Harvard shunned conservatives. It deserves to be defunded by Trump. | Opinion
President Donald Trump is trying to reform an education system that excludes conservative students and faculty while promoting a leftist agenda that most Americans have rejected.
President Donald Trump has escalated his fight with America's premiere university by freezing billions in federal grants and threatening to revoke Harvard's nonprofit tax status. The Trump administration has even threatened to block the university's ability to enroll foreign students, who are a lucrative source of revenue for colleges across the United States.
Trump's fight with Harvard escalated after the university rejected the administration's demands that it change hiring and enrollment policies to elevate merit-based admissions and employment over efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
It's ironic that a university founded nearly 400 years ago by Puritans has sunk so deeply into the progressive swamp. It's even more ironic that it's Trump, an Ivy League graduate who became a reality TV star and then president, who is championing hiring and admissions decisions based on merit rather than progressive ideology.
Conservatives aren't welcome at Harvard University
Yet, Trump is on to something vital in trying to reform a higher education system that has long excluded conservative students and faculty while promoting a leftist agenda that most Americans have rejected.
Harvard, with an endowment of more than $50 billion, has received billions of dollars in federal grants over the years, ostensibly for research. But since money is fungible, those federal dollars have helped administrators and faculty tout ideologies that are anti-American and anti-Israel.
Trump isn't wrong to leverage taxpayer dollars in an attempt to force Harvard to course correct. He challenged Harvard administrators to review the ideological diversity of administrators, faculty and students. That pressure is rooted in a desire for fairness, not in a random power play.
While Harvard's leaders claim to value diversity, it's clear that conservatives need not apply. A 2022 Harvard Crimson survey found that more than 80% of the university's faculty self-identified as liberal or very liberal, which was a 6% increase from the previous year. Less than 2% of faculty said they are conservative; no faculty members identified themselves as very conservative.
The ideological divide is so vast that The Harvard Crimson in 2021 proclaimed that conservatives are "an endangered species" on campus.
Your taxes help subsidize Harvard's ideology
It would be one thing for the university to favor progressives over conservatives in hiring if it didn't receive federal money. But American taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund a university where tens of millions of voters wouldn't be welcome because of their political beliefs.
Liberals are portraying Trump's threat to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status as an abuse of power. Although the president shouldn't try to govern by fiat, there's something deeper at work here.
Harvard allowed antisemitic protesters to terrorize Jewish students. It also has excluded certain American speakers because of their political beliefs. And it did so while raking in billions of dollars from the federal government.
Trump is not anti-higher education. He's not even anti-Harvard. He is against taxpayers funding universities that teach America's young people to hate our country and Western values.
Nicole Russell is a columnist at Paste BN and a mother of four who lives in Texas. Contact her at nrussell@gannett.com and follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @russell_nm. Sign up for her weekly newsletter, The Right Track, here.