Jay Greene
Subject: Taking Down Harvard
Bio: Senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation
Jon Zimmerman
Subject: Taking Down Harvard
Bio: Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Taking Down Harvard.
Our speakers are Jay Greene from the Heritage Foundation who is best known for being my New Trier High School debate partner. We also have Jon Zimmerman who is a Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our focus will be on the Trump Administration’s letter to Harvard demanding that the institution stop violating Title VI and protect the civil rights of its Jewish students and whether the letter is appropriate and reasonable.
After recording the podcast, Harvard released a 311-page internal report on ongoing antisemitism on campus. And I have added a follow-up discussion with Jay on that report.
Let’s start this off with Jay, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Jay Greene:
Taxpayer funding for higher education is a privilege, not an entitlement. That funding is conditioned on universities complying with civil rights law meant to ensure that no one is denied full access to their education on the basis of race, color, or national origin. The Trump administration has given notice to Harvard and several other universities that they are freezing portions of their federal funding over concerns that these universities have grossly and repeatedly failed to fulfill their civil rights obligations.
Harvard filing a lawsuit claims that the Trump administration is infringing on free speech and the autonomy of a private institution. However, neither academic freedom nor the desire for autonomy exempt Harvard or any other organization receiving federal funds from complying with civil rights law. If their understanding of free speech and autonomy is inconsistent with civil rights law, they would have to decline federal money, as several universities, including Hillsdale College, have done.
There is no question that Harvard has repeatedly violated civil rights law. Harvard does not deny these violations in their lawsuit and instead asserts that they are making significant progress toward preventing future transgressions. There are good reasons to doubt that Harvard has fixed itself or will be able to do so in the future without significant external pressure.
In the wake of Jewish students being harassed by their peers, blocked from walking across campus, and even physically assaulted, Harvard formed an antisemitism task force to address these problems. The effort floundered from the start when it was revealed that the professor appointed to co-chair the task force had declared that Israel was a “regime of apartheid.” The other co-chair resigned as did another task force member, reportedly because they doubted that Harvard was serious about addressing widespread problems on campus. And sure enough, Harvard does not appear to be serious given that it has been over 18 months since the waves of antisemitic incidents began at Harvard and the final report of the antisemitism task force has still not been released.
One does not need to adjudicate disputes over whether anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic or whether shouting “globalize the intifada” in front of a synagogue is targeted harassment to agree that blocking students from crossing campus or physically assaulting them because they are Jewish constitute civil rights violations. In addition, there is no ambiguity that Harvard’s failure to enforce its own policies to discipline students who interrupt classes, establish encampments, and occupy university buildings interferes with the ability of Jewish students to access their education.
Some object that freezing federal funding places in jeopardy life-saving medical research. But Harvard should not be allowed to hold scientific research hostage. Harvard can immediately unfreeze that money if only it agreed to take the steps required to end civil rights violations. The Trump Administration sent a letter demanding that Harvard take 10 steps to remedy its civil rights violations, of which nine are directly related to past infractions or involve governance reforms to safeguard against future violations.
Only the insistence that Harvard promote viewpoint diversity among its faculty and students strays beyond enforcement of civil rights law. And even if mandating viewpoint diversity is overreach, it is still both good educational practice and political common sense for Harvard to remedy the fact that it and six other Ivy League universities did not have a single faculty member who contributed to the Trump campaign while there were almost 900 contributions to Harris. Being so politically one-sided may not be a civil rights violation, but it is pretty darn stupid for an organization that derives the lion’s share of its revenue from taxpayers.
But if Harvard wishes to dispute that these nine measures are required for compliance with civil rights law, they may have to do without some federal funding while the courts consider the matter. The argument that these dollars help Harvard do good things does not waive the need to enforce civil rights law in the same way that the quality education offered by Little Rock’s Central High School to white students did not negate the need for Eisenhower to bring in the 101st Airborne to ensure that those benefits were provided to all students.
Harvard is not excused from complying with civil rights law because it otherwise does good things. And neither academic freedom nor the desire by private institutions for autonomy entitle Harvard to taxpayer money without fulfilling their civil rights obligations. No one is above the law including Harvard.
Larry Bernstein:
Jon, do you want to open with some remarks?
Jonathan Zimmerman:
This is an incredibly difficult moment and we need to talk about it. Jay Greene might be surprised how much I agree with him. Jay is absolutely right that Title VI and other federal laws do enjoin the federal government to regulate universities and to penalize if universities are found in violation of the law.
