in its arrogance in flouting civil rights law it has placed itself in an indefensible position, it is reviled by a large swath of public for which it lacks a legitimizing narrative, it is not clear that it has the internal capacity to right itself, and now, as a result, its ability to fulfill its core missions, which it has abrogated, is under threat. We will soon see whether Harvard can right itself and undo the way in which it has made itself such a good target for the Trump administration. I hope that it does.