Harvard fighting back harder against Trump admin than it did against antisemitism

Harvard’s tense showdown with the Trump administration took another costly turn after the White House froze more than $2 billion in federal funding following the Ivy League school’s failure to curtail antisemitism. 

Explaining its decision not to comply with President Donald Trump’s orders aimed at curbing antisemitism, Harvard President Alan Garber said, “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

Conversely, White House spokesperson Kush Desai stated that the Trump administration is “motivated by one thing and one thing only: tackling antisemitism…Antisemitic protesters inflicting violence and taking over entire college campus buildings is not only a crude display of bigotry against Jewish Americans, but entirely disruptive to the intellectual inquiry and research that federal funding of colleges is meant to support.”

HARVARD WON’T COMPLY WITH TRUMP ADMIN’S DEMANDS AMID THREATS OF CUTTING FEDERAL FUNDING

Harvard University Police walk near a pro-Palestinian tent encampment on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 10. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The depressing point that’s lost in this standoff is that Harvard appears to be fighting the Trump administration and the president’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism harder than it has ever fought antisemitism on its own campus. 

Where was Harvard’s fierce resolve when swastikas and antisemitic stickers were plastered near Harvard’s Hillel? Or when a Harvard employee was filmed ripping down posters of Israeli hostages, including those of the slain Bibas babies? Or when an Israeli business school student was surrounded, mobbed and shouted off campus by pro-Palestinian protesters for the heinous crime of being Jewish? 

Harvard is indeed a private university. But unlike Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan which stopped accepting federal funding in 1984, Harvard is still the recipient of billions of dollars of federal funding. That means Harvard is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination against all students, including Jewish students, on the basis of race, color or national origin. 

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An anti-Israel protest by Harvard students and sympathizers. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

Public or private, Harvard has an obligation to ensure the safety of its student population. From harassment. From discrimination. From violence. These are very rudimentary expectations that Jewish students accuse the university of having neglected, leading to egregious civil rights violations and a lawsuit alleging that “Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of Jewish hatred and harassment…numerous students and faculty members at Harvard have openly endorsed Hamas’s October 7 massacre, issuing public statements blaming Jews for their own murders, or otherwise excusing or supporting Hamas’s actions.”

A simple question persists: Why is there so much controversy around measures being taken to protect Jewish students? Had the federal government threatened to cut off federal funding to universities failing to protect LGBTQ groups, would there be such outcry? Of course not. If masked KKK racists stormed a college campus today, threatened to attack black students and the college administration failed to address that threat, would federal government intervention be so roundly condemned? It rightly would not. 

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But once again, in the words of British author and screenwriter David Baddiel, Jews don’t count.