Thursday, May 29, 2025

Part I

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Why Has President Trump Has Declared War on Harvard? An Open Challenge to a Bastion of the Educational Elites

Decade after decade, we have known that America’s elite colleges and universities are moving left, then further left and even further left. The resistance to any kind of change, the resistance to any kind of correction has been absolutely massive and almost universal, but now you have an irresistible force in the form of the President to the United States, Donald J. Trump, and he is using the federal budget, or at least federal monies as a blunt instrument to try to get the attention of those very elite academic institutions. Now, a good many observers are asking why exactly the president’s going after Harvard rather than some other institutions. And honestly, there are some other institutions that are probably even more reckless and ideologically corrupted than Harvard, but the fact is that Harvard is the biggest brand out there and President Trump knows it.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise when, just days ago, the White House announced that the president is issuing a letter directing federal agencies to cease funding, at least all discretionary programs’ discretionary program funding, when it comes to Harvard University. The president has made the claim that he’ll be cutting off about $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard. Now, to just state the obvious, even an institution like Harvard is going to have a very hard time dealing with a $3 billion shutoff in funding, especially since so much of that funding goes to personnel. It goes to programs, it goes to issues, items, it goes to priorities that are central to the institution. And President Trump is basically offering a slash and burn approach when it comes to Harvard. He is doing so, at least in part, to warn other institutions. But even as there are so many who are looking at this and saying this is an irresponsible savage attack upon a major academic institution that is crucial to American science and innovation.

The fact is, that the same institution has resisted correction decade after decade, and we’ve been asking the question for the entirety of that time, what would finally get Harvard University’s attention? And now we’re about to get, at least maybe, our best chance of getting an answer to that question. The liberalization, the leftist capture of the universities, all of this is now old hat. It’s so much a part of the academic landscape that most persons believed it could never be corrected, and frankly, it still remains a disproven theory that it can be reversed. But at this point president Trump is testing that theory and he is testing it in the language that academic institutions most understand, the language of money. The president posted about this at Truth Social on Memorial Day stating, “I am considering taking $3 billion of grant money away from a very anti-Semitic Harvard and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS, that was in all caps, trade schools, all across our land.” He said, “what a great investment, that would be great for the USA and so badly needed.” 

Is that right or is that wrong? Well, a further investment in trade schools would almost assuredly be a good thing, especially when it comes to many young men. What they most need is preparation for what will turn out to be an actual job. On the other hand, the loss of all the research capacity at an institution like Harvard will come with effects, and those effects might well endanger other priorities that even conservatives would share, including, say, innovations in defense technologies, medical technologies, you just pretty much go down the list. The federal government decided decades ago, and we’re talking now about more than a half century ago, that it would not conduct research itself, and that means research not only for esoteric things that you might think were absolutely useless, but the things we all understand would be useful when it comes to missile technology and satellite technology and you could just go down, again, a very long catalog of things including pharmacological development drugs. 

But the president has made very clear that this is not an empty threat against Harvard and, frankly, other institutions are forewarned what happens at Harvard could happen to you. There are even conservative authorities in higher education who are saying this approach is reckless, and by many measures it is reckless. But it also follows the style of leadership and action that President Trump has demonstrated in other areas where he’s tried to bring about change. Will it be successful or not? Well, I’ll just state the obvious that, when it comes to reversing decade after decade of liberal direction and liberal drift, and then outright ideological commitment to the left, it’s hard to imagine that in a short amount of time, even a relatively short amount of years, that any kind of full correction can be brought.

