What I Learned From The Alumni Trustee Movement

Every now and then, calls appear for greater involvement of university alumni in governance and decisionmaking at their respective schools. I'm not entirely sure why alumni are especially qualified to do this, especially in light of the general decline in educational standards -- if the value of a four-year degree is decreasing, why should the university seek out the guidance of former students who are its own low-quality product?

After a lifetime, I'm able to ask that question now. I didn't ask that question 25 years or so ago, when I got involved in the alumni trustee movement at Dartmouth. I think the best argument I heard was in effect that membership on university boards is dominated by very wealthy donors who are representing largely plutocratic interests, and the selection process bypasses potential candidates who may represent other points of view.

In the case of Dartmouth, the unique history of its board offered a potential test case:

The system of alumni balloting to determine a nominee dates to the late nineteenth century. In 1876, Dartmouth's Board of Trustees resolved to fill some upcoming vacancies with alumni. Vacancies were rare at the time, however, and the number of alumni seated was small; most of the members of the Board were still elderly non-alumni clergymen who were seen as theologically and educationally conservative. In 1891, in what came to be known as "The 1891 Agreement", the Board of Trustees resolved to elect five trustees who had been nominated by the alumni of five years' standing. The nomination process would be handled by the Association of Alumni of Dartmouth College, of which every matriculated student becomes a member automatically upon graduation. Soon after the Board issued its 1891 resolution, five members resigned to open seats for the new nominees, and Dartmouth's first effective means of granting alumni influence on the composition of its Board was under way[.]

Not mentioned here is the circumstance that Dartmouth at the time was undergoing a financial crisis, and the board reached out to alumni for donations. The so-=called "alumni trustees" were estalished in return for the financial help, which was the essence of the "1891 Agreement". Throughout the 20th century, the nomination process for the alumni trustees was gradually modified, but until 1980, there was no effective dissagreement among trustees of any constituency.

Alumni trustees were nominated by a body called the Alumni Council, which appears always to have been an old boy network. In 1980, however, a San Diego urologist, Dr John Steel, successfully campaigned for nomination and election to the board as an alumni trustee via a previously unused petition process outside the old boy network. In yesterday's post, I referred to what I called called the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion of the mid 2000s; the one initiated by Dr Steel was the first.

Steel certainly showed that this could be done, and the Second Rebellion could not have taken place without Steel's pathfinding example. I interviewed Steel for The Dartmouth Review about 2005. Steel was generally aligned with the Review's founders, and his campaign in 1980 was contemporary with the Review's founding. He appears to have been close to then-Dartmouth English professor, National Review senior editor, and founding Dartmouth Review faculty advisor Jeffrey Hart.

By Steel's own account, he was hardly an insurgent. He was a prosperous physician, so the much more wealthy charter trustees didn't see him as a threat, although he was fully aware that he flew commercial to board meetings, while the charter trustees had private jets. And Steel had personal qualities that made it easier for him to get along with everyone on the board. He saw there was a general consensus among members to do the best thing for the institution, and insofar as he exerted influence, it was as a member of the overall consensus.

It appears that after Steel, things settled down again, and there were no new petition candidates for alumni seats on the board until 2004, when Silicon Valley billionaire T J Rodgers ran for the alumni nomination as a petition candidate, only the second to do so after Steel. Rodgers was much more vocal, but I'm not sure if he had a definite program, and in any case, he was only one vote on the board, which operated by consensus.

But this provided an opening for two more petition candidates in 2005. That year, Todd Zywicki, an ambitious young law professor building his career, and Peter Robinson, a Jeffrey Hart protégé who'd become a Reagan White House speechwriter on Hart's influence, were nominated and elected. Robinson, a C-lister in the conservative movement ever since, claims to have written the line, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" for Reagan's 1987 address at the Brandenburg Gate -- and that's it. That was his one accomplisment.

Zywicki did neither himself nor the alumni trustee movement any favors. He characterized himself as an insurgent candidate, and his style was characterized as "open and oppositional". Mattters came to a head in 2007 when he addressed a conservative conference, making the point that he was a member of the Dartmouth board, and opened himself to allegations that he violated board policy:

On November 26, [2007], The Dartmouth published a column called In Violation of a Trustee’s Duty, by Bill Montgomery of the Dartmouth Class of 1952. The article called for Todd Zywicki’s punishment or forced resignation as a member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees because of remarks made by Zywicki while speaking at the 2007 Pope Center Conference.

According to Montgomery, Zywicki’s “most egregious statement” called former Dartmouth president James O. Freedman “a truly evil man.” As Zywicki explained in a powerful defense, this was not his own phrase but a quotation that he failed to attribute to Jeffrey Hart. Zywicki also apologized for its use as too excessive.

