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In his first 100 days in office, Trump has gone after political enemies [ [link removed] ] and law firms [ [link removed] ] and universities [ [link removed] ] and the press [ [link removed] ], threatening anyone who isn’t submissive with the full might of the U.S. Presidency. So it was reassuring to see that Harvard refused to cave to Trump’s demands [ [link removed] ].
I don’t know where this fight ends, and I’m not here to comment on the (il)legality or (im)morality of what Trump is doing—plenty of other people are doing that.
What I do want to discuss: nominally, the pretense for this is Harvard’s antisemitism [ [link removed] ]. This is nonsense.
Trump and his administration do not care about antisemitism.
By using antisemitism as the nominal pretense to exact personal and political revenge, what they’re doing is bad for Jews, bad for the fight against bigotry, and bad for the country.
I’m Jewish, and Jewish issues are personal to me [ [link removed] ]. There are real issues with antisemitism and bigotry on college campuses that we need to fight.
But this fight is about academic freedom, research, and an overreaching executive keen to use the Jews as a political tool.
Article summary:
Antisemitism on college campuses is real, but today’s Republican Party has profound issues with antisemitism in their own ranks that they’ve never bothered to address. They don’t care about actually helping Jews.
Political bias on college campuses is a real challenge too. But Trump’s proposed remedies constitute breathtaking overreach without serious solutions.
Cutting funding for research at these institutions won’t solve antisemitism and won’t solve political biases. Funding cuts will, however, hamstring our ability to do life-saving medical research and stunt the growth of future scientists and researchers.
Antisemitism and political bias on college campuses are real problems
We need to be clear about both up front. Democrats and the political left have done a piss-poor job acknowledging that these are two very real issues.
First: there is a very real political bias among university professors.
Relative to the U.S. population, university professors are twice as likely to be liberal, and they’re significantly more liberal than even Americans with postgraduate degrees, the country’s most liberal demographic (by education). At places like Harvard, the disconnect is even more stark [ [link removed] ].
Second: antisemitism on college campuses is a real problem. Hillel reports that the number of antisemitic incidents on college campuses is 7× higher [ [link removed] ] than it was before October 7. Dozens of Hillels and Chabad houses have been threatened, attacked, and vandalized [ [link removed] ].
Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism found that [ [link removed] ], “Jewish and Israeli students also have been targeted with violence…and threats.” At Berkeley [ [link removed] ], Harvard [ [link removed] ], Temple University [ [link removed] ], University of Texas [ [link removed] ], University of Michigan [ [link removed] ], DePaul [ [link removed] ], University of Rochester [ [link removed] ], and countless other schools, there have been very real antisemitic incidents.
Like the rest of the country, Jews moved to the right in the 2024 election. This is a huge part of the reason why. (Jews still overwhelmingly supported Harris over Trump.)
Republicans, to their credit, saw the political potential here. And if they were sincere about addressing academic freedom and antisemitism, I’d be more inclined to support what they say they’re trying to do.
The problem is that they’re not. The Trump administration is not sincere about addressing these issues. They want to assert power, nothing more.
Trump (and other Republicans) don’t care about solving antisemitism
Trump does not care about addressing antisemitism. If he did, he certainly has had a lot of chances to say something in the past:
There is literally a Wikipedia page titled “Donald Trump and antisemitism [ [link removed] ],” which is never a great start. And even beyond that, Trump deploys all the same language [ [link removed] ] that antisemites across the internet use: “globalists,” “billionaire puppeteers,” etc. Trump actively fans the flames of QAnon [ [link removed] ], which has strong roots in antisemitism [ [link removed] ].
Trump was extremely reluctant to condemn the Klansman and Neo-Nazis—the ones walking around and chanting [ [link removed] ], “Jews will not replace us!”—at the Unite the Right rally [ [link removed] ] in Charlottesville in 2017.
