These days it may not be fashionable to say there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to include as many people as possible. Inclusion is, in fact, a critical ingredient in accomplishing as much as possible, whether it is building a team or building a community.
There is absolutely nothing wrong in acknowledging that some people haven’t gotten a fair shot in life. We have to confront the reality that, since our country’s founding, many men were comfortable with the fact that women couldn’t vote; that many white Americans were comfortable with the fact that Black people were slaves; that after slavery was officially abolished, in a large portion of the country, many were comfortable with the fact that Black people were forced to ride in the back of the bus; and, finally, that many straight men and women were comfortable with the fact that gay people were stuck in the closet.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to learn from our past mistakes. And given the world as it is, where Americans are but a small minority, it is smart, not stupid, to recognize and respect the diversity that surrounds us.
Have we made mistakes as we struggle to adapt to our changing world? Certainly. Have we occasionally disadvantaged a white person as we have encouraged a person of color? Have we unfairly penalized a man to give a helping hand to a woman? Has a straight athlete sometimes lost a spot to a trans athlete? Of course. But ask yourself: For how long have women and people of color made do with limited opportunities? And so, over the long run, who really have suffered the greatest disadvantages?
There are certainly those who have been and are sincerely concerned by these lapses. But in many ways, Donald Trump’s completely exaggerated focus on and hatred of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the strategic work of the rightest of the right wing. It is the last gasp of the biased, the bigoted, and those desperately afraid of the changing world. In many ways, this overexaggeration and overcompensation is the product of decades of mis- and disinformation. It feels to me like the temporary triumph of stupidity in the war against smarts.
Yes, in the short run, they can try to rewrite our history, but the world saw and experienced slavery. We forget and pretend to our detriment and only appear foolish to those who remember and know. Try as MAGA might, unless they burn every book and level every library, there will always be someone who discovers and is inspired by the stunning bravery of Harriet Tubman.
That said, for the moment, MAGA, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk have turned language inside out: Right-wing zealots have appropriated terms like “antisemitism” to demand wholesale restrictions on free speech and prevent open and frank discussion of complex foreign policy issues. Pretending to be outraged by a bias they surely share, and putting severe restrictions on legitimate, necessary protest.
Make no mistake: The current focus on “antisemitism” is inextricably linked to the MAGA commitment to wipe out what they regard as the “woke” agenda. And sadly, that includes attacks on black history, multiculturalism, feminism, even the right to read books that make some uncomfortable:
On January 30, 2025, the Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump is ordering U.S. schools to stop teaching what he views as ‘critical race theory’ and other material dealing with race and sexuality or risk losing their federal money.
A separate plan announced Wednesday calls for aggressive action to fight antisemitism on college campuses, promising to prosecute offenders and revoke visas for international students found to be ‘Hamas sympathizers.’ Both plans were outlined in executive orders signed by Trump on Wednesday. The measures seek to fulfill some of the Republican president’s core campaign promises around education, though it’s unclear how much power he has to enact the proposals. His order on K-12 schools declares that federal money cannot be used on the ‘indoctrination’ of children, including ‘radical gender ideology and critical race theory.’ It says civil rights laws barring discrimination based on sex and race would be used to enforce the order, calling critical race theory an ‘inherently racist policy.’
Donald Trump and MAGA make critical race theory out to be some outrageously unfair attack on American exceptionalism, but the reality, as Britannica notes, is quite different:
Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans. Critical race theorists are generally dedicated to applying their understanding of the institutional or structural nature of racism to the concrete (if distant) goal of eliminating all race-based and other unjust hierarchies.
You might quarrel with the underpinnings of the theory, but think for a moment about the Founders’ support for slavery and the fact that it took a disastrous civil war to only partially resolve that great stain on our history. Is it not reasonable, then, to acknowledge these realities as evidence of a pervasive and powerful racism? And this judgment is only reinforced by the subsequent determination of so many Americans to respond by disenfranchising Black people during Reconstruction and then enforce the painful policy of segregation.
But MAGA is determined to thoroughly discredit any attempts to acknowledge the worst aspects of our history and to thwart all efforts to teach inclusiveness, acceptance, and accountability. Donald Trump is committed to punishing and blackmailing schools, colleges, and universities and actively distorting the very purpose of education.
