Re: Richard Ranville Jr.’s post 103753 of 5/29/25
It would be a very bad thing if Harvard caved, so I find the idea of betting on said outcome a bit like betting on whether neo-Nazis will become a mainstream political movement in America. In other words, it’s a distasteful topic to bet on.
America is profoundly lucky that Trump’s authoritarian drives are being resisted by some of the remaining power centers in America, Harvard being one of them. Even more than the worry that Harvard will cave in the short term, the thing to worry about is that other universities, not as rich as Harvard, will cave (emphasis mine):
The White House is looking to strike a deal with a high-profile school, said the first source, who is involved in the higher education response.
“They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,” this person said.
“They want Trump to be able to stand up and say he made a deal with so-and-so – an Ivy League school, some sort of name-brand school that gives them cover so they can say, ‘We don’t want to destroy higher education.’”
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/31/politics/universities-negotiate-trump-administration-harvard
There’s little reason to think that Trump especially cares about antisemitism or DEI, rather than it simply being a smokescreen to justify his actions. He probably does care about protests (what aspiring dictator does not?). But I suspect that most of all he likes the idea that he can install ideological minders into power centers that he does not currently control, and establish the principle that when he says “jump” the universities ask “how high?”.
Undoubtedly many of the universities currently “in discussion” with Trump are trying to convince themselves that if they just give him this or that, then there will be peace for our time. There won’t be, of course; even in the immediate situation one only needs to look at Columbia’s attempt to bargain their way out of the problem. Nevertheless, the viewpoint is undoubtedly seductive. Given that most university presidents are leftist, one wonders why they have not borrowed a page from the union playbook, and realized that they would be much stronger standing together than separately. Of course, Franklin knew the same basic point:
We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
Notably, there’s no indication that Trump wants to stop funding education or research on principle. As I said in an earlier thread, he probably likes the idea of federal funding for such things, and for the basest of reasons: not because he want to advance learning or understanding, but because it gives him such a wonderful cudgel over a competing source of power. The resulting bargains will be worse than the status quo by leaps and bounds: the universities, rather than being a largely independent source of (soft) power, will be extensions of the executive. Those who think Trump’s actions are in alignment with their own goals of reducing government funding in higher education are kidding themselves as badly as the university presidents who have forgotten the lessons of Chamberlain (link).
After the serious sources of potential pushback have been taken care of (the legislature, the courts, the media, academia, law firms, the military, etc.), Trump will turn to the remaining holdouts and squash them like bugs. Pastor Niemöller got that much right, at least (link). He wrote from bitter experience.