. . . Montgomery’s main argument for punitive actions against Zywicki suggests that Todd’s right to free speech ended when he became a Dartmouth trustee: “if he was only speaking for himself, he could speak as he pleased…when he became a member of the Dartmouth board, Zywicki accepted the obligation to follow board guidelines for conduct as clearly spelled out in the Statement on Governance and Trustee Responsibilities.”

While Zywicki wasn't removed from the board immediately, the trustees subsequently denied him a second term when his first term expired in 2009. A second controversy developed around another petition trustee, Stephen Smith, who was elected to the board in 2007. His term expired in 2011, and soon after its expiration,

Professor Stephen F. Smith, who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure at Notre Dame Law School, stands accused of a serious crime.

According to the South Bend Tribune, Professor Smith faces one count of domestic battery, a class D felony. He’s accused of striking and kicking his wife at their home, in an incident that allegedly took place back in June.

Professor Smith doesn’t fit the profile of the typical defendant in a domestic violence case. How many DV defendants have clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court? How many have graduated from Dartmouth College, where Smith served as a trustee, and the University of Virginia School of Law, where he once taught?

It appears that, like they did with Zywicki, the board did not approve a second term for Smith, and he was off the board by the time the violence took place. But there can be little question that the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion of the mid-2000s simply didn't produce serious candidates, unlike the first one of 1980. The biggest problem was that grandstanding, ambitious board members like Zywicki and Smith simply didn't have personal styles or personal qualities that allowed them to work successfully with wealthy people who flew in private jets and made a point of staying out of the news.

I also suspect that none of the Second Rebellion candidates had much of an agenda beyond self-promotion. Again, this didn't play well with plutocrats who employed publicists to keep them out of the nees, not in it. A third factor was that Jeffrey Hart, the force behind both rebellions, and whose friends and protégés made up the candidate pools, was slipping into dementia in the 2000s -- by 2008, he endorsed Obama for president, and as a sometime contributor to The Dartmouth Review, I had the sense that the staff was covering for him.

At some point when the whole project had collapsed and both Zywicki and Smith were effectively in disgrace, somebody approached me to see if I'd run as a petition candidate. I couldn't decline fast enough.

When I first became interested in the project, I must not have remembered Ferdinand Lundberg, who if he'd been available would have told me that univeristy boards are the creatures of the very wealthy, who use them to control large blocks of stock via effective proxy ownership. A few ego-tripping alumni board members will be just a small irritant that can be slapped away. Best not to have bothered.

"The Reactionary Fringe Has Won."

This is in the pull quote from David Brooks's latest at The Atlantic. Yesterday it was apparently the new article for the day that The Atlantic deemed worthy of exempting from its paywall, so I skimmed it. Intending to discuss it in greater detail today, I found that it's back behind the paywall, and the task of starting a free trial so I could go back to it proved too daunting.

I think the gravamen of his argument is that there are polite Ivy Leaguers, who run the world, and impolite ones, who are trying to take over. He makes the point that just about everyone in the Trump cabinet has an Ivy degree, but they're terrible people like Pete Hegseth (Princeton), Bobby Kennedy (Harvard), and Scott Bessent (Yale). Brooks tries to tie both Trump and Elon Musk to Penn, but neither has degrees from Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, the traditionally Ivy style liberal-arts school there, but The Wharton School, the business school, instead.

He then goes to some length to tie the impolite, Trump-style Ivy Leaguers to, of all things, The Dartmouth Review. I know a thing or two, though hardly everything, about The Dartmouth Review, certainly more than David Brooks. I was a frequent contributor in the early to mid-2000s during what might be called the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion, to the point that I was briefly approached to submit my name for nomination as an alumni trustee to serve on the Dartmouth board (I immediately and firmly declined).

I was an undergraduate well before the rise of The Dartmouth Review and its attendant controversies in 1980, and in fact, since I only wrote for them decades after that, I was unique as a contributor who wasn't a current or recent undergraduate. I was certainly familiar with the Review's reputation, built on episodes like the 1989 Dartmouth Review v. Dartmouth College case:

On February 24, 1988, the Review published an article entitled "Dartmouth's Dynamic Duo of Mediocrity", criticizing courses taught by two Dartmouth professors. One of those criticized was William Cole, a black professor in the music department. Apparently there is a history of ill will between Cole and the Review. Prior to publication of the February 24 article, Review members made two attempts to contact Cole by telephone to give him an opportunity to reply to the article. Cole hung up on the students the first time and allegedly became "abusive and insulting" during the second call.

