There were hints last week that something was up between the Trump administration and Harvard. Harvard won in court last Friday and instead of attacking the judge, as Trump tends to do, he posted this positive statement suggesting a deal with Harvard was imminent.
If a Settlement is made on the basis that is currently being discussed, it will be “mindbogglingly” HISTORIC, and very good for our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Did that mean a legal settlement in the two cases Harvard has filed against the Trump administration? Maybe but not necessarily according to the Harvard Crimson. It might just mean a broader deal was being worked out outside of the courts. This was too much for some of the Harvard alums who wrote an open letter Monday to the school begging it not to make a deal with Trump.
Harvard alumni, through Crimson Courage, whose mission is to stand up for academic freedom, sent an open letter to Harvard administrators on Monday morning calling for the institution to resist caving into the federal government.
“We cannot stand for “veritas” if we refuse to stand up for truth when the moment demands it or if we dilute our values because it is expedient,” said the community of Harvard alumni…
“Harvard has benefited from our early embrace of academic freedom as seen in its world-class research as well as its graduates’ civic and business leadership across the world. Standing strong is not merely an operational exercise: it is a moral imperative,” Crimson Courage said.
“The world is watching and needs Harvard’s leadership and courage now,” the organization said.
This is the voice of left-wing alumni who are presumably all well off thanks in part to their Harvard degrees. It costs them nothing to insist that Harvard double down on resistance politics. Meanwhile, Harvard actually has a lot of skin in this game and, behind the scenes, it has been dawning on them that this is probably a battle they can’t win.
Unlike many other powerful institutions that have struck bargains with Mr. Trump, Harvard, the nation’s oldest and richest university, spent much of this spring as the vanguard of resistance to the White House, credited by academic leaders, alumni and pro-democracy activists for fighting the administration and serving as a formidable barrier against authoritarianism.
Despite a series of legal wins against the administration, though, Harvard officials concluded in recent weeks that those victories alone might be insufficient to protect the university.
And while there may be some genuine sense of principle here, there’s no doubt that Harvard feels worried about making a deal because doing so would outrage the leftists that make up nearly all of their faculty.
The internal discussions at Harvard are particularly fraught because among the sticking points with the Trump White House are issues of admissions, hiring and viewpoint diversity. Universities regard admissions and hiring as especially critical to academic freedom — a cornerstone that government oversight could dilute, compromising their independence and infringing on constitutional protections for speech. And Harvard officials are well aware that a deal with the Trump administration on anything related to the school’s academic independence could invite lasting anger from an already anxious faculty…
One by one, whether it was a law firm seeking to head off a crippling executive order or a news organization settling a Trump lawsuit, institutions struck deals and were perceived by some as putting profits — and remaining in Mr. Trump’s relative good graces — ahead of their principles. They were widely derided as capitulating opportunists, a fate Harvard officials are eager to avoid in practice or perception.
Harvard’s academic street cred would take a big hit if they gave their imprimatur to some of Trump’s demands. That and internal dissent are their real concerns.
Former Harvard president Larry Summers thinks there shouldn’t be any shame in making a deal, including one that gives ground on issues like hiring for more diversity of viewpoint.
If there were no conceivable changes for the university to make that would satisfy the administration, he said, there might be no value in negotiations. But, Dr. Summers said, “I don’t hear anyone at Harvard saying Harvard doesn’t need to work at diversity of perspective.”
It sounds reasonable but my own take on this is that diversity of perspective at Harvard is something almost exactly like diversity of perspective in the media. It’s something the media will occasionally mention when they are under pressure, i.e. it’s true that the media is mostly made up of people with very similar outlooks on nearly everything and that’s not idea. I’ve been hearing these kind of tacit admissions for at least 30 years. But nothing ever comes of it. The admission is always seen as enough and no real change ever happens.
I think the same is true at Harvard. Maybe no one is denying diversity of perspective is a good idea. Maybe, privately, some professors even suggest it could make for an improvement of campus culture. But left to themselves it will never, ever change. The same ideologues in the faculty and among the alumni that are against a deal now would be against hiring a single conservative professor and would work behind the scenes to make sure it didn’t happen.
Bottom line, Harvard could do better but it needs a nudge to get there. And for once, it seems enough pressure has been brought that they might feel no choice but to concede and actually do something, at least until another Democrat is President and things can return to normal.
