Harvard: Promoting un-American values!
President Donald Trump is going after Harvard University. He wishes to compel it to largely align its academic policies and programmes with his views on social justice represented by his opposition to ideas contained in the doctrine of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. He also believes that academic freedom cannot be extended so much as to accept or promote un-American values. For him, American values are essentially based on conservative Caucasian patriarchy. One example of this was witnessed in the very early days of his administration when he said that henceforth America will only recognize two genders—male and female.
In doing so, he went against the view that there is a natural third category which consists of persons who consider themselves as transgender. In a famous judgment in 2014 the Indian Supreme Court ruled that people who were transgender constituted a third gender. The British newspaper The Guardian mentioned that the Court ordered "The spirit of the [Indian] constitution is to provide equal opportunity to every citizen to grow and attain their potential, irrespective of caste, religion or gender”.
The Court’s order has been followed by the constitutional and governmental authorities, including India’s election commission. The Indian Supreme Court’s judgment on transgenders flows from the philosophy that societies and polities should move towards enlarging fundamental freedoms and liberties and recognise that people of different orientations and views, including on faith, so long as they remain peaceful, are equal under the law. This is also based on the notion that they are part of a single humanity. It is ironical that America which was the bastion of promoting these views, is, under Trump, curtailing freedoms and liberties. His attack on American academia is nothing but a desire to limit civic liberties and freedoms.
Trump obviously finds that US academia has, over the past few decades, actively promoted liberalism and emphasized plurality. Liberal thinking, incubated in American academia, permeated parts of the country’s political and social life and were translated into domestic policies. It was also pushed, especially by Democratic party administrations, as part of American foreign policy. Trump’s attack on Harvard university, which is universally recognized as one of the world’s leading centres of learning, is therefore part of his general agenda against academia but it is also specifically directed against Harvard too.
The specific charge the Trump administration has levelled against Harvard university is of following antisemitic policies. This accusation is not unique to Harvard because other academic centres have faced similar charges. They all, including in Harvard’s case, originate in American and foreign students’ rallies last year against Israel attack on Gaza after the October 7, 2023 Hamas atrocity against Israel in which 1200 persons were killed and 251 taken hostages. The participants in the rallies opined that while Israel had the right of self-defence it could not kill thousands of innocent men, women and children in its retaliation to the Hamas attack. The Trump administration has targeted foreign students who took part in these rallies.
There are two clear ways which the Trump administration has considered to ‘punish’ Harvard university. The first is by seeking to deny it funding from the American government for specific programmes. The second is by denying visas to foreign students admitted by the University. Pursuing the first form of punishment the Trump administration wants to adopt moves, as reported in sections of the international media “to cancel all government contracts with Harvard University worth an estimated $100m”. These contracts cover “nine federal departments, from health research to executive training programs. Agencies must report back by early June on which agreements they plan to axe”. According to the Guardian newspaper “It represents the most severe blow yet in Trump’s dismantling of Harvard’s federal relationships. Since April, the administration has already frozen $3.2bn in research grants”.
While it is estimated that the Harvard university which was established in 1636 is estimated to have around US $ 53 billion in endowments it has problems in diverting funds of many of these endowments because they were made for specific purposes. Hence, the denial of US government funds means that programmes, many in areas of the liberal arts and courses for social science research, would have to be given up. Naturally, the Trump administration can be expected not to choose those areas to deny funding that are connected with cutting edge scientific and technological research which is essential for the maintenance of American superiority in these areas of knowledge. It would target those that it considers promote what it considers are un-American values.
The second area of attack on Harvard university is through a decision to limit the number of foreign students that the university would be allowed to admit. The Trump administration can do so through denying or delaying visa applications of those whom Harvard has admitted. The New York Times has reported the consideration of moves “to revoke the school’s ability to enroll foreign students.
The college immediately challenged that decision in court, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked the policy. Still, the State Department has since halted interviews abroad with foreign citizens applying for student and exchange visas as the government expands its scrutiny of applicants’ social media posts, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that the Trump administration would begin revoking student visas for Chinese citizens”. On his part Trump recently told the media that the slots given by Harvard were at the cost of American students who were denied admissions because foreign students were admitted. He is obviously playing to his own anti-elitism constituency.
The Trump-Harvard differences will be watched closely by the academia and governments the world over for they will show how far Trump is willing to go to harm America’s iconic institutions in pursuit of his policies and if and when other organs of state will be willing to state ‘enough is enough’.