Trump invited Nick Fuentes and Kanye West [ [link removed] ] to Mar-a-Lago for dinner in 2022. Fuentes is an avowed antisemite [ [link removed] ] and Kanye recently said, “I’m a Nazi [ [link removed] ].” For this, Trump faced no lasting backlash from elected Republicans.
Trump [ [link removed] ], along with Vice President J. D. Vance [ [link removed] ], Governor Ron DeSantis [ [link removed] ], Governor Greg Abbott [ [link removed] ], and an impossibly long list of Senators and members of the House have all talked up different George Soros conspiracies [ [link removed] ]—which is plainly antisemitic.
Let’s not forget Elon Musk, who shares his own antisemitic conspiracies [ [link removed] ] and allows antisemitism to flourish [ [link removed] ] on Twitter. Bobby Kennedy, our HHS Secretary, talked about COVID being “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews [ [link removed] ] and his political career has only blossomed since then.
The so-called Great Replacement Theory that motivated the mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 [ [link removed] ] is openly shared [ [link removed] ] by everyone from Trump to Tucker Carlson to Rep. Elise Stefanik. Frighteningly, voters have responded in kind—one-third of Americans [ [link removed] ] buy into this conspiracy.
Unfortunately, this list isn’t exhaustive—I could go on for a while.
Republicans have been vocal about addressing antisemitism when it scores them points against political adversaries. But do they actually care about addressing antisemitism? Has Trump ever called out a Republican on this?
No, of course not. But imagine the outrage if any of this came from Democratic elected officials! Imagine the crocodile tears [ [link removed] ]!
So when his administration talks about antisemitism [ [link removed] ] as the motivating factor for why they’re going after Harvard and higher education, it rings totally hollow.
Trump’s demands for Harvard are about asserting control
When it comes to antisemitism, the Trump administration is happy to cut funding for local Holocaust museums [ [link removed] ] or for essential security services that keep synagogues [ [link removed] ] (and other religious congregations) safe.
But for an administration that’s nominally about smaller government, they sure want the government involved in a lot of things when it comes to “addressing antisemitism” at Harvard. Non-exhaustively, here’s what’s included [ [link removed] ] in their list of demands:
“All hiring and related data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit…”
“Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity…” (No clarity is given for who gets to define this or what specifically this means.)
Ban certain student groups and “reform its student discipline policies.”
“Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.”
Harvard, rightly, didn’t comply with this sort of insane overreach. And since then, the Trump administration has pulled funding [ [link removed] ], threatened the University’s tax exempt status, threatened the visas of foreign students, and more.
That’s not policy-making. That’s extortion.
Real problems, fake solutions
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.”
That was a quote from a recent op-ed [ [link removed] ]. It feels particularly resonant in this context: the federal government is using Jews and antisemitism as a tool to accomplish its political goals. If they really cared about antisemitism, then they’re awfully silent when it comes to bigotry in their own ranks.
A few final thoughts on all of this:
We need to address antisemitism in the United States. These sorts of policies don’t advance the cause, but they do politicize an issue that shouldn’t be politicized. For all the reasons I outlined above, I cannot trust the Trump administration or today’s Republican Party to actually make things better for Jews.
Campuses have always leaned left, but in this moment of intense political division, addressing political bias on college campuses is obviously important. But for the federal government to insist on what students and faculty can and cannot believe is impractical and, more to the point, totally un-American.
All Americans will suffer if we start cutting funding for research at universities.
We’ve made remarkable gains in public health [ [link removed] ] in the last 50 years, in no small part because of research support from the federal government. And perhaps even more importantly, we’re training the next generation of scientists—Americans by birth or Americans by choice—who lead research in everything from cancer to HIV/AIDS to childhood diseases.
Instead, in the name of political vengeance, we’re making it harder for the world’s best and brightest to learn and research, and we’re slashing funding for causes that improve all of our lives.
What Trump is doing isn’t just totally ineffective in addressing antisemitism and political bias. What he’s doing is bad for economic growth, bad for our health, and bad for the quality of all of our lives.
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