. . . On February 25, 1988, the following events took place which gave rise to the disciplinary action against the individual plaintiffs. Plaintiffs Sutter, Baldwin, and Quilhot, and one other member of the Review staff approached Professor Cole after he had finished teaching a class to give him a copy of the editorial policy and to demand the apology in person. Plaintiff Quilhot held a camera, and plaintiff Sutter brought a tape recorder. There ensued an approximately five-minute altercation between the plaintiffs and Cole, during which Cole became extremely agitated. . . . Quilhot began taking pictures of Professor Cole, at which point Cole allegedly grabbed his arm and broke the camera flash. . . . Cole then noticed the tape recorder, and Sutter acknowledged he was taping the incident. Sutter complied with Cole's request that he stop taping. Plaintiffs then left the room.

The next day, on the complaint of Professor Cole, the Dartmouth Committee on Standards ("COS") charged the student plaintiffs with "harassment, violation of the right to privacy and disorderly conduct."

. . . The COS found plaintiffs guilty of the charges against them, and the following penalties were imposed: plaintiffs Sutter and Baldwin were suspended from classes until the fall of 1989, and plaintiff Quilhot was suspended from classes until the fall of 1988. The students appealed the COS decision to Dean Shanahan, who upheld the decision.

All of the student plaintiffs sued, and the judge eventually ruled in their favor. This is The Dartmouth Review Brooks has in mind that's now infested the Ivy League. But here's Brooks's problem. The film National Lampoon's Animal House was released in 1978, when the Review was hardly a glimmer in anyone's eye:

The film is about a trouble-making fraternity whose members challenge the authority of the dean of the fictional Faber College.

. . . it was inspired by stories written by Miller and published in National Lampoon, which were based on Ramis' experience in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at Washington University in St. Louis, Miller's Alpha Delta Phi experiences at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and producer Reitman's at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Miller, the Dartmouth alum, wrote the original stories on which the script was based, and when I first saw the film shortly after it was released, I instinctively felt it was about Dartmouth, well before anyone noted that Miller based his stories there. I thought Dean Wormer was the spitting image of Dean Thaddeus Seymour, who in fact spent the rest of his life insisting that he wasn't the model for Dean Wormer. According to the Wikipedia link,

In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed National Lampoon's Animal House "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Heck, I was in the ROTC at Dartmouth until they determined that I wasn't officer material. Faber College's Cadet Commander Douglas C. Neidermeyer was something straight out of Dartmouth ROTC. This is all to say that there were elements at Dartmouth, and probably elsewhere in the Ivy League, that long predated The Dartmouth Review. Just for starters, I think about the bon vivant writer Lucius Beebe, who managed to get himself thrown out of both Harvard and Yale, Tom Lehrer, a Harvard math prodigy better known as a writer of satirical songs, or for that metter, well-known Harvard dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, or Columbia dropouts like Whittaker Chambers or Jack Kerouac, or Princeton dropout F Scott Fitzgerald.

In fact, if pressed, I would relate Trump and his Ivy League cabinet to this strain of the Ivy League -- noting, however, that Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House might also be a putative Dartmouth undergraduate placed on double secret probation by Dean Wormer in the spirit of the 1989 Dartmouth Review plaintiffs -- except there's a better Trump archetype than anyone in the Ivy League, real or imagined, polite or otherwise.

This is the neo-noir anti-hero:

[N]eo-noir films are characterized by making audiences cheer for someone who very well may be the bad guy—cynical antiheroes abound.

These would include Jason Bourne in the eponymous franchise, or even more so, John Wick. Another would be the Batman depicted in The Dark Knight Rises. A recurring theme in several such films is that the anti-hero, like John Wick or Bruce Wayne, is retired, but for one reason or another, he's forced to resume his old role. But this in turn refers to the retired gunslingers in great Westerns like Shane or The Unforgiven, who are also driven by circumstances to return to their former roles as hired assassins.

Trump is turning out to be a very similar figure. He should have been, let's face it, a retired one-term president on the line of a Jimmy Carter or Poppy Bush. Whether this fits the true biographical circumstances, it's easy to imagine Trump, driven by the oppobrium and criminal cases against him, undergoing the sort of transformation that drove John Wick or Bruce Wayne to reprise his former role, but this time in an even more fearsome, Nietzschean way, in a sort of cynical realm beyond righteousness. Trump 2.0 owes something to Bruce Wayne or John Wick.

