Trump’s advantage in battle with ‘elite’ higher education

Julian Epstein writes for the New York Post about one high-profile skirmish involving President Donald Trump.

President Trump escalated his war on Harvard, Columbia, and illiberal academia this week by suspending foreign student visas at Harvard and challenging Columbia University’s accreditation for consistently failing to protect Jews from hate crimes on campus.

The president has already cut off Harvard’s grants and contracts, while threatening the university’s tax-exempt status.

Predictably, heads exploded within the progressive elites, its lawfare commentariat, and the legacy media. They claim the president’s actions are unconstitutional and retributive.

Even some of the most powerful critics of the DEI, such as Heather Mac Donald, have criticized the administration’s actions for overreach. 

But the meta story that critics miss is that Trump is fighting a major decay within the university and public education system that is producing abysmal results academically and inculcating anti-Western ideologies that could do our civilization lasting harm. 

Public trust in universities is declining rapidly, and the continuing acts of racial discrimination across campuses, on which much of Trump’s critique rests, stand on thin ice with the US Supreme Court.

While the courts may chip away at Trump’s offensive, the president has multiple funding spigots over which he has near plenary discretion. Harvard, Columbia, and others have few pressure points other than the courts, which have already, in the case of Harvard, slapped down some of its discriminatory programs.

Accordingly, they should, and likely will, soon come to the table.

China’s Chairman Mao ushered in the brutal “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s by first capturing the epicenter of culture: universities. His Red Guard tortured and killed dissident professors, students, and others who challenged his orthodoxies. A softer form of Maoism soon found a warm bath for academics in the West.  

Along with Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, Herbert Marcuse was the lion of the anti-Western academic left in the 1960s.

“Liberating tolerance,” he argued, “would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.” Marcuse’s ideas presaged a new era of progressive illiberalism on campuses.

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