Everything Jay Greene says about Harvard could be true, but we have no idea if it is true because the investigation has not been publicized. Details have not been given to Congress and deliberated. Jay may be completely right about them, but I just don't understand how Jay could base his argument on the need to follow law when the White House is an open violation of the very same law that he is invoking. What the law explicitly requires is a fully transparent investigation and a full report to the lawmaking body of the country, which is not the President, it's the Congress, and none of that has occurred. And that makes it impossible to evaluate the claims he's making.
Larry Bernstein:
I'm going to start with the Trump administration's letter to Harvard as a basis for the discussion.
The letter is addressed to Dr. Alan Garber, who is the President of Harvard University, and it opens with the United States has invested Harvard University's operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence. But an investment is not an entitlement. It depends on Harvard upholding federal civil rights laws, and it only makes sense if Harvard fosters the kind of environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor, both of which are antithetical to ideological capture.
Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment. We appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing these failures and welcome your collaboration, restoring the university to its promise.
We therefore present the below provisions as the basis for an agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard's financial relationship with the federal government if acceptable to Harvard. This document will institute an agreement of principle with the parties and will work in good faith to translate into a more thorough binding settlement agreement.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
I agree with the values that are articulated in this letter deeply and strongly. I also agree that our universities have been inconsistent in the way that they've upheld those values.
What the administration said is we're cutting you off to the tune of $2.2 billion. And also the President of the United States threatened to take away their tax exemption, which as I understand it, the President of the United States does not have the power to do. I think the larger due process point, is those reasons have been completely blinded to Harvard and is just anathema to how I understand due process under the law.
Jay Greene:
I agree that the Trump administration needs to follow the appropriate procedures here, and I think it's ambiguous as to whether they have said that they're freezing funds not cutting those funds, and the freezing is to pursue the negotiation and investigation.
But all of this seems to me to be beside the point, which is do we think that the Trump administration is right to go after Harvard? That's the question, and I think the facts are not in dispute as to whether Harvard has had the shortcomings that I've described. Harvard itself acknowledges them. Harvard settled a lawsuit about its rampant antisemitism in January. There's another one that's continuing.
The Trump administration needs to go back and dot its I's and cross its T's and do it again from the beginning, they can, but it won't change the basic facts, which is that Harvard has repeatedly and grossly violated civil rights. And using historical analogies, there was not a careful investigation and report to Congress before Eisenhower brought in the 101st Airborne. The executive branch enforces the law.
They can dispute the procedures for enforcing law and the requirements for doing so, but those are small issues compared to whether Harvard and several other very selective universities that help train the elite who run our country have been grossly and repeatedly violating civil rights.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
I don't think this is a matter of dotting I's and crossing T's. Expressions like that terrify me because some laws may be broken.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the nine points that the Trump administration included was merit-based admissions reform. It said by August 2025, the university must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies throughout its undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools and other programs, such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes. All admissions data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit, including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average in performance and standardized tests. During this period, the dean of admissions must sign a public statement after each admission cycle certifying that these rules had been upheld.
Harvard had been sued, it had gone from the lower courts to appeals and finally the Supreme Court and Harvard lost and was found to have discriminated based on race. Later after this had been adjudicated, there was a sense that Harvard would find a way of skirting that decision to get to the same place it was before. The Trump administration is asking Harvard to follow the law and to demonstrate as such, and to sign a personal statement by the admissions committee to do that. It feels to me at least with respect to that request that Jon it fits right down the center of what you are saying.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
What is a proxy for race? Would it be legitimate for Harvard to admit poor kids if part of its goal were to make its student body more diverse including racially and ethnically?
Larry Bernstein:
But don't you think it is appropriate for the administration to say, we want proof that you're following the law?
Jonathan Zimmerman:
My point is what constitutes a proxy here is an ambiguous and contested question. I wouldn't want any President, Democrat, or Republican to have the power to make a prima facia ruling on what constitutes a proxy.
Larry Bernstein:
Jon, on the merit based admissions, you're problem with it is solely on the proxy or is it more broadly that you think that we shouldn't have merit-based admissions?
Jonathan Zimmerman:
Of course we should have merit-based admissions. My larger point is that reasonable people disagree about what merit is. It's true that in 2023, the court said you can't use race in certain ways. And Harvard and every other institution has been enjoined to follow that. But how that happens and what is deemed a proxy for race and thereby may be in violation of the law is complex and a potentially litigated matter.
