“Americans are looking at these campuses, like Harvard, and saying, why are we paying for this?”
“Places like Harvard always love to say, we need to look like America, but Harvard and other Ivy League schools don’t look like America because they’re liberal bubbles. And I think that’s the tension that’s underlying all this.”
The Harvard saga continues. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Harvard will fall hard if its fight with the Trump administration continues.
The Trump administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and billions in future funding unless Harvard reforms itself (leading to a lawsuit), and Trump threatened to pull Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
I had a chance to discuss the dispute with Rich Edson on Fox News Live on May 3, 2025:
Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
Edson:
President Trump is escalating his fight with Harvard University. Trump threatened to revoke the school’s tax exempt status. Harvard’s president condemned the move, calling it destructive and highly illegal. Let’s bring in Cornell University Law Professor, and Equal Protection project founder William Jacobson. William, thank you for joining us this afternoon. Harvard says it’s unlawful, do you think it is?
WAJ:
Well, the president can’t just pull somebody’s tax exempt status, that would have to go through the IRS process. So to that extent, they’re right. It can’t just be pulled, but it can be challenged through the IRS process. Famous case of Bob Jones University, which lost its tax exempt status. But that case took years of litigation and went all the way up to the Supreme Court. So while pulling tax exempt status, kind of is like dropping the nuclear bomb in this dispute, it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Edson:
The Universities have promised to address antisemitism, in particular, all the highlights that we saw from the Ivy League schools like Harvard. Do you think that they have done that in good faith? Do you think that they’ve made progress?
WAJ:
The antisemitism problem on campuses, which is also an anti-Americanism problem, anti-westernism problem, anti-capitalism problem, the antisemitism is a symptom of a much deeper problem in higher education. And that cultural clash is really what I think is driving a lot of this.
Americans are looking at these campuses, like Harvard, and saying, why are we paying for this? Why are we funding this? And so that’s a deeper problem.
A lot of what the campuses have done, I think, is window dressing because there’s a core cultural problem on the campuses, which is that for a generation, conservatives have been purged. pro-Israel professors have been purged. At Harvard, for example, 3% of the faculty identify as conservative versus 37% of the American population, 80% identify as liberal versus 25%.
Places like Harvard always love to say, we need to look like America, but Harvard and other Ivy League schools don’t look like America because they’re liberal bubbles. And I think that’s the tension that’s underlying all this.
Edson:
When and how did this all start? I mean, this is a sample of one, but 25 years ago on a college campus, there were liberals, there were conservatives, professors almost invited you to disagree with them, and it was an exchange of ideas. When did that change?
WAJ:
Well, the far left in the United States identified the education system, not just higher education, but also K-12, as a means by which they could change society. And so they put their efforts into it. You’re right. If you look at polling about 20, 25 years ago, the split between liberal and conservative professors with 60 liberal, 40 conservative. So a balance, we always knew academia was a little to the left. Right now it’s almost 30 to one. So what has happened is these activists, such as Bill Ayers and other people who were in the Obama orbit, went into academia and they took over the hiring committees and they only hired their own for 10, 20, 30 years.
So it’s like the boiling frog. By the time you realize it’s happening, it’s too late.
Edson:
The Department of Education is not renewing this contract that is meant to provide mental health funding because there are certain spots according to the Department of Education, that you have to have hiring requirements as part of this. How pervasive is that?
WAJ:
That’s a good example of what seemingly would be a good thing to fund, which is mental health help for students, particularly related to school shootings and other traumas like that. But what has happened is the same activists who have purged academia of conservatives have used these funding vehicles to push Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion into the school systems. And I think that’s the issue with this program is that what was supposed to be mental health counseling for students turned into an activist avenue to push DEI and the racialization of education.
People need to understand it’s not just the Harvards of the world, it’s not just higher education. The education system in general is really in crisis mode.
Edson:
William Jacobson, thanks for joining us.
WAJ:
Thank you.
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Comments
We should not have taxpayer funding for majors that do not make our country better (i.e. anything with “studies” at the end, any of the soft sciences, etc.)
They shouldn’t get any help at all.
Get rid of all the woke professors ad administrators and watch tuition prices go down.
No, that’s not what the criteria should be – it’s a prescription for philistinism, with an institution that offers only what a government bureaucrat thinks is useful. There shouldn’t be government funding to any private university.
Harvard will continue on its way secure in the knowledge it has hundreds if not thousands of former students in high level government and corporate positions. It probably believes it can outlast Trump.
What really needs to happen is an employment ban on Harvard graduates. Do not hire them. Do not accept them into graduate schools. Do not employ their lawyers or consultants. Do not vote for them. Do the same for Trustees. Do the same for their faculty. Attacking the graduates, faculty. and staff in this fashion will force Harvard to reevaluate. If they don’t their brand will become worthless.
We have been paying Cultural Marxist Seminaries to destroy our country within.
End student loans. End Pell grants. End the government grant gravy train. Unless and until you shut off the money spigot, they will not change their ways. If you make colleges front the money for student loans I’ll guarantee you that you won’t see useless degree programs. And that my friends will result in useless professors and grad students being let go too.
Re “useless degrees” – everyone wasn’t meant to be a doctor, lawyer or architect.
Make Trades Great Again, and kick anyone who dares to whine.
we pay b/c americans have been suckered and then guilted and of course threatened with physical violence if they dont continue to allow politicians to run their lives
Americans are looking at Harvard and saying, “Why are we paying for this?”
Well, 53 percent maybe. Forty seven percent of Americans don’t any income pay taxes. And if you count 50 millions illegals, it’s around 90 percent.
I have the Saint Andrews Presbyterian College 1970 edition of the Lamp And Shield, the school yearbook.
After reading through the rambling, three-page Code of Conduct that the soon-to-be educators wrote, it is apparent that the baby boomers that lived in a segregated society and never met “A Person Of Color” until they attended a private liberal arts college where they interfaced with a select few of privileged minorities hand-picked like cotton have no clue to the Pandora’s box that they opened simply to erase a guilt without burden.
Most of us have been saying it for DECADES, but the RINOs were too chickenshit to ever even consider following through and defunding them.
What has federal funding for higher education accomplished?
Higher tuition.
Multiple orders of magnitude of increased in administrative positions, at high salaries, whiles professors languish at cost of living increases.
Remarkably uneducated students who have been coddled into believing that everything worth doing is a joint project, that there’s no such thing as learned on one’s own. In other words, “It takes a village” to do anything.
I see no reason for the US Federal Government to send Federal Grants or give tax free money to colleges. In the case of Harvard they have huge stashes of money so there is no reason not to tax them. Universities like Harvard could let student attend for free, but they charge such high rates for no reason. The Federal Government should get out of the loan business period (except for the military) and leave it to banks.
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