On the other hand, it is clear that he has Harvard University’s attention, and that’s a first just in terms of looking at the battle we face. Jason L. Riley, who is hardly a leftist, columnist at the Wall Street Journal, asked the question, “Does the President Want to fix Harvard or Destroy it?” The subhead says “His actions against foreign students and research grants have little to do with students’ civil rights.” Now let’s look at the question. Does President Trump want to fix Harvard or to destroy it? Well, I’m not sure that President Trump wants to do either. At least one way of understanding what’s going on is that he is using Harvard as, well, you might say an alarm, a test case, an example to seek to bring about a broader landscape change in American higher education. I don’t think the president wants to destroy Harvard. I do think the president sees Harvard as so much a part of the problem that he wants to humble it, if not destroy it.

Now, Jason Riley warns, and this is important, that such an action will come with consequences and some of those consequences will put us in a position where we might lose some brilliant researchers. We might lose some necessary research. We might actually be putting the United States in some disadvantage when it comes to other nations who might be, after all, recruiting if not capturing those scientists and the research and innovations that will come with them. It is also just a basic conservative principle that if you want to salvage something, you want to save something, you can’t break it utterly because once you break it, you can’t turn around and then say you were trying to save it. But the edifice of higher education, like the edifice of public education in America, is a giant ideological blob. Honestly, I don’t know what would get its attention, especially when dealing with the most fundamental questions here, but at the very least, President Trump has well, he’s achieved getting Harvard’s attention.

What’s going to happen now on both sides remains to be seen.

Part II

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‘Trust Us, We Won the Johan Skytte Award’: The Self-Congratulatory Condescension of the Academic Elites

Well, all right, another of the criticisms made against the Ivy League and against institutions like Harvard and the faculty members who teach there is that they are endlessly condescending and frankly dismissive of just about any form of criticism, however legitimate, coming from outside the university circle. But let’s look at a letter that I recently saw published in the Financial Times. When I saw the letter, I thought I just have to talk about it. It is a letter from political scientists, in this case from four political scientists at premier institutions, Stanford University, Cornell University, Harvard University, and another from Harvard University. Here’s what the letter writers have to say, and I quote, “it is from a position of scholarly responsibility that we as winners of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, an award recognizing the most significant contributions to the field speak out.” What do they say? “We are deeply concerned about recent actions taken by the Trump administration that undermine the independence and academic freedom of research universities, colleges, and scholarly institutions.” They cite Harvard President Alan Garber who said, “‘no government, regardless of which party is in power should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and what areas of study and research they can pursue.”’ They go on to say themselves, “we strongly support these values as award-winning political scientists who do not know each other’s political affiliations, we collectively fear that the current actions of the US government are a threat to the rule of law and civil peace, and we condemn the tools being used to achieve the administration’s goals.” 

Well, they go on. Later they also say “we, the authors of this letter, have been awarded the annual Johan Skytte Prize at Uppsala University for outstanding contributions to political science. As political scientists, we have learned how easily voters can be swayed to support anti-democratic candidates, but it is democratic and civic institutions, ones that Trump seeks to dismantle that often save us from ourselves.” Now, honestly, if you wanted to come up with a demonstration of academic condescension, it’s hard to come up with better than this. They start out identifying themselves as winners of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. They then later describe themselves as award-winning political scientists. They come back to say as political scientists, each of them has been awarded the annual Johan Skytte prize at Uppsala University for outstanding contributions to political science. Just in case you didn’t get the memo, they have won the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, something that I’m just going to guess most of you didn’t even know exists. 

I am not even arguing that all the points they made are without merit or at least without consideration. I am going to say that this common letter is an incredible example, the kind of academic condescension in which you have, most importantly, these academics claiming that as political scientists, they are in a position to define reality and the rest of us are in no position to do so. And then they come back and, again, they underlined their expertise by the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. Evidently, the readers of the Financial Times are supposed to say, well, winners of the Johan Skytte prize must know what they’re talking about. We’ll rearrange our societies in accordance with their dictates. 

The future of higher education in the United States is a subject that should interest us all. We’ll watch the unfolding situation at Harvard. No doubt there are going to be many headlines to come.

