Douglas Belkin
Appearances
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
This is sort of the most dramatic moment in higher education probably in my lifetime. It's been building and building, and this is really a perfect storm of politics, finance, power coming together and crashing, and it's all being manifest between Trump and Harvard.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
As the schools begin to integrate and there are more kids who are black and Latina and Asian coming on campuses than Jewish, we move from this sort of Western civilization curriculum to criticism of the West. And so you've got a lot of sort of critical theorists saying the West is colonialist, imperialistic, racist, patriarchal, and faculty move in that direction.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Conservatives argue that it's become an echo chamber where they're no longer allowing the discussion of other points of view. And that's where the friction really grinds the gears of the conservatives.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
So he, as the frustration rises, Trump seizes on this, just as he seizes on the frustration with immigration. And conservatives are angry at universities, and so he articulates their anger. And he says, the universities have been taken over by Marxists, progressive, radical, leftist professors, and I'm going to stop it.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
And Harvard looks at this and say, we don't want to be in this situation. And so Harvard reaches out to the task force. The task force comes back with kind of a broad list of demands.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
So the letter says, we wanted to make sure who you're hiring, who you're admitting, what they're teaching, how it's being looked at. And Harvard sees this list as tremendous overreach. They are trying to determine what can be taught, what can be researched. This is how Harvard sees it. What viewpoint diversity should consist of. And then it needs to be audited by an external party.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
So what makes the United States higher education system so effective and what makes it different from others is that we have a very ground up, decentralized system. The federal government gives a lot of money to these universities, but they also give them a tremendous amount of independence.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
We have a system of accreditation which helps the universities really maintain their independence and regulate themselves.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
If you get to follow your own curiosity, if researchers decide what they want to figure out and study and follow, they're in the best position to figure out, because they're closest to their work, where that should go. And so innovation on American college campuses is stunning.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Right. And if you start to dictate to us, that's a slippery slope to fascism. That's authoritarianism. That's President Trump gets to tell universities how to think what the professors need to teach. And that sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Harvard takes the letter and publishes it with a note saying this is overreach. This cannot stand.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Harvard is the wealthiest university in the nation with endowment of about $53 billion. So if anybody has the wherewithal to stand up and fight the Trump administration, it's going to be Harvard University.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
They crack down. They had threatened to freeze a bunch of money. They move forward and do freeze $2.2 billion.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Almost all universities, all the universities that you think of when you think of a university, a flagship, a public flagship, a big private, they're all tax-exempt. There are for-profit schools that are exceptions. But yeah, I mean, most of the schools in the United States are tax-exempt.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Yeah, it's really important to the business model of the university. So, first of all, they don't pay property taxes, so that's a big deal. If you write a check for $100 billion to Harvard, then you get to knock off what you're going to pay on taxes. So there's a huge incentive for donors to give taxes.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Well, the two big ones are freedom of speech, that when the Trump administration wants to tell the university who to hire, what to study, what to research, that is infringing on the university's First Amendment freedom of speech. Academic freedom is connected to that. And so they don't have the wherewithal to do that.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
The second case is that if they want to pull this money, there's a process that they need to follow, according to the law, that's time-consuming and takes a long time. They can't just willy-nilly pull this money out. And so they're saying this is a capricious move and the damage could be very, very long-lasting. And so you don't do this sort of thing quickly.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
They've essentially said, see you in court. They've said that Harvard University needs to address the civil rights violations on their campus, and when they get their house in order, then they'll be entitled to federal funds. Well, one of the things that the government says is, you know, if they don't want to...
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
The forces that are at play here are a university system across the country that has moved to the left. And the president is attempting essentially a course correction by what the university sees an invasion of their independence. So this is the culmination of forces that have been heading toward each other, toward a collision for decades. two generations.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
make the changes we have, which the government believes means treating everybody fairly on campus, protecting everybody equally on campus. If they don't want to do that, then they can operate without federal research funding.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, and maybe they can live without the money for a little while. You know, they don't have to start firing people immediately. They can tap their endowment. They have an option to. And so they're a little bit unusual in that situation. So they're sort of, they're the alpha in higher education on that front.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
And there's been a huge surge in donations since Harvard said they would stand up. So they have a lot to gain from their supporters.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
Yeah, there's been a lot of, there was just a letter signed by a couple hundred college presidents saying we are behind Harvard. So they want to defend it. When people ask me what I cover and they ask me to distill higher education, I say universities posture toward the federal government for a long time has been leave us alone.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
But by the way, we need a lot of money from you guys to make this work. The mistake the university made was they allowed themselves, I think, to be perceived as no longer working for the majority of Americans. And that made them low-hanging fruit for a political administration.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
This will change the course of higher education, absolutely. Universities, especially research universities around the country, absolutely depend on federal dollars to operate and to do the research that Americans depend on, that the economy runs on. If that stops, then a system will change. And we don't know exactly how, but this is what's at stake right now.
The Journal.
Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle
This administration is very, very aggressive. I can only imagine that they would figure out different levers to come at them. They want this address. They want this whole worldview shifted. I don't think they're going to stop.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
You've got all of this faculty that very much believe that protest is critical. The ability to speak freely is critical. They believe that these kids are doing the right thing. Some of them are teaching that this is part of, you know, how the world needs to be a better place.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
And a lot of Jewish students begin to feel like they're not safe. They're being screamed at. They don't want to go to class. At one point, a rabbi from Hillel says, don't come back to the campus. We can't protect you. It gets pretty ugly.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
Universities are, especially a research university like Columbia, is dependent on the federal government. The federal government has the capacity to shut the tap off. So the school can't operate without the federal government. And that gave the federal government huge leverage.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So he campaigns on this notion that elite universities have been taken over by Marxist left-wing ideologues. And he is going to stop it. And the way he's going to do it is he's going to cancel the federal funds.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
And so he says, I'm canceling $400 million in contracts and grants. And it's connected to your inability to rein in anti-Semitism on campus.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
That's exactly what he's doing. He has identified an institution in this country that a lot of Republicans are not happy with, and he has leveraged that to his political benefit.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
What the Trump administration would like to see is time, place, and manner restrictions so that if you want to protest something political, you keep it out of the classroom, you let kids you want to go to school go to school and study.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
He demanded that the Middle Eastern Studies Department be put into receivership, which essentially really was the big sticking point with this issue. And it really meant that they rein in some of the most far-left professors in that department. What does that mean, the receivership department?