As the Associated Press notes:
The Trump administration is opening new investigations into allegations of antisemitism at five U.S. universities including Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley, the Education Department announced Monday.
The Associated Press writes:
It’s part of President Donald Trump’s promise to take a tougher stance against campus antisemitism and deal out harsher penalties than former President Joe Biden’s administration, which settled a flurry of cases with universities in its final weeks … In an order signed last week, Trump called for aggressive action to fight anti-Jewish bias on campuses, including the deportation of foreign students who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Along with Columbia and Berkeley, the department is now investigating the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University and Portland State University. The cases were opened using the department’s power to launch its own civil rights reviews, unlike the majority of its investigations, which stem from complaints.
But this is yet another MAGA manipulation, turning upside down the very notion of a civil rights review, not to enhance and expand the rights and opportunities of minorities but instead to restrict the exercise of basic rights of dissent, rights that characterized the successful fights for civil rights.
The Washington Post explores the connection of the larger MAGA agenda with current efforts to penalize our colleges and universities:
The Post explains:
How conservatives are using Columbia as a ‘test case’ to enforce Trump’s agenda … So far it’s the only school to lose federal funding, but it’s not the only target of the administration’s push to combat what it sees as leftist ideology and antisemitism in higher education. Months before Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong stepped down, conservative policy circles were buzzing about ways to force elite universities to change.
Critical of college admissions; diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and campus protests that he lambasted as pro-Hamas, Max Eden, then a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote an outline that presaged what was to come in the new Trump administration. He singled out Columbia as the top target. ‘To scare universities straight,’ Eden wrote in the Washington Examiner, Education Secretary Linda McMahon ‘should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.’
In fact, Max Eden described the very playbook that Donald Trump has just put in action:
… universities get an insanely cushy deal on research grants from the federal government. Research grants tend to cover both the direct costs of the research project and ‘indirect’ costs, which are supposed to cover overhead expenses but are actually used as a slush fund for diversity, equity, and inclusion and who knows what else. … To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University. Columbia was, perhaps, the worst offender in indulging the pro-Hamas campus radicals. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights should initiate a compliance review of every single decision Columbia made. To do that, OCR would need the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests, actions the Trump administration could deem material support of a terrorist organization. Border czar Tom Homan could then revoke every single one of the foreign protesting students’ visas.
If Columbia doesn’t cooperate, McMahon could cut off its research grant funding.
If they do cooperate, she’ll surely find the evidence necessary to cut off its Title IV funding. That would mean that Columbia would become ineligible to receive federal research grants and subsidized student loans, which would jeopardize nearly half of its revenue …
[Emphasis added.]
It didn’t take long for Eden’s strategy to be implemented.
As the AP reported on March 7, 2025:
The Trump administration said Friday that it’s pulling $400 million from Columbia University, canceling grants and contracts because of what the government describes as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus. The notice came five days after federal agencies announced they were considering orders to stop work on $51 million in contracts with the New York City university and reviewing its eligibility for over $5 billion in federal grants going forward. And it came after Columbia set up a new disciplinary committee and ramped up its own investigations into students critical of Israel, alarming free speech advocates.
But Columbia’s efforts evidently didn’t go far enough for the federal government. ‘Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,’ Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement Friday. She later posted on X that she’d had ‘a productive meeting’ with the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, and anticipated ‘working together to protect all students.’
Columbia vowed to work with the government to try to get the money back. ‘We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and well-being of our students, faculty and staff,’ the university said in a statement. It is not clear which research, projects or activities will be affected at Columbia, which operates a medical center among many other functions.
Now, as a working-class kid in the Bronx who pretty much hated school, it was pretty clear to me that if I was going to get a college education, it would be at tuition-free city college and not Columbia or Harvard University. And the closest I got to Harvard was when I lived for a bit in Allston, Mass., and took the Green Line to buy music in Harvard Square. But today I find myself pretty darn proud and impressed by what Harvard just did and Columbia University wouldn’t: standing up to DOGE and Donald Trump and in support of the First Amendment and the independence of American education.
As for Columbia, I twice lived mere blocks away, drank at the West End Bar, had cheese omelets at Tom’s, but I never made it into a classroom. Still, it is embarrassing to see Columbia succumb to MAGA blackmail.
Here are some excerpts from the bullying letter sent by Josh Greenbaum of the General Services Administration, Thomas Wheeler of the U.S. Department of Education, and Sean Keveny of the U.S. Health and Human Services to Columbia Interim President Katrina Armstrong:
Please consider this a formal response to the current situation on the campus of Columbia University and a follow up to our letter of March 7, 2025, informing you that the United States Government would be pausing or terminating federal funding. Since that date your counsel has asked to discuss ‘next steps.’
U.S. taxpayers invest enormously in U.S. colleges and universities, including Columbia University, and it is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that all recipients are responsible stewards of federal funds. Columbia University, however, has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pursuant to your request, this letter outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government. Please ensure and document compliance with the following no later than the close of business on Wednesday, March 20, 2025.
The government demanded the university abolish its University Judicial Board and bestow all disciplinary responsibilities and powers to the president. Insisting that “Meaningful discipline means expulsion or multi-year suspension.” They wanted to control not only how student and faculty are expected to behave but does the teaching and what is taught:
Clearly, this MAGA government is acting to strip Columbia of its independence and commitment to provide a liberal education. In effect, as Eden has urged, the government is attempting to destroy Columbia University and send a message to every other American educational institution. And it seems Columbia University has submitted:
Columbia University agreed Friday to put its Middle East studies department under new supervision and overhaul its rules for protests and student discipline, acquiescing to an extraordinary ultimatum by the Trump administration to implement those and other changes or risk losing billions of dollars in federal funding. As part of the sweeping reforms, the university will also adopt a new definition of antisemitism and expand ‘intellectual diversity’ by staffing up its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, according to a letter published Friday by the interim president, Katrina Armstrong.
The announcement drew immediate condemnation from some faculty and free speech groups, who accused the university of caving to President Donald Trump’s largely unprecedented intrusion upon the school’s academic freedom. ‘Columbia’s capitulation endangers academic freedom and campus expression nationwide,’ Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement …
Earlier this month, the Trump administration pulled $400 million in research grants and other funding over the university’s handling of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. As a precondition to restoring those funds — along with billions more in future grants — federal officials last week demanded the university immediately enact nine separate reforms to its academic and security policies.
In her response Friday, Armstrong indicated Columbia would implement nearly all of them. As ordered, it will hire new public safety personnel and empower them to make arrests on campus, bar students from protesting in academic buildings and revamp its long-standing process for student discipline.
[Emphasis added.]
Here is some of what Katrina Armstrong agreed to:
Having spent time at City College fighting for increased student and faculty participation in the affairs of the college, what we termed “participatory democracy” inspired in part by the work of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley, I am greatly saddened by Columbia’s surrender. To me, academic freedom has always stood at the cornerstone of what often makes college and university life special.
I want to remind you of some of the exceptional work of Timothy Snyder and his “On Tyranny.” Of particular interest is his warning about anticipatory obedience:
By reviewing recent history in Nazi Germany, Snyder accurately portrays the tyrannical attack on critical institutions in a democracy:
Back appropriately enough to the words of Max Eden, because he has urged an unrelenting, full-out war on the leading lights of liberal education. Of Harvard he writes:
This brings us to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision banning affirmative action, which Trump has promised to implement to the hilt. The first step should be forcing Harvard University to comply. Right after the decision was issued, Harvard all but publicly vowed to do everything in its power to violate the spirit of the Supreme Court’s ruling and the 14th Amendment on which it was based.
McMahon should initiate a never-ending compliance review to ensure that Harvard follows the law. She should assign Office of Civil Rights employees to the Harvard admissions office and direct the university to hold no admissions meeting without their physical presence … and Harvard should be forced to provide a written rationale for every admissions decision to ensure nondiscrimination.
If OCR finds a shred of evidence of racial discrimination, Harvard should lose its Title IV funds. If Harvard wants this monitoring to end, it can voluntarily agree to relinquish all discretion over its admissions process. It can select students by a weighted lottery based on standardized test scores and grade point averages. After all, Harvard swore that if it couldn’t discriminate based on race, the ‘diversity’ of its class would plummet. It didn’t. Either Harvard misled the Supreme Court or it’s violating the law. Either way, it has lost the privilege of picking its own students.
[Emphasis added.]
Lo and behold:
Trump Administration Will Review Billions in Funding for Harvard. The move follows the cancellation of roughly $400 million in funding for Columbia and the suspension of $175 million for the University of Pennsylvania. The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing roughly $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard, claiming that the university had allowed antisemitism to run unchecked on its campus.