Jay Greene:
Let's also look back here at how normal it is for the executive branch to behave in this way and how we don't normally get so upset when the executive branch has an understanding of the law and attempts to enforce it. For example, just last year, Yeshiva University was compelled by the State of New York to permit a student association for LGBTQ students. Yeshiva believed it was inconsistent with its religious mission and its core values. It's a private institution and it deserves autonomy. And I didn't hear anyone who's very upset that Harvard's autonomy is being infringed upon that the procedures have not been followed. There was no court ruling that said that a university must have an LGBTQ Student Association. That ruling did not occur, and yet there was executive authority that compelled Yeshiva to do it, and Yeshiva gave in and did it in part because it didn't have an army of sympathetic people in the public saying that there were all these principles being violated. So maybe these principles aren't such principles, and maybe instead this is interest on the part of selective universities.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
It's a very good point, and I'm not against federal regulation of education. You already gave the example of the 101st Airborne in Little Rock, and that's one of the iconic moments in our history. After the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed, about 20% of southern school districts were fined because they weren't complying with desegregation laws and rulings. I support that as well. But in that case, as in the Yeshiva case, Jay, there was radically more transparency. Nobody in the Biden administration said, we're cutting you off to the tune of $90 million or $900 million.
Jay Greene:
We're acting as if Harvard is very delicate and has certain entitlements and rights here. The federal funding is not an entitlement. It's not a right, but the students who've been repeatedly harmed at Harvard over the last year and a half, they actually have rights.
Let’s describe how gross it is. For example, students occupy the university building, interrupting the normal educational activities of the university, which students are entitled. Jewish students cannot be denied access to their education because other students occupy a building. The university building was occupied and rather than enforce its rules against such occupations, Harvard administration delivered burritos to the students to symbolize sympathy with and support their endeavor.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
Jay, I'm not here to defend Harvard.
Jay Greene:
Well then join with the Trump administration in criticizing Harvard.
And maybe at some point the violations are gross enough that maybe Harvard doesn't have an entitlement to taxpayer money.
Larry Bernstein:
This is going to be litigated. There's going to be depositions and full discovery on behalf of the government and Harvard. We'll call witnesses and the evidence will be presented publicly in the courts. The Congress has the ability to continue to provide funding and to overrule the president's actions throughout this process.
What's weird here is usually the bully picks on the smallest child in the class. And here it's reversed. Harvard is the most privileged and elite of the educational institutions. It's the wealthiest. It's the top dog. They didn't pick on Yeshiva, they picked on Harvard.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
I agree that Harvard should not be exempt from criticism or from penalties if it's broken laws. But everything comes down to whether Harvard has rampant antisemitism. And by the way, people on my blue side, have made a similar error. Remember after George Floyd all those statements about how our universities are suffused by anti-blackness and racism. And you may recall that Betsy DeVos trolled Princeton about this.
She said, I read this statement and it seems to me what you are just admitting that you are in violation of Title VI, so I'm coming after you. I would say the blanket statement about antisemitism is absurd too. I mean, come on. This is a place that's been run by Alan Garber, Larry Summers. It's not just that they're Jews, although they are this whole idea that antisemitism suffuses the whole institution, it's in its bones. That sounds a lot like the post-George Floyd claims about anti-blackness. And I think it's equally flawed.
Jay Greene:
Just last week, Aaron Sibarium at the Free Beacon has revealed documents from the Harvard Law Review that detail their intentional and repeated use of racial identity for determining who would be on the Harvard Law Review and which articles would be accepted for publication, explicit in writing and continuing to this day.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
It's also not a very good look for the Trump administration whose beef is primarily with the humanities and the social sciences especially the Middle East departments to end up penalizing the neuroscientists and the biologists.
Jay Greene:
The racially discriminatory DEI policies have suffused the sciences as well, including the medical school. A lot of that NIH funded research has been going towards racially targeted programs.
Larry Bernstein:
We had Daniel Diermeier on the podcast. He's the Chancellor at Vanderbilt, and he said that at Vanderbilt we have rules and if you violate the rules, we have a process and you're gone. Harvard has rules, individuals have violated those rules, and the rules were not enforced. And that's one of the elements of the Trump letter is that going forward, they'll have to enforce those rules. Do you find that appropriate Jon?
Or is your focus the threat of withdrawal of the grants without proper due process? Is that really the core of it?
Jonathan Zimmerman:
That's the major one.
The other one has to do with free speech. Since January 20th is people have been going through their grants and removing the word diversity and women, I'm sorry, Larry, that's not what happens in a democracy.
