(Part 1 is here)

The Administration’s demand that Harvard start acting like a non-partisan educational institution rather than a woke ideology propaganda factory was met with predictable indignation, accusations, and deflections. $2.2 billion in federal funding ticketed for Cambridge was cut after the university refused to submit to the administration’s ultimatum, as Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber rejected the letter’s demands. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote. Apparently Harvard also can’t allow itself to meet its own standards of academic integrity and the duty of teaching students how to think rather than what to think. Garber’s response came after protesters rallied to call on Harvard to defy the Trump administration’s demands, and hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to “condemn President Trump’s attempt to remake higher education.”

I submit that when higher education has become a destabilizing and destructive force in society because it has been taken over by those more concerned with transforming American society than teaching and enlightening its young, it is well within Presidential power and the President’s obligation to take reasonable measures to address that problem.

Significantly, the New York Times’ appeal to authority resorted to Larry Tribe, the once respectable legal scholar and Harvard professor who has become an addled trafficker in Trump Derangement and unhinged rants. Remember this?

So naturally he is the Times go-to analyst. “‘Mr. Tribe said he had heard colleagues worry about how the [Trump threatened] funding cuts could affect their research, but not as much as they were concerned about the larger principle at stake,” wrote the Times. “’I know people at the medical school and elsewhere who are cheering what Harvard did,” Mr. Tribe said, “although they are at the same time grieving for the likelihood that their clinics will end up being closed and that the lifesaving research they’re doing will either be discontinued or put on indefinite hold.’”

What principle? The principle of allowing Hamas-supporting students to harass Jews? The principle of only hiring progressives, socialists or Democrats as instructors? The principle of discriminating against whites and males in hiring and promotions? The principle of admitting overtly anti-American foreign students?

One of Althouse’s commenters trenchantly wrote regarding the screaming over Harvard being told to shape up or else, “Isn’t it absurd the way the Democrat/Liberal/Left authority figures still think they have credibility with the public? We’ve seen the other side of your face, guys. We all know you’re amoral leftwingers who don’t give a damn about anything except pushing the Leftwing agenda. And everything, ethics, norms, scholarship, standards, even laws gets subordinated to that.”

Well said. Conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson wrote today in part, “The administration task force is not forcing Harvard to run its university according to its version of federal dictates. Instead, the Trump commission is simply warning Harvard that if, in addition to its huge sources of private funding, it still wishes continuance of some $2.2 billion in public money from the federal government, then it must comply with existing laws and executive orders… Harvard has no problem with an activist federal government, as long as it is a liberal one forcing all sorts of Title IX or DEI initiatives on private and Christian colleges that apparently lost their autonomy by accepting federal money….Harvard loudly can set itself free by permanently pursuing its agenda on its own $50 billion, in the same manner Hillsdale does quietly with its $1 billion—without the taxpayer’s dime, whether Democratic or Republican.”

Harvard’s endowment is, in fact, over $53 billion. But it is not, as the Harvard Crimson explains, a “slush fund”: it can be invaded for emergencies, but most of the money has restrictions. Unlike conservative Hilldale, which takes no federal funds at all, Harvard, like all of the leftist-dominated educational institutions, is addicted to government funding. It can expect, however, most of the public to be unsympathetic to a school that has more money in the bank than some countries.

The Times line of attack to support its Harvard comrades seems to be crystalizing. “Federal law bars the President from either directly or indirectly requesting the I.R.S. to investigate or audit specific targets,” it writes. And see? “President Trump on Tuesday publicly called for Harvard to pay taxes, continuing a standoff in which the administration has demanded the university revamp its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum. Some I.R.S. officials have told colleagues that the Treasury Department on Wednesday asked the agency to consider revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, according to two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.”

Nicely sourced there, Grey Lady! “Some officials” according to “two people” who can’t be named. If the Democrats had a majority in the House, this would be fodder for another impeachment. But why should an institution that has become overwhelming political and ideologically biased be tax-exempt when it has 53 billion dollars? Isn’t it amazing that the same people who complain about billionaires and want them taxed more heavily shrug off Harvard’s tax-free ride? Why haven’t AOC and Bernie brought their anti-oligarchy crusade to Harvard?

As long-time readers here know, I have been exposing and condemning Harvard’s values and betrayals of the principles it claims to hold dear for many years. I boycotted my reunion and turned my diploma to the wall. Trump’s confrontation with my old alma mater (and my father’s, and my sister’s, and my mother was employed there for decades) is welcome and deserved.