Trump is the reactionary fringe like Bluto Blutarsky is just a dreamy sophomore. He's a politico-cultural force of nature. This is not The Dartmouth Review, which Brooks belittles as producing Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza. Ingraham and D'Souza are not Bluto Blutarski. The Review, for that matter, was never Bluto Blutarsky, who came before it and will long outlast it. David Brooks isn't even any one of them.

The Guardian's Exclusive On The Signal Chat

The Guardian ran an "exclusive" yesterday that had nothing new on a two week old story but continued to get everything wrong:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

. . . According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

The Guardian story then repeats Waltz's initial explanation that Goldberg’s number had somehow been “sucked” into his phone and seems to use the complex chain of contact updates outlined above to lend support to the story.

The problem is that the Guardian's version -- which appears to have been planted by Waltz allies within the White House -- simply doesn't fly. For starters, it implies that Signal is just a text messaging app:

Waltz also appears to have also engendered some sympathy from inside Trump’s orbit over the group chat because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.

Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.

But there are other text messaging apps, inclulding WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, and Viber. The important thing about Signal is that it has a strong commercial-level security feature. According to techradar,

What sets Signal apart is its robust privacy features: it’s regarded as the benchmark for secure mobile communications. Which makes Signalgate all the more ironic, even though it has little to do with the app's technical security.

All messaages are encrypted on the sender's phone, transmitted over the web in encrypted form, and decrypted on the receiver's phone. But in order for the text to be decrypted, the app must be on the on the receiver's phone. As I noted a week ago, Signal would have had to be installed on Goldberg's phone, which would have involved:

• Downloading Signal to the phone and running the install program
• Registering a phone number and waiting for a verification code
• Entering the verification code and finishing the onboarding process
• Editing a user profile and notifying a chat admin of it.

There is no way this could have happened just by "including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number" into a text message mistakenly sent to Waltz by Brian Hughes. Goldberg, someone on Goldberg's staff, or possibly someone on Waltz's staff, would have had to have access to Goldberg's phone, installed Signal on it, registered the phone with Signal, verified it, and then created or edited a Signal user profile for Goldberg, notifying Waltz, or someone on Waltz's staff, that this was Goldberg's profile.

Then Waltz, or someone on Waltz's staff, would have had to add Goldberg's profile, knowing it was Goldberg, to the Houthi chat. There is no way around this -- after all, this is strong commercial-level security. At least two people had to be involved, likely more than two, and there are presumably audit trails of every action. This is, for instance, the level of security banks use in things like wire transfers.

The Guardian story indicates there was some sort of internal forensiuc investigtion at the White House. The Guardian's use of the term "forensic" suggests the investigation involved auditors qualified to investigate fraud. It's hard to imagine the technical details of how Signal is installed and a phone is registered and a specific user profile added to the chat on Signal itself weren't part of that forensic investigation.

It's also hard for anyone not to conclude that someone on Waltz's staff was fully aware of what was done and for what purpose, namely, to damage the Trump administration's image by leaking information to a hostile journalist. I'm inclined to believe just one point in the Guaridan story:

Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system such as Signal.

But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term.

Trump isn't stupid. Right now, he's keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. The Guardian story seems to come from Waltz and Waltz allies:

When Trump left the White House on Thursday, he was joined aboard Marine One by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, his personnel chief, Sergio Gor, and Waltz, which aides took as a show of support for the embattled national security adviser.

Trump has learned important things about Waltz and Waltz's staff from this episode. Waltz, I think, is the stupid one here.

Let's Take Another Look At Trump, DEI, and the Ivies

Just this morning I saw yet another threat to an Ivy over anti-Semitism and DEI:

The Trump administration is poised to block $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown University over the school's response to antisemitism on campus, the New York Times reported.

Following the report, Brown Provost Frank Doyle said in an email that the school couldn't substantiate the information but was aware of "troubling rumors" about federal action against its funding. The potential freeze follows similar moves by the US government against Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, Brown's Ivy League peers.

As I noted yesterday, Alan Dershowitz never believed that the Ivies ever dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them throughout the postwar period as geographical "diversity" admissions preferences -- if you were applying to Harvard from someplace like Kansas or Montana, you got a few extra points, not least because you probably weren't Jewish. The Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel wdnt into much more detail in his 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Karabel's main point is that the admissions process at elite schools is almost infinitely subdivided. As one reviewer put it,

By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard's admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter.

Karabel uses the term "baskets" more often than "dockets", but his point is the same. More important, there are baskets where neither academic ability nor athletic prowess nor character makes much difference -- some baskets are reserved for legacies, others for children of major donors, others for children of politicians and celebrities. A very good example is Hunter Biden: by the time he applied to Georgetown and Yale Law, he was the son of a US senator; that outweighed any other consideration on his record, even though his subsequent career manifested his utter lack of promise objectively viewed.