Jay Greene:
People were going through their grants four years ago adding the word diversity, adding the word women because they believe that if only they did so they might get funding. So the coercion to say or not say things to get federal funding is not new in this moment. It was true before as well.
Jonathan Zimmerman:
The answers to a double standard is always a single one.
What has happened on our campuses is we have created this moment of existential fear. The university should be subject to critique, and I've engaged in that critique myself. But fear is the enemy.
Jay Greene:
Isn't existential fear what gets people to abide by the law because you're afraid that you might be imprisoned.
Larry Bernstein:
What was the purpose of sending the 101st Airborne? Was it to instill fear with the guys with the rifles?
Jonathan Zimmerman:
There may be appropriate times and places for the exertion of that kind of federal power.
Larry Bernstein:
The President of Harvard is Jewish, Penny Pritzker, who is the lead member of the Harvard Corporation, is Jewish, Larry Summers is Jewish, a substantial amount of the faculty is Jewish. How could the assertion that the institution is antisemitic be reasonable?
Jay Greene:
It's worth noting that a lot less of the institution is Jewish than it used to be. When I was at Harvard three decades ago, more than a quarter of the student enrollment was Jewish, of whom roughly half were modern Orthodox. Over the last three decades, Jews are disappearing at Harvard. Now the student enrollment, it's less than 5% Jewish. In that process, what we get is survivor bias. The Jews who are selected to be there are different Jews than can be found in the rest of the population. The Trump administration is protecting the Jews who aren't at Harvard now, but who should be or could be if Harvard were not discriminating.
Larry Bernstein:
There is an Orthodox Jewish day school, two blocks from my home here in Miami Beach, and Ari Ciment, who is my doctor, invited me to be his guest where Alan Dershowitz was speaking. One of the high school students asked Alan Dershowitz, should I go to Harvard? And Dershowitz said, you got to apply to the best school and then fight antisemitism at these institutions. And it wasn't that the child should go to a school where he or she feels comfortable. She has to deal with it and carry on.
Jay Greene:
If the Trump administration is successful at getting Harvard to reform itself and restrain its abuses, then yes, it would be important for Jews to take advantage of the opportunity for an education at Harvard and fight to ensure enforcement of the civil rights laws at Harvard and is a good place for all students. Now that being said, Jews have a very fine tradition, which is fleeing.
I am suggesting is that they might take your children and provide them with incentives to abandon their Judaism, to betray themselves and their fellow Jews, which is what the survivor bias at Harvard is all about. If you denounce Israel and other Jews, you will be praised. But if you are a proud Zionist Jew, then you will be punished. Places like Harvard have been doing this for a while now. And it has led to a large but minority contingent of Jews who abandoned their connection to the Jewish people who denounce the values, traditions, and priorities of the Jewish people.
Larry Bernstein:
I attended the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-eighties, and it too was a very Jewish institution. And what I noticed over time was going back to what Jon was talking about, is that they used proxies to reduce the number of Jews either by accident or by active decision. For example, I was a Jew from the Midwest, but most of the Jews there were from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Penn announced that they were going to base their admissions based on diversification of geography. And if you bring in people from Wyoming and Oklahoma, there are no Jews there. There are various techniques that you could use as proxies for reducing the number of Jews and whether by hook or by crook, they were successful in doing that.
Jay Greene:
Not only did they do this by hook or by crook, but they did it righteously believing that they were good people for doing it. They got there through diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. The oppressor deserves to have their privilege taken away while the oppressed deserve benefits to rectify collective and historic wrongs.
People feel righteous in taking away opportunities from Jews and redistributing those opportunities to others who collectively have not been thriving. And that's part of why the Trump administration is going after DEI. It is the ideology that has been fueling the discriminatory behavior at these institutions against Jews but also against whites and Asians.
Larry Bernstein:
Steven Pinker is one of the great scholars living today. And in his remarks about the Trump letter, he said what Trump is trying to accomplish is antithetical to Jewish interests. And what he meant by that is the research being done in the sciences supports all people and are worthy and consistent with Jewish interests. A couple of kids getting banged up on street, we have to put that in the context of all the good that Harvard's doing.
Jay Greene:
There are many ways in which Harvard does not have to hold its scientific research hostage here. They could avoid having to euthanize the animals and shutter valuable projects if they wish to. The thing is they don't. What they want is taxpayer money. They're willing to threaten to kill lab animals and shutter lifesaving research, if that's what it takes to get taxpayers to cough up the money. Harvard could continue to fund those projects from their endowment or from specific donations that they would help raise to keep those projects going if that were a priority. Similarly, another thing they could do is they could transfer those specific projects to other institutions that were not under threat of funding cuts for repeated civil rights violence.
