Oh, please.
The Trump administration could not give a rat’s behind about antisemitism. They’re just using it as a pretext to stifle dissent and dismantle the colleges they see as hostile to their worldview.
Their threats against scores of schools aren’t really about protecting Jewish students on campus. They need an excuse to gut funding for the kinds of study that makes citizens more likely to resist their agenda, to shut down speech they don’t like, and to wind back decades of civil rights advances that have made our institutions of learning better reflect the whole country.
It’s all there in Project 2025, the detailed policy blueprint the second Trump administration is following to the letter. It calls for defunding liberal arts colleges and replacing America’s whole story with a selective mythology in which only white people are the heroes.
“We must aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vice President JD Vance said in a 2021 speech titled, in case you had any doubt, The Universities are the Enemy. “Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”
Authoritarians always attack the universities.
“In democratic societies, universities are pretty influential centers of dissent,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of Government and Latin American Studies at Harvard. “It’s difficult to find an autocrat who didn’t go after universities.”
The Trump administration is pulling, or threatening to pull, billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts from schools in an effort to bring them to heel, and it’s generally working: Faced with the prospect of losing $400 million and threats to withhold even more, Columbia folded like a cheap lawn chair. Among other shameful capitulations, the school promised to further crack down on protesters, and reach into several international studies departments to make them more palatable to reactionaries. None of it has satisfied Columbia’s tormentors, though. Concessions only encourage bullies.
On Monday, the administration renewed its attacks on Harvard, threatening the school and its affiliates with a hit of $9 billion, accusing the university of failing to do enough to combat antisemitism and of “promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry.”
They say it’s all about combating the bigotry that marred student protests last year over Israel’s assaults on Palestinians in Gaza, after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis in the heinous attacks of October 2023. As the massive crowds protesting in Israel’s streets make clear, it is not antisemitic to criticize the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been laying waste to Gaza. But some of the students and others associated with the campus protests here did truck in hateful rhetoric that leapt over the line into antisemitism. That has been rightly condemned, and universities are correctly examining how they balance constitutional rights with the safety of all students.
However, that real problem has given MAGA zealots a foothold for wider attacks on academic freedom and vital research, and for targeting individual students and faculty members. We know it’s a pretext because the Trump administration is itself lousy with antisemitism, starting at the top. The president, remember, described actual Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., yelling “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people.” He recently called the hateful 2017 march “a little peanut” compared to campus protests over Gaza. He has cozied up to white supremacist groups replete with antisemites, and hosted noted Hitler fans Ye and Nick Fuentes at Mar a Lago. He cleared the way for misogynist gurus Andrew and Tristan Tate to travel from Romania, where they face sex trafficking and rape charges, to the United States. Andrew Tate is virulently antisemitic, throws up Nazi salutes, and has actually praised Hamas for the massacre of 2023. Trump has described Jews as having dual loyalty and demonized George Soros. He said if he lost the 2024 election, Jews would be to blame.
Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire who is basically running the country, gave a Nazi salute in January, and recently promoted a post that said, “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”
The rot goes on, but you get the drift.
So far, universities, like other crucial institutions, including big law firms and corporations, have mostly chosen to play along, placating the administration in the hopes of saving themselves, rather than fight this almost certainly illegal overreach. On Monday night, Harvard president Alan Garber responded to the threats with a letter in which he acknowledged that antisemitism is still a problem on campus and outlined Harvard’s efforts to combat it.
There was no indication that he intends to fight Trump’s incursions on academic freedom, which infuriates many at the school. So far, about 800 faculty members have signed a letter circulated by Levitsky and a colleague calling on Harvard to push back on the administration. He said “dozens and dozens” more faculty members would have signed, but without tenure or citizenship, they were afraid of losing their jobs or being deported.
“Garber and others are very smart people,” Levitsky said. “They know it’s a pretext. They know appeasement is not going to work.”
Harvard’s decision makers are not acting as if democracy is at stake here. If they roll over, they might — might — protect themselves from deeper cuts, but at what cost? Do they really want MAGA telling them what to teach, who to punish, and how to run the university? Besides, over the last year or so, Harvard has already taken a bunch of the steps the administration demanded of Columbia, to the distress of some on campus.
“There is no price tag on academic freedom,” Levitsky said. “If the most prominent members of our civil society — the most influential law firms, the universities, and other civil organizations — if they all retreat to the sidelines … we will lose our democracy.”
This is a time for choosing. If giants like Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia won’t join forces and stand up in the courts and on the streets, then less powerful and well-resourced colleges won’t stand a chance. Nor will the rest of us.
“Future generations are going to read about this moment,” Levitsky said, “and they are going to say, ‘What the hell were these people thinking? Why didn’t they act?‘”
Maybe the colleges won’t win. But are they really going down without a fight?
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.
This post was originally published on here
