They Mean It With Harvard

Over the past several weeks, there's been growing tension between Harvard and the Trump administration, culminating as of yesterday in an additional discontinuance of $2.7 million in federal grants beyond an already frozen $2.2 billion. The Trump administration itemized its complaints last Friday in a letter to President Garber and the board chair, according to the Harvard Crimson:

[T]he Trump administration delivered a longer and more focused set of demands than the ones they had shared two weeks earlier, asking Harvard to derecognize pro-Palestine student groups, audit its academic programs for viewpoint diversity, and expel students involved in an altercation at a 2023 pro-Palestine protest on the Harvard Business School campus.

It also asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” — and immediately report international students to federal authorities if they break University conduct policies.

. . . And it asked the University to submit quarterly updates, beginning in June 2025, certifying its compliance.

The full letter can be found here. On Monday, Harvard President Garber rejected the demands:

University President Alan M. Garber ’76 delivered a scathing rejection of what he described as “unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community.”

It is not clear if the Friday letter prompted Harvard’s shift from embracing cautious dialogue with the Trump administration to outright rejection. But the new demands show how deeply President Donald Trump and his administration aim to shape the inner workings of Harvard.

Many of the Trump demands are what I would call "point solutions", meant to address particular grievances against the public manifestation of academic prejudice. For instance,

The letter’s language also seemed to invoke conservatives’ arguments that some academic disciplines — particularly fields that study race, gender, and sexuality — are activism, not scholarship.

. . . The letter asked Harvard to check faculty members’ scholarship for plagiarism and conduct plagiarism reviews in its hiring process.

. . . The Trump administration also instructed Harvard to pull recognition and funding from student organizations that promoted criminal actions or “anti-Semitic activity.”

But one of the Trump demands in particular goes to the beating heart of the Ivy League, what makes Harvard Harvard:

The letter also demanded Harvard cease any hiring or admissions decisions “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

. . . The letter from federal officials also requested that the University submit data from its hiring and admissions processes. The data would include the race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized test scores of applicants and candidates.

It’s not clear whether the demands would actually require the University to change its admissions processes — which already must follow federal law. But the administration’s request for data suggests that they want Harvard to demonstrate its reforms are tangibly changing the makeup of its student body and employees.

It's generally acknowledged. for instance by Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah or Jerome Karabel in The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that the admissions process at selective US universities was developed as a means of limiting Jewish presence in student bodies without the explict use of Jewish quotas, and those techniques, developed a century ago, continue with only minor adjustments. In the words of a Harvard sociologist reviewing Karabel,

That is precisely what we see with the history of college admissions. The whole panoply of strategies for reducing the admission of Jews without creating an explicit quota survived. Admissions directors around the country will tell you why athletic preference, alumni offspring (“legacy”) preference, regional distribution, and well-roundedness (the new “character”) remain vital parts of the admission process. They will tell you that without these things, private donations would dry up. Karabel cites the size of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton’s endowments to debunk that assertion. They will tell you that the student body would be too “intellectual” (long the code word for Jewish), not broad enough.

As I've noted here now and then, admissions offices as a standard practice subdivide applicants into "baskets" or silos, many of which de-embhasize GPA or test scores, such as legacies; children of major donors, politicians, and celebrities; athletes; preppies; faculty children; foreign applicants, who pay full freight; and until very recently, explicit DEI candidates. The percentages of applicants in each silo have always been a closely guarded secret, but I think this is a key to why I was so severely puzzled when I arrived at an Ivy campus as a new freshman.

I'd been told that I had to shape my childhood and adolescence to meet the selective-university demands for the best and brightest -- so why, having finally achieved admission to this crème de la crème, had so many of my new classmates turned out to be such dingbats? And not just a few, a lot of them. Probably, looking back, most of them. A lot of the admissions silos had been deliberately designed to filter out the smartest applicants, the Jews, although it didn't hurt that this was increasingly filtering out Asians as well.

I strongly suspect that if universities are forced to disclose the relative sizes of the silos in their applicant pool, the results would be explosive, especially among potential applicants from the middle class. If you attack the century-old admissions hustle at Harvard, you're pulling out one of the legs on the stool that makes the ruling class the ruling class. John MacGhilionn gets the Harvard mystique partly wrong at the Spectator:

For well over a century, Harvard was considered the crown jewel of American education. Presidents came from its halls, and Nobel laureates filled its lecture rooms. It was the kind of place that turned ambition into achievement and ambition into legacy. It symbolized something enduring: excellence, discipline, and elite leadership. The very name carried an air of unimpeachable credibility.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

More precisely, those days never were. Certain applicants in certain silos were in fact evaluated competitively based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, but this was probably never even a majority of applicants. All the others simply hitchhiked on the prestige of the ones in the competitive silos, but the point of the game was to be sure the duller scions of other preferred groups could get in as well.

And think about it for a moment: the level of education Harvard offers its students certainly has to be maintained at a certain mediocre level so as not to challenge the dullards. This is nothing new, either. And Trump is pulling out multiple legs of each stool on which these problems sit.