What to Do with the Rot on Our Country’s Campuses?
What to Do with the Rot on Our Country’s Campuses?
Wow. In January 2024, more than a year ago and only three months after Harvard’s disgusting turn as Hamas’s Ivied cheerleader, I wrote that the university should be placed in receivership. Lo and behold, someone now in power must have filed my piece in a folder called “good ideas.” Harvard and Columbia are, in effect, headed for a time under both the federal microscope and the federal axe, if the Trump people are serious and know what they’re doing.
I follow the gross misbehavior at our elite colleges and universities, since most of them have exceptional art museums, and, let’s face it, these schools are important. They were once the best in the world, ever, and now they’re a collective dumpster fire. Columbia is on its third president in the past year, all not up to the challenge.
What’s the reality at Harvard? When I wrote my story last year, the plagiarism scandal of the hideous mediocrity Claudine Gay — Harvard’s president at the time — plus her deployment of sexual harassment laws as a political weapon, a tidal wave of antisemitism, and a Supreme Court decision nuking Harvard’s race preferences in admissions all showed a school and trustees run amok. And that was before we learned that Harvard, of all places, needed to create remedial math classes for freshmen; that the manager of a morgue at Harvard Medical School was selling body parts; and that the scandal over foreign money is worsening. Add in Harvard’s new persona as George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door to keep in DEI. I could go on and on. Lots rots in the kingdom of Cambridge — and, I suspect, also at Yale, where I went to school, and Penn, Princeton, Colgate, Cornell, and down the line to the Little Three and the Seven Sisters.
At Harvard, out with “I Have a Dream.” In with Massive Resistance and “Don’t Tread on My Quotas.” Supreme Court be damned. Trump be doubly, triply, to the end of time damned. Harvard might hide its racist admissions and hiring policies, but it won’t give them up until its ivory tower gets the Saipan treatment. It’ll be tough. I wonder whether the Trump people have Marine grit. Harvard is waiting them out. I’m glad Linda McMahon’s at the helm of the Education Department, which seems to have one last mission, and, after 50 years, its only good one. She ran the World Wrestling Federation. I admire her a lot. Barbara Stanwyck would play her in the biopic. Pajama Boys, get ready for the armbar takedown and ankle pick.
For years, conservatives ignored Trot capture in our schools, growing antisemitism, indoctrination, plummeting standards, and galloping tuition inflation. “The universities are lost,” I heard. We can’t give up on them. They have too much money, too much physical and intellectual infrastructure, too much social power, and too much potential. I’m a libertarian on most fronts, but the slap of firm government, as Mrs. Thatcher called it, is sometimes needed. What’s happening at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Penn, and dozens of other premier schools threatens the country.
Washington and Cambridge fired salvos across the Acela Corridor last week. Amid the rhetorical shock and awe, a few things are clear. Harvard’s racist admissions program is illegal. The Feds have every right to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. It can audit future admissions, for starters. It’s already illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in hiring. Washington is correct to enforce these laws, too. Harvard is wrong to withhold the data the Feds need. The federal government is right to enforce the civil rights laws and the 14th Amendment, as it did to break Jim Crow rule.
Our top universities admit too many foreign students, especially graduate students, who bring their crazy politics with them. Mahmoud Khalil is the poster child and also a Hamashole agitator. Federal, state, and local taxpayers subsidize colleges and universities either directly through grants or indirectly through tax exemptions. Why should taxpayers support students from other countries? A numerical cap, say, 2 percent, seems reasonable and easy to impose since the State Department controls visas. Foreign students tend to be full-freight tuition payers so universities will lose a ton of money.
A race-blind admissions policy, enforced by Justice Department lawyers, some of whom might have gone to schools in Kansas, Utah, and Kentucky, and a tight, low cap on foreign students are lice baths. They’re first steps to intellectual and ethical health. I think a ban on federal grants to colleges and universities is a good next step.
I’m astonished to read that Harvard’s getting billions of dollars every year from Washington. Billions. Its operating budget is $6.4 billion. How much of that comes from the government? Is it masquerading as a private school? Much of it goes to research, I know, but Harvard’s central administration skims a chunk to subsidize its overall operating expenses. It doesn’t need the alumni anymore since government money dwarfs their giving and diminishes their justified complaints about Harvard’s hard-left tilt. The money drifts to new buildings. Williams, where I got my art history degree and whose libraries I use, is as much in the construction business as education. It’s building a new art museum that it doesn’t need, because it’s got so much money its trustees don’t know how to spend it.
Another good step, for the overall health of the universities and colleges and for their art museums, would be pulling the plug on black studies, gay studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies departments. These are fake enterprises, created in the 1970s and ’80s for political reasons. They have lax standards and are often just parking places for identity hires. With little heft, they colonize the school museums with dumb shows. Their courses should go into the traditional departments that have established standards, with black, gay, women’s, and ethnic studies majors and graduate students having to compete.
Government money is always political money. For private universities, it creates an ugly codependency and a gravy train. Harvard and Yale and Princeton can keep doing health research and run their museums and build fancy new dorms, but they’ll need to get the money from alumni and foundations. It’ll be good for them.
All of his would, of course, put Harvard and Columbia in a financial crisis. As a creature of Wesleyan, Williams, Yale, and Andover, I can write that until a few years ago, impoverishment was a once-in-a-decade abyss for high-end schools. Local rivers swelled with tears, trustees cleansed Augean stables, and marginal people on the staff, newly sacked, became community organizers, speed knitters, and Kwanza-ornament makers. The schools were stronger for it. Bloated staffs, and this includes in art museums as well as in student life and most every other nonfaculty department, are hurting, not helping, the mission.
I read Yale’s alumni newsletter every morning and marvel at its topics, both odd and telling as they are. Chronic pain, depression, the first and last king of Haiti, psychosis, climate action, which means “change the weather,” and relief from allergies headline this past week’s research doings, as does “when is it okay to use personal connections to land a job.” Fifty push-ups, people! Yale gets big bucks from Washington. Is this money well spent?
An intervention is long overdue, and the private universities brought it on themselves. I wonder if the focus, discipline, tactics, and knowledge exist in Washington to wrestle these beasts to the ground, given that cleansing corruption is a long-term enterprise, dating from long before God and Man at Yale. If there’s a financial crisis at our universities, however therapeutic it is, I hope central administrators don’t raid their museum endowments. This has happened many times.
It’ll be painful, but these times call for cleaving to the line. The Feds seem to have plenty of carrots and plenty of sticks. The elite universities can play for time, go for as many potted judges as they can find, and hope that the Trump people lose interest.
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