You’ve likely seen that Harvard officially and publicly refused the Trump White House’s latest set of demands. You can see the letter here. I would say that if you’re going to read only one letter, it should actually be the one the White House (notionally the GSA, HHS and Education) sent to Harvard, which the university published along with its response.
It’s a very clarifying letter. It’s not too much to say it essentially demands operational control over the whole university or perhaps more specifically a kind of receivership of the sort police departments sometimes go into under consent to decrees after they’re caught framing or torturing prisoners. When I first read it I was not … well, certainly not happy to see it but it occurred to me that the demands were not only substantively of an indefensible character but also very tenuous legally. It’s good to have this fight on these grounds because, as I said, they demand to put the entire university under the direct control, down to hiring, curriculum, admissions and more, of MAGA operatives. It’s been suggested to me by one person familiar with the university’s decision-making that waiting for the White House to spell out all its demands on paper may have been by design to put the university’s refusal on the surest legal footing. If that’s the case, it was smart to wait.
I’d really recommend reading the letter. Among other things, it requires the university to hire a cadre of White House-approved commissars to ensure that MAGA conservatives are equally represented, not only at the university level but at each individual department, teaching and research “unit” — both in hiring and admissions. The White House demands that every department and unit be “audited” by the outside commissar group for “viewpoint diversity.” Each department or unit found not to have sufficient MAGA representation (defined as “viewpoint diversity”) “must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty” to “provide viewpoint diversity.” Same language but with respect to admissions. Any department or unit which lacks MAGA representation must admit a bunch of new, MAGA, “viewpoint diverse” students. Again, it’s just one example.
I’ll also note that, as of today, the university’s webpage has been remade into essentially an advertisement for the societal/human impact of university research. The splash headline is “Research Powers Progress” followed by the tagline line: “Research at Harvard — from medicine to technology to education and business — touches countless lives, moving us closer to disease cures, next-generation technology, and a more secure future for millions of people.”
I don’t want to be too fawning. But this is how you do it.
