A lot of liberals are beside themselves with glee now that Harvard is standing up to Donald Trump’s demands. Me, I’m sort of with Harvard. I guess. Better than the alternative. Probably.
Trump threatened to hold up billions of dollars in Federal grants unless Harvard complied with a list of demands aimed at somehow curbing the school’s leftist politics. The list was longer and more unreasonable than the things he demanded of Columbia when that school backed down over a threat to withhold $400 million.
For starters, no president should have the power to withhold money duly approved under programs authorized by Congress for any reason outside of a violation of the contract. What Trump’s doing here has been characterized as extortion and that’s not far off.
The thing about bullies is that if you cave to them once, they don’t leave you alone. Instead, they see you as an easy mark and keep demanding more. It never ends.
In addition, the grants Trump is holding hostage are for medical and scientific research — things that have nothing to do with politics.
But here’s the thing. If you asked Americans if they wanted to cut funding for, say, Alzheimer’s research, I’d bet 90% would say ‘no’ and the other 10% were beginning to show signs of cognitive impairment. But if you asked them if they wanted to put a stick in the eye of Harvard, I’m guessing a majority would say, ‘yeah, that’d be kind of fun.’
Trump doesn’t care about the details, nuance not being one of his strong suits. He’s picking a fight with the Ivy League and academia in general because they are the belly of the beast when it comes to the kind of people he and his core supporters detest. This is a central part of the “owning the libs” strategy, which I wrote about yesterday. (You can read something similar, though both much better and much longer, from David Brooks.) So, Trump’s delighted that Harvard is defying him, even if its defiance may have earned it a little grudging respect.
If we can step back — way back — for a moment, here’s what’s happening. Mostly because of trade and technological advancements, part of a society becomes prosperous. As they become wealthier, they can start to focus on things, like human rights and the environment, that seem tangential to the rest of society, where the concerns are more about simple survival. That goes on for a while amid growing tension. Then as the gap widens, it also starts to become apparent that the elites don’t just have vastly different priorities and values, but they’re now imposing them on everyone else. Then they accuse the masses of ignorance or worse when they object.
And snap! The rubber band breaks. The elites get reminded that they’re in the minority, as today’s elites are. Only about one-in-three Americans has a college degree and the split I’m describing is mostly along levels of education.
So, if we can step back and see all this from a distance, what’s happening is a correction. A segment of society — the most powerful segment — became too far removed from the values and concerns of the masses. Then they insisted on imposing that point of view on everybody else. Finally, everybody else had had enough. The result was the Tea Party movement and then Trump and now Trump supercharged.
So, while I don’t like what Trump is doing to Harvard, it’s not like you couldn’t have seen this coming. There needs to be a correction. The cultural and economic canyon between elites and everybody else needs to narrow down to just a yawning gap. The hard-left elite does have to trim its sails. What Trump’s doing is a crude, cruel, stupid and self-defeating way of getting there. But we do need to get there.
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yes, this is right on, and I for one would just love to give those snotty nosed Harvard Libs, a mighty good stick in the eye.
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Careful what you wish for, Dave. When did education become the enemy?
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Education isn’t the enemy. But to suggest that colleges and universities haven’t become (enemies might be too strong a word — let’s say critical) of any thought that isn’t far left of center would be to not recognize reality.
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Yeah, let’s cut off funding for cancer research, that’ll really show them!
One has to have a very slanted worldview to see Ivy League universities as bastions of leftism. They are more accurately the backbone of conservatism, but in todays world, even Regan would be viewed as a liberal. I guess now just saying governments shouldn’t commit genocide is the talk of hard-left maniacs.
The only way the institutions have changed (relevant to this analysis) is by admitting qualified applicants from non-rich, non-WASP families. I believe this is the underlying impetus for these recent attacks. The actual work of the universities is still teaching and research, the people running them are still similar, but the undercover work used to be discriminatory elevation of rich youth to positions of unearned privilege. Now that non-rich, non-WASP youth have been getting a chance at the same game, they’re aiming to shut down the game. The classic move to achieve this is to attack based on your weakness. The rich-capitalist’s primary weaknesses are discrimination and elitism. So they accuse the new enemy of those exact things.
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“But if you asked them if they wanted to put a stick in the eye of Harvard, I’m guessing a majority would say, ‘yeah, that’d be kind of fun.’”
This is why I lean toward the government not funding anything unless there is no good way to do it privately. Otherwise it devolves toward what you’re describing, where the government takes people’s money under threat of jail and then people find morbid fun in watching the government refuse to give the tax dollars to people and organizations that make them feel bad.
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