Trump’s clash with Harvard puts higher ed on notice

One of the most important insights of public policy is the understanding that most laws are predicated upon a (stated or unstated) quid pro quo.

Take, for example, the roiling months-long debate about President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda. Think back to the arrest and initiation of removal proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, the green card-holding pro-Palestinian organizer at Columbia University. Critics said that Khalil never committed an actual black-letter crime — and perhaps he didn’t. But the government has argued he supported the foreign terrorist organization Hamas and contributed to a hostile campus environment for Columbia’s besieged Jewish students. Doing so could abuse the terms of his noncitizen legal permanent residence and forfeit his right to be here.

We might view it this way: If Khalil violated his implicit “quid,” he lost his corresponding “quo.”

Many similar examples abound throughout our legal fabric. Consider also Section 230, the 1990s-era technology law: In exchange for helping to “offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse,” as the statute aims to do, a given social media platform will not be treated as a “publisher” for purposes of defamation law. But Big Tech has repeatedly violated the “quid” (suppressing perspectives for political reasons), and now a change to the statutory “quo” is appropriate.

This same prism can explain the ongoing, and rapidly escalating, standoff between Trump’s administration and Harvard University — and Trump’s ambitious agenda to rein in the fiscal and cultural excesses of elite American higher education, more generally.

For decades, American institutions of higher education have benefited from extraordinary taxpayer largesse. Federal government grants and other forms of direct taxpayer subsidizations of universities are legion, not to mention tuition revenue from federally backed student loans. Capital gains of major university endowments are also taxed at the minuscule rate of 1.4% — a fraction of the taxation rate to which the endowments would be subject were they operating as any other type of business or investment fund.

This favorable governmental treatment of higher education is the back-end “quo.” But policymakers predicated that “quo,” long ago, on the corresponding “quid”: American universities, in educating young Americans and instilling in them a love of their faith traditions, their nation and God, conduce to the common good and deserve direct public support.

The basic problem with this argument, in the year 2025, is that — quite simply — it is indescribably and laughably out of touch with reality.

American higher education, viewed as a whole, no longer conduces to the common good. Indeed, it has not done so for a very long time now. William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, published “God and Man at Yale,” a prominent cri de coeur against the liberal educational establishment, seven and a half decades ago. The rise of the Frankfurt School and rampant cultural Marxist indoctrination soon followed. The problem of institutions of higher education churning out not godly patriots but decadent ingrates has been with us for a very long time. But for too long, the higher education “quo” of extra-generous taxpayer treatment stayed constant despite the collapse of the onetime “quid.”

Trump, in seeking to condition federal taxpayer grants to elite universities like Columbia and Harvard on the universities’ bare-minimum compliance with the nation’s civil rights laws, is taking the smallest step possible to recalibrate the discombobulated quid pro quo that has defined the taxpayer-university relationship for decades. American universities retain full 1st Amendment rights to speak, instruct and promulgate however they would like — but they cannot do so on the taxpayer dime when they engage in flagrant racial, ethnic or religious discrimination against applicants and students in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There is also always the “Hillsdale College option” — like Michigan-based Hillsdale, any other school can simply opt out of federal funding. Perhaps they should!

Many notable Democrats, such as former President Obama, have lined up to defend Harvard — the Trump administration’s most recent and outsized funding target. Truly, it is remarkable. The onetime party of the working-class — “lunch bucket Joe,” as former President Biden was once known — has transmogrified into the leading partisan proponent of a status quo in which working-class men and women nationwide subsidize not necessarily the local technical training school, but the distant Ivy League ivory tower. Democrats may not win back the Rust Belt any time soon, but they can at least bank on the Harvard and Yale faculty lounges. And maybe they’re OK with that. I know I am.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer