Trump's attack on Harvard hampered by his inability to STFU
The administration is violating the First Amendment, and he's tweeting through it.
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The Trump administration would be getting slapped down in court even if the president and his minions didn’t constantly announce their intent to violate the law. But their incessant chest thumping does make things go a lot faster.
Case in point: the temporary restraining order barring the government from canceling student visas at Harvard University. The order was issued just hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked Harvard’s visa “privilege” for foreign students. The administration teed up the ruling by declaring that it intended to flagrantly violate the First Amendment. But they telegraphed their punch so thoroughly that Harvard’s lawyers had a 72-page complaint with 28 exhibits ready to be filed the second Noem announced the plan.
Trump hates Harvard
Just hours after being sworn in, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” of civic, corporate, and academic institutions, including “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars” for their supposed “illegal discrimination.”
The EO was clearly an attack on the Ivy League, long targeted by conservatives as a bastion of “wokeness” that should be brought to heel. And Project 2025, with its “big idea” to seize control of the budget from Congress, provided Trump with a blueprint to wield federal tax dollars as a weapon against state governments and institutions.
Part of the plan was for Trump to unilaterally announce new “laws” via executive order, and, instead of asking courts to enforce them, leverage federal funds to punish anyone who resists.
And so the president simply declared DEI “illegal,” and used the widespread adoption of anti-discrimination policies by corporations and academia as a pretext to go after anyone he doesn’t like. But, as a federal judge noted last week when he blocked an attack on the law firm Jenner & Block, “the defendants point to no case holding such diversity initiatives illegal.” This is simply the executive branch inventing a new legal theory and demanding that everyone treat it as settled law.
Harvard, the nation’s oldest university, is also the richest, with a whopping $52 billion endowment. And while it did scale back DEI programs and censor some anti-Israel speech on campus, the university was wholly unwilling to surrender its academic freedom to the administration’s whims — particularly after it saw the “vig” Trump demanded from Columbia University as the price of peace.
In March, the Trump administration announced that it was “reviewing” $8.7 billion in government grants to Harvard, much of it for scientific research.
“Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon raged. “Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”
On April 11, Harvard sued in federal court in Massachusetts, alleging that the funding cuts were an arbitrary and capricious agency action in violation the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, and the Constitution’s separation of powers. That case landed on Judge Allison Burroughs’s docket, and when the school sued again 10 days later over a further round of funding cuts, it designated the cases as “related,” ensuring that it, too, would be assigned to the Obama appointee.
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Harvard docketed voluminous correspondence demonstrating that the Trump administration is using federal funds to both coerce the school into changing its speech, and retaliating against it for speech conservatives don’t like. For instance, a letter signed by representatives of the General Services Administration and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services presented an “agreement in principle” demanding sweeping changes to all aspects of the university’s hiring, admissions, disciplinary, and curricular programs as a precondition of preserving the school’s federal funds.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the university wrote in response. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
That response was signed by longtime Republican lawyer Bill Burck, of the law firm Quinn Emanuel, and Robert Hur, the former special counsel tapped by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate Joe Biden. (Burck was immediately fired by the Trump Organization as an ethics advisor.)
Loose lips sink lawsuits
Trump’s constant public screeds serve as potent evidence that the funding cuts are retaliatory, and any supposed DEI “crimes” are mere pretext.
On April 15, he suggested that 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?’”
That’s an explicit attack on Harvard’s academic freedom, which is protected by the First Amendment. And he followed it up the next day by screeching that “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.”
In case that was too subtle, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon admitted in an interview with CNBC on May 7 that the administration is 100 percent targeting Harvard for disfavored speech.
“Are they vetting students who are coming in from outside of the country to make sure they’re not activists? Are they vetting professors that they’re hiring to make sure that they’re not teaching ideologies?” she said. “They’ve taken a very hard line, so we took a hard line back.”
All these comments — and so many more! — featured in Harvard’s lawsuits.
Put it in writing
Throughout the spring, Trump administration officials continued to send menacing letters to the university.
“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country's higher education system,” McMahon wrote in a particularly unhinged missive on May 5.
“Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence and achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans,” she ranted, making it entirely clear that the administration was retaliating against the school for academic choices — which are very clearly protected by the First Amendment. Accusing the university of engaging in affirmative action after the Supreme Court outlawed it in 2023, McMahon vowed that “Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided.”
Not to be outdone, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem went on the hunt for other ways to kneecap the school. In April, her agency began demanding extensive records on foreign students and faculty under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). The program is a crucial pillar of US soft power, exposing millions of foreign students to American culture and ensuring US access to the best and brightest pupils, faculty, and researchers. It was never intended to be a pressure point for the executive branch to exert control over academic institutions.
And yet Noem has done just that, sending a series of intrusive demands to Harvard for records on its foreign students and faculty — far beyond what is required by statute or regulation — and warning that failure to comply “will be treated as a voluntary withdrawal” from the program.
Harvard maintains that it did comply, despite DHS’s vague commands to hand over lists of visa holders engaged in “deprivation of rights” or “obstruction of the school’s learning environment.”
Nonetheless, on May 22, Noem purported to cancel all student visas for Harvard students.
“As I explained to you in my April letter, it is a privilege to enroll foreign students, and it is also a privilege to employ aliens on campus,” she huffed. “As a result of your refusal to comply with multiple requests to provide the Department of Homeland Security pertinent information while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies, you have lost this privilege.”
Noem announced the revocation on Twitter, accusing the school of “fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
Note that none of these is “failing to comply with the mandates of the SEVP.” And access to government programs is not a “privilege” flowing from the generosity of the Dear Leader, but a right to which all Americans are entitled equal access.
As Harvard argued in its complaint, “the government’s effort to punish the University for its refusal to surrender its academic independence and for its perceived viewpoint is a patent violation of the First Amendment,” adding that the order would immediately revoke the residency status of more than 7,000 students, instructors, and graduates, throwing the entire academic year into chaos.
Here again, Trump’s deranged attacks on Harvard, as well as sycophantic echoes by his minions, are offered as evidence that the revocation had nothing to do with the school’s supposed failure to adhere to the requirements of SEVP.
So far Judge Burroughs has not reached the merits of Harvard’s complaint. But within minutes she granted a temporary restraining order barring the government from kicking Harvard out of SEVP to prevent “immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.” She scheduled a hearing for tomorrow on the school’s request for longer term relief.
And still the president is supplying more evidence that this decision was based on Harvard’s speech, not its failure to comply with the terms of the SEVP.
First, Trump complains that the percentage of foreign nationals matriculating at Harvard is too high, something which has nothing to do with eligibility under SEVP. Then he makes the bizarre claim that Harvard refuses to give the government a list of the foreign students enrolled.
That’s nuts. Accepted students must apply for a visa and be approved by the secretary of state. The government doesn’t need a “list” of foreign students at Harvard or anywhere else.
And the president is still going! Yesterday he threatened to “take” money from Harvard and give it to trade schools — unilaterally expropriating congressionally allocated funds for medical and scientific research and doling it out as bribes to favored constituencies.
Then the GSA put out a letter, first published by the New York Times, instructing federal agencies to terminate all remaining grants with Harvard based on inchoate allegations of antisemitism and “illegal” DEI.
Those TRO motions write themselves!
That’s it for today
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The sheer ignorance of the Trump cabinet members is breathtaking. Says secretary of education Linda McMahon: “Are they vetting students who are coming in from outside of the country to make sure they’re not activists? Are they vetting professors that they’re hiring to make sure that they’re not teaching ideologies?” She seems to think "activists" shouldn't be admitted as students. She evidently thinks "activist" is a bad thing, but I'm pretty sure she'd be fine with, say, a Hungarian student who was all in with Viktor Orbán.
Me, I'm glad that my history and political science professors "[taught] ideologies." I learned plenty about ideologies (including, of course, religions) that have had major impact on the world, including how to recognize their various strengths and weaknesses. Which is how I can see that Linda McMahon is in thrall to an ideology but doesn't realize it.
Trump will, unfortunately, win his fight against international students at Harvard, and American higher education in general, regardless of what the courts say.
Why would the brightest international students risk their critical college choice by rolling the dice on 4 years of chaos, uncertainty, and hostility from this criminal administration when they can select from prestigious universities, in welcoming and stable countries worldwide? They won't, of course, and all of the value that America has traditionally derived from being a magnet for global talent will quickly evaporate.
Everything Trump touches dies, and Americans stupidly and tragically let him re-gain power.