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Harvard decides to decline Trump's administration's "agreement in principle" for continuing to provide Federal grants and contracts. The Trump administration freezes their $2.2 billion funds.
Unlike Columbia, Harvard is willing to send a costly signal that it is, indeed, an elite private university, and it plans to stay that way.
The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:
I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.
The way I see it, what makes Harvard University elite is that it both draws and correctly chooses the elite. The elite want to go there because other elite will be there, and admission of the non-elites is carefully curated for their usefulness. It's like an exclusive party that's awesome because a whole bunch of awesome people are there, and boring people aren't, with a few useful wingmen. If the party's host was required to invite a bunch of boring people, the party will break up as awesome people take off. There might be a brief party hiatus for the awesome people as they coordinate where to have the next awesome exclusive party, but awesome people seem to coordinate pretty quickly, so that party will resume. Just not at the current host's place.
So Harvard looked at the $2.2 billion, looked at their party, and decided to party on.
Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
Woke Right theory wins again?
The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening. They can probably fight and defeat a lot of Trump's demands in the courts, but I don't think they can fight them all.
-The total amount of funding to Harvard under review is 9 billion, 2 billion was just frozen, so there is another 7 billion for them at risk.
-Trump has also threatened their tax exemption status (501c3) per the BBC. From what I can tell there is precedence for stripping tax exemptions status due to racial discrimination in admissions. See the Bob Jones case below. Now connect the dots with SFFA vs Harvard.
-They can also threaten their accreditation status - no accreditation, no federal student loans.
-Another avenue would be sicing the DOJ on Harvard Professors. If you receive a federal grant and plagiarize or fake data then that is fraud. There is history of professors getting prison time in egregious cases. A bit further reach that I am not fully sure of would be charging plagiarists with wire fraud - if you knowingly plagiarize a paper, put that paper on your CV, and then got a job with that CV then wire fraud charges might be possible. I think it would be hard though, from what I can tell you would have to prove that the plagiarist got the job from your plagiarized paper. You'd have to prove knowingly plagiarism too, and I think that might be hard to prove to a jury. Even in the case of someone like Claudine Gay.
-Last, but still impactful, would be revoking or denying student visas. They have already been doing this. Foreign students are a quarter of the student body.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz01y9gkdm3o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United_States
Revoking Harvard's accredited status wouldn't harm Harvard, it would destroy the concept of accreditation.
I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.
The story will not fully be "Trump targeted us unfairly and stripped our accreditation". It will also include "they already got sued and lost for being racist (SFFA v. Harvard), they refused to stop being racist, now they lost their accreditation. Also antisemitism." Yes Harvard will always be a prestigious institution, yes it would survive the loss, but its still a pretty big egg in the face. I'm not sure they can spin their way out of it. Especially after SFFA v. Harvard.
Students losing ability to transfer credits, losing federal subsidized loans, no student aid would all follow the loss. None of which I think would matter too much, of course everyone will still clamor for Harvard. But accreditation as a concept will survive for these things alone, Pell Grants and subsidized loans may not matter to Harvard students, but they sure do matter for almost everyone else.
And if accreditation were destroyed - what does the current administration lose?
They're Harvard. The US News college rankings list is irrelevant to them. US News would probably modify their policies to keep them there, because not having Harvard on the list would hurt the authority of the list more than it would hurt Harvard.
Thinking otherwise is, ironically, a form of woke reasoning.
I’m curious what you mean by this (sincerely).
Progressives see a measure of prestige that implies a hierarchy with some people or institutions ending up with less, and try to "fix" this by rejiggering the measure to be more fair on the grounds that prestige will then be more fairly divided, ignoring that some hierarchies are not purely arbitrary and can't be molded that way.
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