Chapter 5.3 | Harvard’s Stand for “Independence” Is a Betrayal of Jewish Students — And Trump’s Response Risks Undermining It
Harvard’s Double Standard: Autonomy or Abdication?
On Monday, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard after the university rejected federal demands it called unlawful. In an April 11 letter, the General Services Administration, Department of Education (ED) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ordered Harvard to dismantle DEI programs, monitor certain academic departments, screen foreign students, and submit to audits — or lose funding. Harvard refused, calling the demands an attack on “university freedoms.” Hours later, the administration made good on its threat. On Tuesday, President Trump posted to Truth Social:
Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?
Harvard cloaks its resistance to federal oversight in the language of constitutional independence — but that independence is only selectively exercised. When marginalized groups aligned with fashionable progressive causes raise concerns, Harvard’s bureaucracy mobilizes. Entire DEI departments spring into action. Condemnations are issued. Task forces are formed.
Christopher Rufo penned an op-ed for the Free Press entitled “The Right Is Winning the Battle over Higher Education” in which he acutely observes:
Ivy League presidents see themselves as heirs to the civil-rights movement. In fact, they are among the most active practitioners of racial discrimination, stereotyping, and segregation in America today. Shielded by a virtuous public image, elite universities have institutionalized discrimination against disfavored racial groups, implemented DEI policies based on racial rewards and penalties, hired and promoted faculty according to skin color rather than merit, and overseen racially segregated student programs, dormitories, and graduation ceremonies.
As Charles Lane writes in the Free Press:
The expression “they’re framing a guilty man” comes to mind. This is the university that once penalized a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, for serving as legal counsel for Harvey Weinstein, widely reviled as an accused rapist, but constitutionally entitled to a defense. Harvard subsequently promoted another dean to president, Claudine Gay, who gave key verbal support to student protests against Sullivan.
This is a school that once tried to strong-arm a quarter of its students into abolishing their single-sex clubs, fraternities, and sororities, because “their fundamental principles are antithetical to our institutional values.”
Yet when Jewish students report harassment, vandalism, or even physical threats, the response is slower, quieter, more equivocal. The university drags its feet, dodging with vague statements about “complexity” and “dialogue.” It’s a pattern that reveals the truth: Harvard’s stand for ‘independence’ is not a principled defense of freedom — it’s a defense of bureaucratic discretion, even when that discretion enables bigotry.
Here is Audrey Moorehead a Harvard student writing for Tangle News confirms the toxicity of the environment at Harvard when she wrote in an editorial that:
For the past four years, the political environment at Harvard has been roiling. Harvard’s student body and faculty have produced such a toxic speech landscape that a survey found two-thirds of last year’s graduates felt uncomfortable sharing controversial opinions in class — even though 72.4 percent of this same class self-identified as “somewhat or very liberal” in a survey conducted their freshman year. And the Class of 2024 isn’t out of the ordinary: In this year’s freshman survey, 60% of the class of 2028 reported favorable opinions about Kamala Harris, compared to just 4% having favorable opinions about Donald Trump.
This striking lack of political diversity on campus generates emphatic internaldebate about how (if at all) to be more ideologically inclusive, which the university has ostensibly taken steps to do. Since 2021, campus administrators — aided by undergraduate input — have pursued an Intellectual Vitality Initiative with the goal of “improv[ing] the free exchange of ideas on campus.” The effectiveness of this initiative has been debated by students on both the left and the right.
She continues:
Meanwhile, left-wing activism has arguably been at its most prominent since 2016, and that activism has been controversial at best or outright antisemitic at worst. When I first came to campus, most left-wing activism seemed exclusively online (probably because of lingering pandemic restrictions). Today, in addition to rising pro-Palestine activism in the wake of Israel’s response to October 7, the left seems almost energized by the conservative revival — emboldened by the presence of real political opposition on campus that refuses to be silenced.
This is not a new phenomena at Harvard. Here is a paper by Frank Dobbin, from Harvard’s Department of Sociology writing in 2007 writing about Jerome Karabel’s book “The Chosen”:
The Chosen is a dispiriting book for a college professor to read, not only because it recounts a history of anti-Semitism that was blatant, deliberate, and well known, not only because so many intellectual leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not merely complicit in discrimination, but architects of it, but perhaps most of all, because so much of the system originally designed to keep Jews out of Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale is still in place, at those Ivy League schools and across the country.