Larry Bernstein:
How that would work?
Jay Greene:
I wrote a piece on this in the Daily Signal that without having to even relocate the researchers or the lab, you could subcontract the project and lease the lab to another institution. Any institution, University of Florida could become the manager and you could legally transfer the staff, the lab and the project. The federal government would have to agree to that change, but there would be no doubt that the Trump administration would be thrilled to continue funding valuable lifesaving research and have it legally transferred so that it was supervised by a different institution that was not violating civil rights.
Larry Bernstein:
What if they went in a different route and said, we're going to competitively bid it. Would another institution provide the management or oversight and the institution that provided the lowest cost wins?
Jay Greene:
Harvard's indirect rate or the amount it charges taxpayers for its overhead costs, not for the cost of doing any actual research, but for its administration and its facilities, it charges 67%, which means for every dollar for research, there's another 67 cents that goes to overhead. That's one of the highest overhead rates in the country. I calculated in that Daily Signal piece that if you were to transfer the research projects to any other university with much lower overhead rates, you would save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars just in overhead, and you could increase the amount of scientific research being conducted if you redirected that overhead towards actual direct scientific funding as opposed to paying for bureaucrats.
Larry Bernstein
The weakest argument relates to viewpoint diversity in admissions and in hiring. It showed poor judgment on Harvard's part to abstain from hiring and admitting conservative students and faculty. One of the arguments made in DEI was that it would bring a diversity of opinion to the classroom and give different perspectives on an argument. Why do you think that Harvard and many other universities have decided to prevent conservative faculty members and students at these campuses? And what do you make of the decision by the Trump administration to encourage them to reconsider that approach?
Jay Greene:
For an organization that receives the lion's share of its funding from taxpayers, it is remarkably stupid politically to decide to have almost no vocal conservatives in your faculty. And if you have radical student protests, it's probably unwise to continue admitting tons of radical students and not increase the number of conservative students. This is prudential advice for an institution like Harvard, and it is shocking that people so smart would be so politically stupid.
That lack of intellectual diversity did not occur in a single decision. It's a death of a thousand cuts that have driven conservatives out of the academy. They got rid of the conservatives 20 years ago. Now it's the progressives going after the liberals.
Larry Bernstein:
The first bullet point in the Trump letter to Harvard is entitled Governance and Leadership Reforms. Harvard must make meaningful governance reform fostering clear lines of authority and accountability, empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty.
Jay Greene:
This is a real problem at universities. They are not governed by the boards of trustees in a clear hierarchical fashion. And that's an untenable situation, and it leads to unaccountable misbehavior.
At Columbia, the ultimate decider of discipline was a judicial board consisting of a committee of stakeholders, faculty, students, and that was the ultimate say so the President of Columbia and the Board of Trustees didn't have final say over whether students were disciplined. You can't have authority and responsibility separated from each other.
The Trump administration's letter advises Harvard, that they must take reforms so that authority and responsibility are aligned so that Harvard as an institution can be held accountable for its behavior with respect to civil rights.
Larry Bernstein:
Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious penalties not less than suspension.
Jay Greene:
This is so that students can be held accountable for their behavior. This is not a free speech issue. There are laws across the United States that were motivated by the KKK. The KKK put on hoods so that they would not be held accountable for their public behavior. There are laws for example in Virginia that forbid covering your face because you are not allowed to evade responsibility for illegal behavior because you're wearing a mask.
Larry Bernstein:
The Trump letter says that the Harvard President and the Harvard Police chief must publicly clarify that the Harvard University Police Department will enforce university rules and the law. In addition, Harvard must also commit to cooperating in good faith with law enforcement.
Jay Greene:
A Jewish student was attempting to go to his dorm room, but it involved having to walk by an encampment. The students in that encampment believed he was spying on them, so he could not cross their lines, and they held up keffiyehs to block his view and began pushing him around. The people involved included leaders from the law school. There's been an assault charge filed against some of those students, and Harvard is refusing to cooperate with that prosecution.
Larry Bernstein:
After our discussion, Harvard released after 18 months its own task force analysis of ongoing antisemitism. Jay, what did it say?