Part III

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President Trump Changed the Political Landscape: Americans Now Believe That Republicans Represent the Working Class, and Democrats Represent the Elites

But our concern is not just with the academic landscape, but it’s also the political landscape that has our attention today.

Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times has written a very interesting piece with a headline “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape.” This is the kind of story that can only come out months after an event as big as, say, the 2024 presidential election. His assessment, “The Democrats problems run deep nearly everywhere.” And then the article, the paper, offers a map and it’s an intensity map, and so you have arrows and the arrows are pointing either to the left or to the right, and they are based upon county election shifts, and the map is overwhelmingly pointing to the right. Most of the action, by far most of the action, is pointed to the right. Action towards the left is virtually nonexistent on the map. So as the paper states, “Mr. Trump has reordered America’s political divide both geographically and demographically. One of the big issues is that Republicans are overwhelmingly making gains in working class counties.” That’s exactly the statement by the times. 

“Democrats are improving almost exclusively in wealthier areas, they go on to say that education’s also a major factor.” “Republicans are running up the score in counties where a few people have attended college, tied that back to our concerns about the liberalization of higher education.” Then, “Democrats are gaining ground in a small sliver of the best educated enclaves.” Now, the bottom line in this article is that a fundamental shift has taken place in American political life. For decades, the Democratic Party has claimed to be the party of the middle class, the party of those who are aspirational, the party of the weak and the poor. But it turns out that it is those very persons that the Democratic Party has claimed to represent who have decided the Democratic Party doesn’t represent them at all, massive movement over time. And the bottom line in this article is that there is very little good information, encouraging information for the Democrats, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s enormous encouragement to Republicans because the big question on the Republican side is whether this is a shift to the Republican Party or a shift to Donald J. Trump, those are not necessarily the same thing.

The study covers a far larger period than you might expect, looking from 2012 to 2024, so that’s a full 12 years. And then the study tells us that 435 counties voted more democratic in ’24 than they did in 2012, but 2,678 counties became more Republican, “by an average of 13.3 percentage points.” The paper goes on to say that “six times as many counties moving towards the GOP than toward the Democratic Party and by a substantially wider margin.” Now you’re looking at 12 years, and when you’re looking at Donald Trump, you’re looking at an electoral span from 2016 to 2024. So this is older than Donald Trump. This goes back to 2012, but the big momentum does come with Trump’s runs for the White House in 2016 and 2020 and 2024. It turns out that in looking at many aspects of his base in 2020, president Trump actually deepened the support. 

Ben Tulchin, a pollster who has worked with Senator Bernie Sanders said, looking at the electoral map, “The math doesn’t work for years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side. Now the inverse is true.” Increasingly by so many different measures, we are moving into a two party country, and you can look at this in terms of the more religious and the more secular. You can look at this in terms of the more liberal and the more conservative, certainly the more Democratic and the more Republican, but you can also look at many other issues, and those have to do with the cultural values that the Democratic Party is basically running only with a leftward message.

Another very interesting development from a worldview perspective is where we are told that democratic strongholds, “are increasingly islands.” So that tells us a lot about our country. We talk about an awful lot of red, but you look at blue dots, but those blue dots are highly educated. They tend to be highly compensated, they tend to be high income, and they tend to be very liberal. “If a broad and increasingly diverse swath of the country is realigned toward the Republican Party, only a few isolated areas [says the report] have moved sharply in the Democrats’ direction.” As you look at the map, you can probably already anticipate where those blue dots are.

In turn to the party distinction, the study tells us, “just nine counties voted more democratic in each of the presidential elections since 2012.” That’s just nine. “On the other hand, 535 counties shifted towards the Republicans in all three presidential elections and by a total of at least 25 percentage points, they were spread across 36 states from diverse democratic strongholds like the Bronx and New York City where the black and Latino population tops 80% to overwhelmingly white and rural counties.” So this also points to the fact that President Trump made significant inroads when it comes to the voting patterns of many ethnicities. And at least a part of this may reflect the fact that these voters don’t primarily see themselves in ethnic terms at all, but rather are voting because of their concerns over cultural issues, economic issues. In other words, like most Americans. 