We might still ask why Hunter didn't apply to Harvard -- the answer is that there are some legacies, some children of celebrities, politicians, or major donors, that even an Ivy can't justify. Harvard couldn't justify admitting John-John Kennedy, a lifelong underachiever, even though he was a legacy, a celebrity, and scion of a wealthy family, but he did get into Brown, arguably the least selective and least prestigious of the Ivies.

The question is how big the various baskets are relative to the others. We can grant -- even the Ivies will grant, however reluctantly, that they exist. The question is what percentage of an incoming first-year class is made up of applicants who were weighted for reasons other than academic promise or even athletic ability. The answer to this is a closely held secret, and to some extent, it's irrelevant, since the competition among applicants is within the baskets, not overall. But the point is that DEI is nothing more than a slight rejiggering of the basket system.

If DEI applicants are a new basket, that means one or more baskets are proportionally smaller -- and my bet is that the basket that loses most will be the one that gives preference to the competitive Northeastern public school, SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. The baskets that lose the least will be the legacies, prep schools, major donors, and children of politicians and celebrities baskets -- and now the DEI.

And this brings me to one of the formative events of my life -- I got into an Ivy, via a public school, Northeastern suburb, SATS-grades-and-extracurriculars basket. I'd taken German, Latin, extracurricular Greek, and other AP courses, and all my SATs were in the high 700s, with one perfect 800 in Latin. I just assumed that all my classmates would have similar qualifications. But once I arrived on campus, I found no such thing. A fair number had developed severe alcoholism by the time they turned 18. Others just didn't seem very smart. Still others had acquired experience with drugs in prep school, something that in the mid 1960s hadn't reached the public schools.

I'd read and admired Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt in junior higb school. Why did so many of my classmates remind me of George F Babbitt? And I was always trying to figure out why so many had the same surname as the names of campus buildings -- Steve Throckmorton. Why is that the same as Throckmorton Hall?

As I've noted here now and then, I went to the dean of freshmen and told him I thought somehow there'd been a major mistake. I was in the wrong place. The dean had something of a wry reacton, looked at my file, and more or less assured me that I was an intelligent young man indeed, stick it out. He was probably right that, ill-placed as I was, there was probably nowhere else for me to go, and that's probably still the case. Hillsdale College is good as far as it goes, but I'm not all that impressed with the online courses I've taken there. It's still your basic liberal arts school.

There's a fairly broad strain of opinion that says if Trump is overturning the system of tariffs, he's out to change more than just tariffs. If he's out to stop uncontrolled migration, he's out to reform more than just migration. If he's out to stop DEI and campus anti-Semitism, he's out to change more than just DEI and anti-Semitism. I certainly hope an unintended consequence of this particular program could be a more basic academic reform, maybe a scrapping of the whole basket admissions system.

They Miss The Point

Ingrid Jacques at USA Today:

Money talks.

That’s the message coming loud and clear from the country’s universities, as they respond to demands from the Trump administration to strip “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts and antisemitism from their campuses.

College administrators who might otherwise have rolled their eyes at such demands are paying attention now that their federal funding – provided by taxpayers – is on the line.

But it isn't just DEI:

The Trump administration has suspended several dozen federally funded research grants to Princeton University as part of its investigation into campus anti-Semitism, according to a Princeton University email published by the Daily Princetonian student newspaper.

The email, dated April 1 and sent to the campus community by university President Christopher Eisgruber, said the university received the notification from the funding agencies, including the Departments of Energy, Defense, and NASA.

. . . Eisgruber’s email said more information would be released following conversations with affected faculty, researchers, and grant managers.

Princeton is among the 60 elite higher education institutions currently under federal investigation for the harassment of Jewish students following Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Elsewhere,

The Trump Administration has officially put Harvard University on notice that it must change its policies on everything from wearing masks to admissions, or it will lose federal financial support.

Unlike the administration action cutting off Columbia University from about $400 million without options for adjusting policies, the government letter to Harvard this week gives Harvard the choice to adhere to government demands without an immediate cutoff, reported The Hill.

The Trump administration began the process of reviewing colleges and universities and taxpayer-provided financial support less than two weeks after President Donald Trump was inaugurated to serve a second term. Trump's Executive Order on Jan. 29 zeroed in on incidents of campus protests and specifically mentioned "Measures to Combat Campus Anti-Semitism."

. . . On March 31, the administration posted that it had opened a direct policy and funding review of Harvard.

