The Trump administration’s fight with elite universities might be its toughest yet because it’s about money — federal research funds that have been given to major universities for decades. On the most recent podcast of The Drill Down, host Peter Schweizer approves of the effort: “We say that’s a good thing.”
President Donald Trump’s budget hawks seek to cut wasteful spending, but that is only part of their goal. What they really want is to see elite universities return to merit-based admissions and viewpoint diversity in faculty and students, an end to campus antisemitism, and elimination of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Columbia University, scene of violent, antisemitic riots by pro-Hamas students and activists, has complied with many of the administration’s new rules for receiving continued federal grant funding. But the biggest one of all is pushing back — Harvard is fighting fiercely.
In fact, Harvard just announced it was suing the federal government late Monday afternoon, claiming the government has cut off funds “as part of its pressure campaign” to force the university “to submit to the government’s control over its academic programs.”
As noted on The Drill Down previously and in news reports, Harvard has upped its spend on lobbying in Washington by about 20 percent, hiring Brian Ballard, a Trump intimate whose firm, Ballard Partners, has done land-office business since the new administration took office. Harvard needs the $2.2 billion it currently receives each year in federal money lest it would have to tap into its $53.2 billion endowment. Several Trump administration figures, including Vice President JD Vance, have suggested raising the tax rates the school pays on its endowment from the current 1.4 percent to closer to 10 percent, a change that would present Harvard with an additional tax liability of up to $500 million each year.
As Schweizer says in the podcast, schools like Harvard are “hedge funds with universities attached.” Research funding by the federal government overall amounts to $60 billion per year.
Harvard’s president Alan Garber issued a statement rejecting the administration’s conditions, citing academic freedom and independence. Yet, as Schweizer notes, the school has always acquiesced to federal stipulations regarding affirmative action programs, ethnic and racial diversity, equity, and inclusion before. The truth is that they simply don’t like these particular stipulations. Schweizer says, “It used to be that universities had to show they were doing diversity programs to get funds.”
In the same way, it is hard to argue on the principle of independence when many of the same schools knuckled under to the Obama and Biden administrations’ pressure to allow male students who claimed to be transsexual in order to compete in women’s sports.
The federal government has paid universities for nearly a century to perform research they believe necessary. The best historic example is of course the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb and led to victory in World War II. What Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers show is that research funding has turned into a cash cow for these schools, allowing them to pad up to 30 percent of federal grants as “indirect costs” that they claim as overhead and then use for other purposes. By contrast, large private funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation allow only 10 percent of a grant to be used on “indirect costs.”
Moreover, just a fraction of the research being performed is in the hard sciences that produce real innovations and product improvements. Much is spent on research Schweizer derides as “airy, fairy, social science crap.”
As Eggers notes, the latest class admitted to Harvard as undergraduates breaks down as 14 percent African American, 37 percent Asian American, 20 percent Latino, 16 percent international, and one percent Pacific Islander. That suggests that, at most, 16 percent of the freshman class is composed of white Americans, who comprise 58 percent of the total US population.
Since 2020, Harvard dispensed with the requirement for applicants to have taken the Scholastic Aptitude Test. At the same time, Harvard has instituted remedial math classes for incoming freshmen, which suggests math skills might not have been up to snuff for large number of those admitted.
Another Trump administration stipulation was for “viewpoint diversity.” This has long been a hot issue for political conservatives who cite studies showing the overwhelming majority of university faculty and administrators are politically to the left — often the far left — and that fewer than 10 percent of faculty members are Republicans or call themselves conservatives. “Viewpoint diversity should be a no-brainer,” Schweizer says.
Yet, those are not Harvard’s only offenses. The school was found to have hidden hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign donations, which are prohibited by the school. Its previous president, Claudine Gay, was forced out after both an embarrassing performance in front of a congressional committee seeking to understand the university’s tolerance of campus antisemitism and after a report detailed more than a dozen instances where she plagiarized portions of her dissertation from fellow scholar Prof. Carol Swain. In 2017, Harvard admitted that there was falsified data in a research paper funded through money from the now-shuttered US Agency for International Development (USAID).
As Schweizer asks on the show, Harvard now offers remedial math, but “do they need remedial ethics?”
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