One very interesting statement was made by Ken Martin, who has just taken over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He at least understands something of the challenge he faces. He said, “The majority of Americans now believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.” He went on to say, “The Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.” Now if the chairman of your national committee for your party is making that kind of assessment, that ought to be pretty sobering, you would think.

Part IV

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‘Be Normal. Sound Normal.’: Democrats are Attempting to Dump Their Woke Jargon, But Not Their Woke Ideologies– But It’s Not Working

But then along the same lines, I want to turn to a very interesting report that came out in the Telegraph. That’s a rather conservative British newspaper that has a deep interest in the United States. They offer a headline story, “Democrats Ditch Woke Jargon to Win Back Trump Voters.” The subhead, “Party figures fear activist phrases, isolate electorate and urge candidates to, ‘be normal and sound normal.’” Well, looking at the article tells us that the goal is to be normal and sound normal. Let’s just say they’re failing on both counts. This article actually makes that clear. Benedict Smith is the reporter. He says, “Democrats are ditching woke jargon to win back voters who defected to the right and elected Donald Trump.” “Prominent party figures warned that said phrases beloved by its activist base like ‘Latinx’ had isolated ordinary voters and fueled shattering losses in the last year’s elections.” The next sentence, and I quote, “they also fear the party’s emphasis on issues such as pronouns exhausted the electorate.” Now, let me just say at this point that exhausted can’t be the right term. It’s more rightly described as offended, grossly offended. 

Ruben Gallego, who won a tight Arizona Senate race said, “Some words are just two Ivy League-tested terms.” He went on to say well, I actually can’t read exactly what he said. He cited a phrase such as social equity and then asked, why do we say that? Why don’t we say, we want you to have an even chance? The paper then tells us, “Mr. Gallego, who defeated Kerry Lake, a candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump in his Senate race, said he had once been instructed to describe his background as, ‘economically disadvantaged’ rather than poor.” He went on to say, “not every person we meet is going to have the latest update on what the proper terms are.” That’s an understatement.

The telegraph also acknowledges that the Biden administration turned into Exhibit A of how to tangle itself up in this leftist jargon. For example, the Biden administration referred to, “justice involved populations.” What does that mean? It means prisoners. The administration referred to, “previously incarcerated individuals.” Which means ex-convicts. Now if you can’t use the phrase, if you can’t use the word, in this case, prisoners or ex-convicts, you’re not going to make any sense to people because when you try to shift it to “justice involved populations,” which is just absolute leftist nonsense or “previously incarcerated individuals,” it’s not so much that you’re just making a linguistic change, you’re trying to make a moral change, and that’s what the public has caught onto. When you refer to persons as justice involved populations rather than prisoners, you’re losing the entire moral script. 

A very interesting statement was made by Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, who is expected to make a run for the presidential nomination on the Democratic side in 2028. The Telegraph tells us, “Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor who won two terms in the red-leaning state, that’s Kentucky, said, Democrats have fallen into using phrases like ‘substance abuse disorder’ instead of ‘addiction.’” The governor said, “I believe that over time and probably for well-meaning reasons, Democrats have begun to speak like professors and started using advocacy speak that was meant to reduce stigma, but has also removed the meaning and emotion behind words.” You can also say it’s removed the truth behind words. Kentucky’s governor went on to say, “It makes Democrats or candidates using this speech sound like they’re not normal. It sounds simple, but what the Democratic Party needs to do is be normal and sound normal.” Well, that advice sounds normal, and remember the Kentucky governor was saying that Democrats have begun to speak like professors, so who would be cited next in the article? You beat me to it, a professor. 

