The Harvard Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Above is the cover and the illustration for its feature section about the University’s “resistance” to President Trump’s completely reasonable, responsible and justifiable demands that the most visible, influential, prestigious and wealthy university in the United States stop dedicating itself to undermining American values, indoctrinating students in anti-American biases, provide intellectual diversity on its faculty, cease discriminating against whites, males and Asians, and stop enabling flagrant Jew hatred on campus.

To Harvard’s credit, the alumni magazine makes a pass at even-handedness, even highlighting an alumnus who writes that “no private institution has a right to demand that taxpayers fund discrimination, exclusion and intolerance.” But most of the issue is devoted to familiar anti-Trump victim-mongering, including an essay extolling the work of a non-binary (or something) professor “whose data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.”

“Authoritarianism” has joined “sexism,” “racism,” “violence,” “insurrection” and other rhetorical weapons of the Left as infinitely flexible accusations steeped in double standards. A President who uses his constitutional powers to pursue policies the Left opposes is an “authoritarian.” A President who weaponizes the legal system to imprison and persecute his political opposition is not—as long as he is a Democrat.

I mean, just to pull a fantastic hypothetical out of the air…

Harvard’s delusion, dishonesty and traditional partisan bias seeps out all over the issue. In its monthly “Yesterday’s News” section, Harvard proudly notes that students and faculty blocked an effort in 1985 to have President Ronald Reagan speak at Commencement and receive an honorary degree. Buried on page 21 we learn that Harvard has “renamed” its DEI office, because everyone else is stupid and won’t figure out that the new Office for Community and Campus Life is engaged in the same unethical, discriminatory activities. Harvard appeals to the authority of past Harvard presidents to ratify its refusal to reform, cluelessly putting disgraced DEI plagiarizer Claudine Gay front and center, as if anyone should care what she thinks after rationalizing campus anti-Semitism before Congress and being forced out of her “historic” Harvard presidency for scholarly misconduct. Harvard must “stay true to its values,” Gay says—you know: socialism, Democratic policies, exclusion of non-conforming voices on the faculty—including “openness and inclusion.” Openness, like dealing with criticism of DEI anti-merit policies by changing the name of the department pursuing them, and inclusion, like maintaining a faculty that at most generous estimates contains no more than 3% conservatives.

I regard President’s Trump’s attack on Harvard’s corrosive influence on the nation’s culture, thought and politics one of his most important and laudable initiatives. I say this as someone who grew up with Harvard as a constant presence, always in a positive way. My father and sister graduated from the college as did I; my mother worked there off and on over half a century, retiring as Dean of Housing. She met my father as a secretary to then President Conant. My Harvard room mates and colleagues are among my longest-lasting (and most tolerant!) friends; I had a wonderful, rich, exciting four years there despite the SDS riots and the leftist anti-Americanism that was already beginning to take over the school.

Yet Harvard has become one of the institutions entirely co-opted by the political left, and is part of the slow, undercover ethics rot that has infested so many of the nation’s institutions and so much of its culture and society while conservatives snoozed: journalism, education, law, science and popular entertainment being hardest hit and doing possibly irreparable damage as a result. In normal times, the intrinsic and traditional loyalty and trust Americans automatically attach to the office of the Presidency would make a mere university defying a President a blunder of epic proportions. In part because of the ethics rot, however, Harvard is emboldened. Its allies have undermined this President to the point where even though the office represents the nation as much as the flag (the Left has also diminished the power of the flag), Harvard thinks it has the advantage on the cognitive dissonance scale over the Presidency in the assessment of most Americans, using Axis-rigged polls to justify its belief.

Well, bias even makes Harvard stupid. It is wrong, and there are many clues pointing to this in its brief, as represented in the alumni magazine. Its defiance is in part grandstanding for donors, faculty and students.

It is in the best interests of Harvard, academia, education and the nation if President Trump wins this battle.