Jay Greene:
It's a 300 page document. It was a compilation of anecdotes as well as survey data and some thoughts about remedies. The damning anecdotes are overwhelming. The common theme is that if you wish to be a Jew at Harvard, that students and professors will insist that you declare your opposition to Israel. And if you do not, you will be sanctioned socially. One cannot simply be Jewish at Harvard and apolitical and stay quiet. They will insist that you deny your connection to your heritage, which is about as gross of a civil rights violation as you could imagine.
This report does have recommendations that should be encouraging that they could fix this themselves. But because the abuses are so egregious and continuing that it casts doubt the ability of Harvard to do things that were self-evidently appropriate just a moment ago. It's not clear how they can turn a switch and suddenly do things now that they obviously should have done yesterday.
Larry Bernstein:
There were 500 people surveyed. And the results were stunning in that the Jews felt that they were being persecuted.
Jay Greene:
The surveyed results are astounding where Jews are reporting much worse conditions on campus for themselves than non-Jewish peers, but also that it's gotten much worse than it was in 2019 because they asked similar questions five years earlier.
Larry Bernstein:
A grad student at Harvard in the report said things had gotten worse, and Jews are being treated now like the Republicans were treated when I was an undergrad.
Jay Greene:
The lack of viewpoint diversity is connected to the infringement on civil rights of Jewish students. They go hand in hand. And that's why even though the Trump administration was overreaching and demanding that Harvard diversify in viewpoint their students and faculty, it's not illogical for them to see a connection and ask Harvard to address that problem.
Larry Bernstein:
I don't understand Alan Garber's strategy, the President of Harvard, he must have seen drafts of this report. He knows it's coming. And yet a few days ago after receiving this letter, he decides to lead the resistance not only within his own institution but across multiple institutions to push back against the Trump administration. And he knows this report's coming out that details the very charges that Trump is making. And then he issues an apology, a complete mea culpa as the report comes out. If you know you're guilty, how you can lead the resistance?
Jay Greene:
The best leg they have to stand on is the one that Jon was making earlier in this show, which is a procedural complaint. They say we are doing this carefully with proper procedures. It's politically crazy because most people don't care about the process if the substance is self-evidently true.
Larry Bernstein:
How does this report change the calculus of how this will play out?
Jay Greene:
It makes the pervasiveness of the problem undeniable because Harvard's own evidence proves it. And so now we're just haggling.
Larry Bernstein:
And what is it about the punishment that seems so bad? When Trump sent the letter, he's not threatening reductions in the grants. They have their wish list of nine things. Give us the admissions data, get an ombudsman in there, have a hiring process, get rid of DEI, change your governance so the trustees are responsible. What is it that was so horrible that they had to die on that hill?
Jay Greene:
I entirely agree. I would strongly encourage the listeners to read the letter that the Trump administration sent to Harvard and look at the substance of the things that were asked of Harvard and think about whether they're reasonable. This may be of assistance to trustees to help them get their faculty in line to implement some very reasonable reforms. I think the only thing that Harvard would bristle at is the loss of autonomy because the nine recommendations are that there be external auditing of their compliance.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you want to end?
Jay Greene:
This report makes me more optimistic because anything this horrible can't endure in a decent society. People won't stand for this, so Harvard's going to lose and so are a bunch of other institutions. It'll help them restore their true mission, serve a broader set of students appropriately, and focus on truth seeking, which is what they should be doing as opposed to radical indoctrination and other nonsense.
Larry Bernstein
I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to the federal government's interaction with Harvard?
Jay Greene:
I'm optimistic that the Trump administration is going to succeed at reigning in the abuses and violations of civil rights laws at Harvard and other selective institutions. Harvard is grossly overestimating their power and their resources. The federal government has way more of both. Even if the Trump administration has not followed all the procedures required, it is not difficult for the Trump administration to go back and redo this. The Trump administration has the time and resources to continue way longer than Harvard has to withstand this. Harvard is going to lose, and they know they're going to lose. All they're doing now is trying to make the settlement less onerous. But in the end, nonsense cannot prevail.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Jon and Jay for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was The Future of the US Navy. Our speaker was Eric Labs who is the Congressional Budget Office Analyst for Naval Forces and Weapons. We discussed the challenges coming from China and how that will impact what kind of Navy that we need. The shipbuilding process needs an overhaul. Eric encouraged that we consider buying warships from the South Koreans and Japanese to save time and money.
We also chatted about how technology will change sea power. Recently, Ukraine destroyed the Russian Fleet in the Black Sea with a combination of drones and even bombs on a jet ski. Cheap weapons will change the naval battlefield.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, The Future of the US Navy, here.
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