This week's communication from the administration to Harvard does not specify the length of time Harvard is allowed to implement and begin enforcing the required policy changes.

Nor is it just elite universities:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and two other nonprofit organizations have come under fire for allegedly implementing scholarship and career advancement programs that discriminate against white Americans, potentially violating federal law and jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

The American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) reported three organizations, the Gates Foundation, the Lagrant Foundation, and the Creative Capital Foundation, in letters to the IRS, claiming the nonprofits have “intentionally” discriminated against white people.

These cases of discrimination, AAER says, constitute “sufficient grounds” for the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt statuses of these three organizations.

. . . The Gates Foundation, AAER says, is “intentionally discriminating against white students by excluding them from the tuition assistance and specialized support that it provides to students of every other race or ethnicity.” The foundation’s Gates Scholarship states that the program is a “highly selective, last dollar scholarship for outstanding, minority high school students” before listing acceptable racial and ethnic backgrounds in its eligibility requirements.

A 2022 video advertising the Gates Scholarship reaffirms that only “low-income, minority students” are eligible. The program is only open to students who are “African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, or Native American.”

The complaints about both elite universities and charitable foundations actually put equal stress on both DEI and anti-Semitism, and even before the age of DEI, Alan Dershowitz in his 1991 Chutzpah pointed out that selective universities stressed "diversity" in their admissions policies by, for example, favoring applicants from outside the Northeast, which had the effect of excluding Jewish applicants from the Northeastern cities and suburbs. DEI simply continued the same policy under a slightly different guise.

But even that, it seems to me, isn't the whole story. In Thursday's post, I returned to Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich, where he discussed both charitable foundations and university endowments as byproducts of the income tax, which was made constitutional in the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution:

The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states on the basis of population. It was passed by Congress in 1909 in response to the 1895 Supreme Court case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by the requisite number of states on February 3, 1913, and effectively overruled the Supreme Court's ruling in Pollock.

. . . For several years after Pollock, Congress did not attempt to implement another income tax, largely due to concerns that the Supreme Court would strike down any attempt to levy an income tax. In 1909, during the debate over the Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act, Congress proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the states. Though conservative Republican leaders had initially expected that the amendment would not be ratified, a coalition of Democrats, progressive Republicans, and other groups ensured that the necessary number of states ratified the amendment. Shortly after the amendment was ratified, Congress imposed a federal income tax with the Revenue Act of 1913.

As Lundberg points out, although charitable foundations existed before 1913, both they and university endowments became effective ways to conceal and shelter stock ownership after the advent of the income tax. Wealthy families could donate corporate shares to the non-profits and universities while continuing control over those stocks via their membership on the non-profit and university boards, which followed because of those same major donations. In effect, this was the plutocratic response to the progressive policy innovation, and as part of the package, it incorporated other plutocratic predilections like anti-Semitism.

As I've been noting, a feature of the Trump paradigm reset is removal of multiple legs of the stools on which particular problems sit. He approached the migration problem both by closing the border and canceling funding to the NGOs that enabled the migration. He's approaching the dual problem of DEI and anti-Semitism, of which elite universities are and have been bastions, by threatening the federal part of their funding. It looks as if a further step will be to threaten federal funds to charitable foundations on the same basis.

Another factor in the Republican agenda will be to tax elite university endowments:

Washington insiders believe it is very likely that a significant increase in the tax rate on university endowment income will be enacted this year. They cite the need for additional tax revenue to offset the Trump tax cut agenda and the antipathy of many Republicans to what has been happening on campuses for the last two years. They also focus on the fact that then-Senator JD Vance introduced a bill in the last Congress imposing a 35 percent tax on endowment income.

Existing law imposes a 1.4 percent tax on endowment income of private universities that have endowments of $500,000 or more per student. The type of tax that might be considered in the current Congress is exemplified by a bill, H.R.446, the Endowment Tax Fairness Act, introduced by Congressman Nehls (R-TX), which raises the current 1.4 percent tax rate to 21 percent. The 21 percent is the same as the tax rate imposed on corporate income. Another bill, H.R. 1128, introduced by Congressman Lawler (R-TX), increases the rate to 10 percent, but it also greatly increases the number of schools covered by including private colleges and universities that have endowments of $200,000 or more per student.

But yet another leg of the stool on which university endowments sit is the income tax itself. Trump's long-term agenda, which is likely to outlive both him and his presidency, is either to reduce or completely eliminate the income tax. This will simply remove a major reason for the existence of university endowments and charitable foundations at all. Many people don't seem to understand the breadth of Trump's agenda, just part of which will be to reduce the prestige of the universities and, as just one result, to mark the value of a university education to market.