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So that's when they replace – usually if there's a department that's infighting and just dysfunctional and can't make decisions and is just at each other, they'll bring a chair in from another department to oversee that department. And that doesn't feel good for the department because they feel like we're the experts in philosophy and literature.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
We should be making decisions about what we teach and how we teach it. But if the problems are so hot, they'll put it into receivership.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
Well, that question came to lawyers and they said he doesn't have the grounds, that he's skipping due process and that Columbia should fight him in court and they would win. Do you want to take on the president? Maybe you'll win, maybe you won't. This is what he's been doing with other issues, right? I mean, this was happening with Mahmoud Khalil.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
Right. It's a very aggressive move, and it's not entirely clear what would have happened if the school did fight him in court, but they opted not to.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
— If we allow the president to dictate how we work inside the campus, we give away academic freedom. And they're really anxious to protect that. So that's why this choice was so difficult to make, because you're pitting gold versus principle.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
It was felt most deeply in the medical school. And of course, the irony there is that most of the researchers in the medical school are not involved in the protests, first of all, they're on a different campus. Second of all, they're just not as connected to the politics that are driving the protests on the campus.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So they're a little bit removed from all this stuff, but they're the ones who are bearing the brunt of the cuts. So this decision goes to the president, and it goes to the board of trustees, and the board is split. How they're gonna deal with this, you know, they have different leanings. Some folks, their priority is protecting Jewish students. They see antisemitism on campus.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
They know students who've complained to them. They're not happy. They want it shut down. They don't believe that the schools move fast or far enough. On the other hand, there are board members who say this is, if we give away academic freedom, if we allow the president to dictate personnel and policy, and to some extent curriculum, then you give up a lot.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So kids will be detained if they're wearing the mask. If they're asked for ID, they have to give it to them. One of the things that they actually, the Trump team asked for was discipline of the students who had taken over Hamilton Hall last spring.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
And after almost a year, the Senate faculty actually announced that they were disciplining them and expelling a number of students and suspending a number of other students. So they were doing that already.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So everything is a backstory. In the 1968 protests at Columbia, a lot of police came in and roughed up a lot of students. And so the campus law enforcement at Columbia don't have the power to arrest kids or to detain kids. And so these protests, they have to call in NYPD to break them up. There's now going to be 36 officers with the power to arrest and detain students.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So it's going to expedite discipline on campus very quickly. So that's one obvious thing that'll be clear to kids pretty quickly. If the protests start again, they'll be arrested by Columbia police.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So the federal funding probably accounts for around a quarter of their operating budget.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
Yeah. Most of the endowment is earmarked for certain programs. People give money, they endow a chair, they endow a sports program, they endow something. So only some of that can they use. And they really try not to draw down more than 4% a year because it's for money.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
perpetuity right they want to have the endowment they want to keep it growing they if they have to pull it down they can that's how they would answer that question it's no it's this is to maintain the fiscal health of the university for the long run and so if you're drawing it down very quickly in the short term you're giving that away yeah even even an endowment of with billions of dollars in it you take 400 million dollars out of it every year and it's gonna it's gonna disappear pretty quick
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
Yeah. And he has the potential to take a lot more than that. I mean, he could probably take closer to a billion dollars. I mean, how much money is coming out of the federal government to fund Columbia? It's more than 400 million.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
A lot more. Yeah. The Pell grants, the student loans, he could turn that tap off. He didn't touch all of the research contracts and grants. There's plenty more where that came from. So he could shut that off.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
They now have the right to sit at the table and negotiate the funding. This was a precursor to the negotiations that will lead to the funding.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
There's no guarantee, and there's a lot of people who are very concerned that Trump doesn't want to give them the money back, that he wants to essentially put Colombia on the cross and make an example of them, and that this isn't going to go well for them. So a lot of people were pushing back on this, saying he's not negotiating in good faith.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
Yeah, so this has drawn a huge amount of attention around the country because people are saying if Columbia fails here to stand up for academic freedom, he's going to roll right through the next school and the next school and the next school.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
So that is probably the most significant shift of this entire story is that there's now been kind of a breach in academic freedom at Columbia and that can continue on to schools, you know, more schools down the line.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
He's announced that this task force on anti-Semitism, which was at the point of the spear of this investigation, has announced another nine schools they're going to visit, and then there's 60 more schools that are in various stages of investigation. You know, they include a lot of brand-name schools that everybody's heard of.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
It's like two tectonic plates slamming into each other. And it has the potential to change higher education significantly going forward. We are absolutely in a generational shift. I think we're probably in a once-in-50-year shift. This decision will resonate for a long time to come.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
This fight will almost certainly change more than just Columbia.
The Journal.
Trump's College Crackdown
That's a really interesting question. I think that the kids who are on student visas are gonna be a lot less likely to protest because he's picked some of them up now. There's a chill on campuses. We were down in Florida talking to kids about this last week. There is an incentive to be quiet, to stay home, to sit in your hands, to not raise your voice that wasn't there before.