In a statement on Monday, the administration said that it was examining about $256 million in contracts, as well as an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as ‘multiyear grant commitments.’
The announcement of the investigation suggested that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus but was vague about what the university could do to satisfy the Trump administration. ‘While Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized antisemitism — though long overdue — are welcome, there is much more that the university must do to retain the privilege of receiving federal taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars,’ Josh Gruenbaum, a senior official at the General Services Administration, said in a statement. ‘This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow antisemitism to fester,’ he added. ‘We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.’
In an email message to the Harvard community Monday evening, Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, noted that ‘we are not perfect’ and said that Harvard would work with the federal government ‘to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism … If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation,’ he wrote. He also referenced his personal experience with antisemitism. ‘I have experienced antisemitism directly, even while serving as president, and I know how damaging it can be to a student who has come to learn and make friends at a college or university,’ he said.
The Harvard community responded in a variety of ways. Harvard Magazine reported:
On Monday morning, President Alan M. Garber wrote that Harvard will ‘implement a temporary pause on staff and faculty hiring,’ among other austerity measures, in response to ‘substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.’ The freeze comes a little over a month after the Trump administration announced a change in federal support for research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), on terms that could substantially affect the University and affiliated hospitals …
On March 11, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi Hoekstra, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Emma Dench, and the divisional deans notified FAS faculty colleagues that effective immediately, all graduate students on the waitlist for admission next fall would be denied admission.
In his letter, Garber wrote:
We need to prepare for a wide range of financial circumstances, and strategic adjustments will take time to identify and implement. Consequently, it is imperative to limit significant new long-term commitments that would increase our financial exposure and make further adjustments more disruptive. Effective immediately, Harvard will implement a temporary pause on staff and faculty hiring across the University …
Meanwhile, The Harvard Crimson reports:
The Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors sued the Trump administration on Friday to end its ongoing review of the University’s federal funding, alleging the review was coercive and unlawfully undermined academic freedom. The complaint argued that the review was illegally ‘exploiting’ Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in federally funded institutions, to silence dissent on campus by putting more than $255 million in federal contracts and more than $8 billion in multi-year grants under review.
You can download that lawsuit here.
Harvard’s administration and President Garber wisely hired some of the most renowned conservative attorneys in the nation, Robert K. Hur and William A. Burck, to conduct negotiations with the Trump administration. I imagine negotiations with the Trump administration proved more than difficult because as The Washington Post reported on April 14, 2025:
Harvard University officials on Monday rejected Trump administration demands that the school yield to extensive government oversight and make sweeping changes to governance, admissions and hiring practices, calling the directives unlawful and unconstitutional.
The Post notes:
Garber shared with the campus community a link to the letter of demands, which he called unprecedented, and encouraged people to read it. The letter makes clear, he said, that the government’s intention is not to work constructively to combat antisemitism. The majority of the demands, Garber wrote, ‘represent direct governmental regulation of the intellectual conditions at Harvard. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,’ Garber said.
The government’s five-page letter called for changes to university governance, leadership and student discipline and extensive government oversight. It called for ‘merit-based hiring,’ including a plagiarism review for all existing and prospective faculty members, with oversight from the federal government ‘at least until the end of 2028.’ Admissions would also be audited during that time period, and the university would have to change its screening of international students to avoid admitting students ‘hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.’
The demands would require the university to report international students, including those with green cards, accused of conduct violations to federal authorities, and to hire an external auditor to evaluate the ‘viewpoint diversity’ of the university’s students, faculty, staff and leadership. Another audit would be conducted of programs and departments ‘that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture,’ including the university’s medical school and school of public health. The government also demanded the shuttering of all DEI programs and policies.
[Emphasis added.]
You can read the revised demands of the government here.
And here are excerpts from the letter of response Harvard sent to Gruenbaum, Keveney, and Wheeler of the U.S. government:
At last, a major institution in America is standing up to the bullying and extortion that seems to characterize every action of the Trump administration. Not surprisingly, as Donald Trump’s response on Truth Social makes clear, they won’t relent:
Once again, Timothy Snyder explains what needs to be done:
But, finally the battle is drawn: Trump and MAGA are waging war against intelligence, against learning, against smarts. I know what side I am on.
