Harvard – UPDATED May 27, 2025May 27, 2025 [Sorry . . . I added one more not-to-be-missed Pinker passage at the end.] Steven Pinker, long-time Harvard critic: In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. [Numerous examples . . .]. So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.” And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.” This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just moved to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as fifteenfold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status. . . . Worth reading in full. Including Pinker’s criticisms of Harvard. Former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust concludes her Memorial Day op-ed: We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up. The “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address all but faded with the overturning of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Only a century later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, did the United States at last fully commit itself to multiracial democracy and the war’s emancipationist vision. But even this belated progress is now being reversed with voter suppression efforts, challenges to the 14th Amendment’s establishment of birthright citizenship and the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, most recently with an executive order abandoning the regulations that have been central to its enforcement. The unfinished work of freedom seems to be in full-throttle reverse. Douglass invoked the “eloquence” of the dead. We should listen to them. As a historian, I have read dozens of these men’s letters and diaries, windows into why they fought, into what and whom they loved and what they hoped for at the end of a war they knew they might not survive. Together they did save the Union, the nation that has given me and so many others opportunities that the war-born imperative of ever-expanding freedom has offered. These men made our lives possible. They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future. We possess a reciprocal obligation to the past. We must not squander what they bequeathed to us. This debt and this duty should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day. We must honor these men, their bravery, their sacrifice, and especially their purposes. We are being asked not to charge into a hail of Minié balls and artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it? Trump’s war on Harvard is ostensibly being waged to root out anti-Semitism, notwithstanding the fact that the University’s 2024-minted (Jewish) president, Alan Garber, launched his Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias months before Trump’s election . . . . . . the 311-page Final Report of which clearly acknowledges the problems Harvard had begun to confront before Trump was elected. “You had me at hello,” as they say (great clip!) — or, in this case, months before “hello.” And yet Trump is waging war on scientists, many of them Jewish, because that’s where the great bulk of the government’s grants to and contracts with Harvard goes — science. Principally, life-saving medical research. Not to obscure courses, sparsely attended, of the kind Professor Pinker references further on in his op-ed: Of course, Harvard also has plenty of offerings like Queer Ethnography and Decolonizing the Gaze, but they tend to be boutique courses with small enrollments. One of my students has developed an artificial-intelligence-based “Woke-o-Meter” that assesses course descriptions for Marxist, postmodernist and critical social justice themes (signaled by terms like “heteronormativity,” “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “late-stage capitalism” and “deconstruction”). He estimates that they make up at most 3 percent of the 5,000 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 2025-26 course catalog and 6 percent of its larger General Education courses (though about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt). More typical are offerings like Cellular Basis of Neuronal Function, Beginning German (Intensive) and The Fall of the Roman Empire. And if Harvard is teaching its students to “despise the free-market system,” we’re not doing a very good job. The most popular undergraduate concentrations are economics and computer science, and half of our graduates march from their commencement ceremony straight into jobs in finance, consulting and technology. And here is the kicker (though, again: the whole piece is worth your time): . . . Mr. Trump’s strangling of support [for science] will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews. The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” Join Indivisible! Join Field Team 6! Spread dis-disinformation! Support the opposition!