Suffice it to say that it is well documented that Jewish students at Harvard, and across the Ivy League, have been systematically excluded from DEI programming. They are treated not as a protected class, but as an extension of Israeli policy — and therefore as targets. And when they protest this treatment, they are ignored or told to “engage in conversation.” This is not academic freedom. This is abdication.
The Trump Administration’s Just Cause — and Its Strategic Flaw
To its credit, the Trump administration recognized this double standard and acted. By reviewing Harvard’s federal funding and its compliance with civil rights laws, it sent a clear message: No institution — no matter how prestigious — is above the law when it comes to protecting students from discrimination.
Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, any institution receiving federal funds must ensure that students are not subject to discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. That includes antisemitism when it targets Jewish identity as an ethnonational group — as it too often does. Lest we forget, Jewish people make up 2.4% of the U.S. population but are the targets of about 60% of hate crimes linked to religion according to the FBI.
Returning to Christopher Rufo’s op-ed, he references Christopher Caldwell’s book “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” and he observes:
Though launched with the noble intention of stopping racial discrimination, Caldwell argued, the Civil Rights Act—and the bureaucracy it spawned—gradually consumed core American freedoms and became a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions.
In the decades that followed, the right’s response was marked by ambivalence. Some libertarians called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, but—like many libertarian proposals—this was never a political possibility, given the Act’s broad public support. The establishment right, meanwhile, largely suppressed its private misgivings. Republicans repeatedly voted to expand the civil-rights regime, further embedding dubious concepts like disparate impact theory (the idea that discrimination can occur even inadvertently) into law.
Now, all of this has changed. After mounting a successful fight against DEI, the political right has come to accept that if there must be a civil-rights regime, it should be one of its own making. Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil-rights law, the right can now advance a framework grounded in color-blind equality, not racialist ideology.
The first field of battle is higher education.
But here’s the risk: Intentions do not excuse process. And federal law does not allow for blanket punishment without due process. If the administration revokes funding or tax-exempt status without completing proper investigations and issuing formal findings, courts will likely block those actions — not because they disagree with the cause, but because the process violates the law.
This is where strategy matters. History provides a roadmap. For example, consider when the Eisenhower administration faced civil rights resistance in the 1950s. It didn’t follow Trump’s play book and issue funding ultimatums or posture for the cameras. It acted decisively — and lawfully. If you’re unaware, it was 1957, when nine Black students — known as the “Little Rock Nine” — attempted to enroll at Central High School in Arkansas following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. When Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to block their entry, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the extraordinary step of federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and sending in the 101st Airborne Division to protect the students and enforce desegregation.
He did not issue threats. He did not play politics. He acted with solemn constitutional authority to uphold the law.
That’s the model the Trump administration must follow if it wants its actions to stand. Investigate, document, build the legal case — then enforce.
Don’t hand elite institutions an opportunity to cry victim.
Win the legal war by honoring the very rule of law you seek to defend.
A Better Path Forward: Enforce the Law with Precision, Not Political Theater
The Trump administration has a powerful moral case. But moral clarity must be matched with legal precision. That means:
Conducting full and fair Title VI investigations into antisemitism on campus;
Conditioning funding based on clear findings of noncompliance with federal civil rights laws;
Empowering students to file complaints and demand accountability through legal mechanisms;
Working with Congress to clarify that DEI policies must include — not exclude — Jewish students;
Using existing IRS authority to investigate abuse of tax-exempt status, if that abuse is provable under the law.
What it must not do is hand universities a court victory by skipping steps or appearing to punish political dissent. That approach, while emotionally satisfying, undermines the very justice it seeks to deliver.
The Trump Administration Must Protect the Civil Rights of Jews, Without Losing the Constitution
This moment is a test. Not just for Harvard, and not just for the Trump administration — but for the country.
Will we protect Jewish students with the same vigor we’ve used to protect other minorities? Will we defend civil rights without weaponizing executive power?
Harvard has failed this test. It chose bureaucratic self-preservation over student safety. But if the Trump administration wants to correct that failure, it must act like Eisenhower — not like an angry political surrogate. Use the law. Use the courts. Use the truth.
Because if we care about fairness — real fairness — it cannot depend on who is in power. It must depend on the rule of law, and the courage to enforce it.