In this case, Allison Prasch, identified as an associate professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She said, “Democrats trip over themselves in an attempt to say exactly the right thing.” She says, “Republicans maybe aren’t so concerned about saying exactly the right thing, so it may appear more authentic to some voters.” Well, I guess there is one test in terms of the great divide in our country, and that divide is whether or not that sentence makes much sense on its own. 

Rahm Emanuel, the former ambassador to Japan and also mayor of Chicago, who is also likely a candidate for the 2028 Democratic nomination, he was responding to the fact that the Trump campaign or allies of the Trump campaign had made a great deal of progress against Kamala Harris with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them, president Trump is for you.” Rahm Emanuel said, “I’m empathetic and sympathetic to a child trying to figure out their pronoun, but it doesn’t trump the fact that the rest of the class doesn’t know what a pronoun is.” Now that advice may seem to be offering some form of common sense, but notice that Rahm Emanuel basically affirms the underlying gender ideology confusion, and he’s not going to confront that, otherwise he doesn’t have a chance in the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. So instead, he’s trying to say, sound normal and understand there’s a larger educational crisis, but diverting attention is not going to solve the Democrat’s problem.

Part V

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Woke Education is the Left’s Agenda: The Left Wants Your Kids, and They are Targeting Them Through Schools

When you put the word ‘woke’ with education, you pretty much get the agenda of the Left in the United States. Daniel Buck writing for the Wall Street Journal is onto it. He offers an article, “Woke Education is Going Strong Even in Middle America.” This should be a wake-up call to a lot of parents listening right now. The subhead, “schools in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin embrace far-left fads from gender identity to restorative justice.” The point here is that this is not just in, let’s say, an urban center with a very progressivist, well-understood-to-be progressivist, school board, teachers unions, and all the rest. This is in the suburbs. But the point is, this is what you will find in the suburbs as well. 

The educational blob, it is so difficult to defy, and this just shows that these agendas continue to show up even where parents probably think there’s no chance they would be there. Oh, they’re there all right. Daniel Buck writes, “what happens in San Francisco may be an outlier, but what happens in Wauwatosa likely happens in countless other districts. So then he asks, so what’s happening?” “In 2022, the Wauwatosa School Board approved a new sex education curriculum. Among other things, it expects sixth graders to define different types of sexual intercourse. Kindergartners learn about, [well, let’s just say body parts] with the help of cartoon drawings, and third-graders are informed that no matter their body parts, they may feel like another gender.” Third-graders. “notably, the newly adopted units are based on the national sex education standards, which encourage teaching third-graders about puberty blockers, sixth graders about abortion and students as young as kindergarten about gender identity. He goes on to say, the red flags appear in more than the curriculum.” 

He explains, “Wauwatosa is one of thousands of districts to have adopted a restorative justice policy. This is an alternative to traditional discipline structures that emphasizes dialogue over punishment and focuses on revising school policy rather than changing student behavior. The report just goes on and on. You pretty much got the theme. You also need to note that one of the tools of cultural change, particularly by the left, is when you look at something identified as the, “National Sex Education Standards,” well adopted by whom? Well, by the very people who want third-graders to know about the flexibility of gender and sixth graders to know about abortion, Kindergartners to be taught about gender identity, and sixth graders to be experts in sex.

The school has also bought into an equity model that means that it is poised to sideline advanced programs such as say, AP or STEM schools, and that’s because, “offering sixth graders the chance to do accelerated coursework is according to consultants for the program,” “highly problematic.”

The bottom line in that kind of statement is that these consultants from the Left, they may want children to learn, but they don’t want any children to learn more quickly than other children. Regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the aptitude, regardless of the family structure, you can see exactly where this is headed. Speaking of these ideas, Buck says, “These aren’t tumors that can be easily excised. They are degenerative disorders that leave schools hunched and limping toward failure.” Well, powerful metaphors there, but unfortunately, powerfully true.

And the Left, of course, isn’t satisfied with the students in this one Wisconsin school district. They want your kids as well.