We are learning that in spite of its grandstanding and feigned defiance of the Trump demands that it stop engaging in left-wing indoctrination, allowing an anti-Jewish environment to fester on campus, and engaging in viewpoint discrimination in hiring (along with other unethical conduct), Harvard is quietly (it hopes) negotiating some level of reform along the lines of the Trump Administration’s letter of April 11.

Quietly, because Harvard’s overwhelmingly leftist, totalitarian-tilting, progressive activist faculty wants to have their campus advance only one world view, the “right” one, and because of the sinister influence of that faculty, its student body overwhelmingly believes likewise. In the Trump Deranged world where most academics, scholars, journalists, lawyers and, of course, Democrats dwell, publicly deriding and defying the President of the United States is simply opposing fascism and the forces of darkness, even if the least intellectually crippled of them recognize deep down that President Trump is on the correct side of an issue. He is on the right side of this one.

Harvard’s leadership knows also, no matter how much it postures, that the government has the means and power to punish the university if it refuses to compromise. After Harvard declared, Travis-like, “Victory or Death!” the administration began a crusade against the university including the stripping of billions of dollars in research funding and imposing limits on the school’s enrollment of international students, another lucrative enterprise. Harvard’s cries of penury are not going to carry much weight with the public, since the school has more cash on hand than many nations.

The Harvard alumni group Crimson Courage wrote to Harvard’s president Alan Garber urging him to maintain his public insistence that “no government should dictate what we teach, who we admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

Gee, I wonder what party that group’s members vote for.

No, the administration is telling the nation’s most prominent and influential institute of high learning that it must be dedicated to education and not ideological indoctrination, stop toxic discrimination, and advocate and model merit, not DEI bias.

Harvard is between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and it entirely placed itself in that dilemma. If the school hadn’t corrupted so much of its foundation in recent decades with Marxists and anti-American zealots, agreeing to advance the values all U.S. colleges and universities should naturally and organically embrace wouldn’t require a significant change of direction.

Tough. The school will have to reform, and knows it.

Good.