Sunday, May 25, 2025

The Trump Administration's Letter to Harvard

I don't have the necessary expertise to fully evaluate the Trump administration's actions against Harvard. But I can say a few things about it.
  The most important letter from the administration (from Ed., the GSA and HHS), the April 11th letter, is here.
   Needless to say, I'm a strong supporter of academic freedom and of Harvard's rights, as a private institution, to conduct its affairs as it sees fit. However, let me briefly state my take on what the administration is up to--it also seems to me to be the strongest case in support of their actions:

Universities have been ideologically captured by the Left (for brevity, I'll capitalize to indicate that here I mean not just the political left, but the political, intellectual and cultural left. These groups are basically coextensive, but I think the distinction is important). This constitutes a major violation of the scholarly and pedagogical obligations of a university--of its telos. It is becoming more and more common and reasonable to worry that universities cannot be saved--that is, that they cannot be preserved as universities, but are becoming instead something else--something akin to Leftist reeducation and idea-laundering operations. (See Boudry making this point in a recent Quillette interview.) This is a threat not only to perhaps the greatest institutional creation of Western Civilization, but thereby to the United States and Western Civilization itself. It is, in the fashionable phrase, an existential threat. This should concern all of us, and, in fact, I think the threat is so severe that it would, in and of itself, warrant extreme measures in response. However, the administration's case is more modest, hence stronger than that: all it is doing is threatening to withhold public funds from institutions--Harvard in particular--that will not address the problem and make efforts to fulfill their scholarly and pedagogical obligations and preserve their institutional telos.
   If universities had been ideologically captured by the right, the same people who are hysterically denouncing the administration's actions would be praising them. For the record, I oppose all ideological capture of universities--I don't care whether it's from the Left or the right. Not that it's even easy to plausibly imagine, currently, the right capturing them. Of course, back in Ye Olde Daye, universities were in the grip of religion and theology. Really, really in the grip.
   I've argued, at my own university, for committing ourselves to institutional neutrality. My department passed a version of the Chicago Statement unanimously years ago. I spoke in favor of it in our faculty senate, and it was clear that it didn't stand much of a chance.
   Anyway: I'm concerned. But I'm concerned about both things: the ideological capture and destruction of universities by the Left, and the administration's actions. But my tentative conclusion is that, given the former, the latter is not only non-terrible, but actually good.

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