The Laura Loomer Firings

More has trickled out about the National Security Council firings yesterday following the Signal flap, along witn a couple of new firings just this morning:

President Donald Trump fired Air Force General Timothy Haugh, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and head of U.S. Cyber Command.

General Haugh, a Biden holdover who assumed leadership of both agencies in 2024, has been relieved of his duties effective immediately, the New York Post reported.

General Haugh, who succeeded Gen. Paul Nakasone nearly a year ago, was informed by the White House that his tenure had concluded. His civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, was also relieved of her duties.

. . . Notably, this follows a meeting between President Trump and conservative activist Laura Loomer, who has been vocal about the need for personnel who are steadfastly loyal to the President’s agenda.

The Gateway Pundit reported on Thursday that during Loomer’s meeting with Trump, Loomer asked Trump to fire several National Security Council staff members, including his principal deputy national security adviser, Alex Wong.

The AP added some new context to that meeting:

People speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters say Loomer met with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Sergio Gor, director of the Presidential Personnel Office and presented “research findings.”

When reached for comment, Loomer referred The Associated Press to an X post shared earlier on Thursday, saying she was not going to divulge any details about her Oval Office meeting with Trump “out of respect” for the president.

Apparently this is not the same meeting that was reported in a Politico story I linked here on Sunday:

On Wednesday evening [March 26] — following a brutal day of headlines surrounding the now-infamous Signal chat — Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles and top personnel official Sergio Gor gently offered President Donald Trump some advice in a private meeting.

So this meeting was a different one, Laura Loomer was there, and the personnel matters went beyond NSC staff. One outcome of this April 2 meeting was released yesterday:

President Donald Trump has dramatically fired several members of his National Security Council team.

. . . The dismissals come after National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added The Atlantic magazine's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat where top administration officials were discussing an attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

However, The New York Times reported Thursday morning that far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office on Wednesday and pressed for National Security Council (NSC) firings.

. . . Loomer came to the White House armed with research that purportedly showed some NSC staffers were not loyal enough to the president's agenda.

This was apparently a follow-on to the March 26 meeting with Trump, Vance, Waltz, Wiles, and Gor. The story continues,

'NSC doesn't comment on personnel matters,' was the official line from NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes.

But CNN reported Thursday that the individuals fired were Brian Walsh, Thomas Boodry and David Feith.

The network said that the firings were directly the result of Trump's meeting with Loomer, who Trump's top Congressional ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, had tried to get banished from MAGA months ago.

Loomer, however, has maintained a position in Trump's orbit.

CNN added another name to the three mentioned by the Daily Mail:

The four officials fired include Brian Walsh, a director for intelligence and a former top staffer for now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee; Thomas Boodry, a senior director for legislative affairs who previously served as Waltz’s legislative director in Congress; David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security who served in the State Department during Trump’s first administration; and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations.

CNN also adds other names to the April 2 meeting, which had more members than the March 26 meeting:

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff who was among the advisers who worked to control Loomer’s access to Trump during the campaign, was present for the Wednesday meeting, sources familiar with the meeting said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was seen greeting Loomer before she left the White House campus, was in the meeting for part of it. Communications Director Steven Cheung and Vice President JD Vance also attended, sources said.

. . . It was unclear when the Loomer meeting was placed on the schedule, but one aide said the presence of Wiles and Gor underscored that it was a sanctioned meeting. Gor, who is seen as one of the president’s most loyal aides, has been among the advisers who has been fielding complaints from MAGA world about Waltz.

. . . Christopher Rufo, an activist, published internal logs that showed staffers allegedly exchanging explicit messages in National Security Agency chat rooms; Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard within days announced that she had fired people over the revelations.

I'm less concerned about the possible security exposure from Signal than many of the politicians -- the communications are encrypted using a hard-to-decode algorithm, and only the phones of designated group members can decrypt them. According to Politico,

NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes noted that Signal is allowed on government devices and that some agencies automatically install it on employees’ phones. He also stressed that officials have used the app in both the Biden and Trump administrations.

“It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary, it is one of a host of approved methods for unclassified material with the understanding that a user must preserve the record,” Hughes said. “Any claim of use for classified information is 100 percent untrue.”

The complaints about the Houthi chat were essentially that the members were discussing "sensitive" information, but that term is meaningless in a security context, and the assertion from the participants that they in fact did not discuss "classified" information -- and indeed warned each other not to discuss it -- appears to be correct. But I'm more concerned about whether the group chat -- which in the business world would be more accurately characterized as a meeting -- was necessary at all. That's the rub. The CNN link says,

National security adviser Mike Waltz’s team regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe, according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats.

Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed.

Again, "sensitive" in a security context is a meaningless designation, unlike "secret", for example. We could substitute another word, "balderdash", with perhaps better effect:

Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of balderdash being discussed.

And this sounds more like what in the business world we would call a meeting. These people were in dozens of meetings in which balderdash was discussed. And they were fired. Fancy that.

CNN and the AP have the vapors over far-right conspiracy theoriest Laura Loomer was urging Trump to fire NSC members. But my point last weekend was that you didn't need DOGE to investigate the Houthi Signal chat. Laura Loomer was enough.

Trump Is Resetting The Paradigm

The thing that struck me about Trump's moves on the migration crisis was that they simply removed at least two legs of the stool that held the whole situation up -- he closed the border by eliminating the policy of paroling anyone who wanted to come in, and he ended the funding to the dozen or so faith-based NGOs that ran the migrant programs, both the ones that settled groups into small cities and towns in the interior and the ones that ran the camps at the border.

That transformed the whole situation within weeks. At the same time, he's working to knock legs off the stool that's held up the Ivy League and other prestige universities.

The Trump administration’s drive to clean up woke elite universities continues, with Princeton and the big tuna, Harvard, both under the microscope.

Princeton reportedly faces a pause on some $210 million in federal funds as the Department of Education investigates it for allowing antisemitism to fester unchecked, concealed as pro-Palestinian protests.

Harvard has even bigger financial woes possibly in train, with the feds probing some $8.7 billion in grants and $255 million in contracts with the world’s richest university and premier destination for whiny rich kids, Jew-hating keffiyeh thugs and the rest of the ugly left-wing panoply.

These are some of the marquee moves in the Trump admin’s 60-school probe.

But the drive against the Ivies and other well-endowed universities is just part of another agenda, which appears to be elimination of the income tax. Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich understood that the advent of the income tax in 1913 underlies the whole current structure of university and other charitable endowments:

Prior to 1913 at least, the problem of taxes could not have influenced Rockefeller in his philanthropies because business and wealth were subject then only to piddling local taxes. Nor can it be held that the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation was a direct reflex to the advent of federal taxes in 1913 because the Foundation had long been planned, at least since 1905. The community of Big Business, it is true, was opposed to the new taxes and Rockefeller's chief attorney, Joseph H. Choate, had been the lawyer who in 1893 convinced the Supreme Court that income taxes were unconstitutional; it was therefore necessary to amend the Constitution to enact income taxes. However, even though the advent of federal taxes did not influence the idea of the Foundation, it was gradually noticed by others that there were distinct tax advantages in making philanthropic allocations. This fact is now part of standard tax doctrine, set down in many tax treatises. Gifts to philanthropic funds pay no taxes, the income on such funds pay no taxes, and there is no inheritance tax on such funds. Furthermore, stocks placed in such endowments carry corporate voting power--a nice point. It should be recalled here that it is power really, rather than money or property, that we are concerned with.

So what does Trump intend?

President Donald Trump has stated multiple times that he wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with tariffs. Such a decision would be one of the most significant changes to the tax code in decades, and it could help Americans save a lot of money.

Eliminating the income tax is a death knell for university endowments and charitable foundations as we know them. But the paradigm shift goes beyond that; Trump's tariff agenda is generally recognized as applying to issues beyond just income taxes and trade deficits. According to the BBC,

President Trump's critique of the post-1945 international order dates back decades. Nearly 40 years ago he took out full-page advertisements in three US newspapers to criticise the United States' commitment to the defence of the world's democracies.

"For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States," he wrote in 1987. "Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

"The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help."

It's a position he has repeated since his second inauguration.

According to The Guardian,

Overarching all of this, say experts, is a US president who is not only prepared to approve annexation elsewhere but has an imperialist outlook, which has led some, including Ivo Daalder, the former US ambassador to Nato, to declare that with “Trump in office, the rules-based order is no more”.

As analysts have noted, Trump’s policy on both trade tariffs and territorial acquisition harks back to the 19th century – the era of president William McKinley, who presided over the acquisition of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

So far, it looks as though Trump has been able to move so quickly with a comprehensive strategy that his opponents have been able to attempt only minor individual points of resistance. Judge Boasberg tries to return deported Venezuelans to the US, when Trump's overall policies have already stopped mass migrations and begun to reduce the numbers of illegals -- something disputes over the legal rights of a few dozen gangsters won't affect. Vandalzing Teslas here and there will be an equally feckless gesture. Cory Booker's marathon speech on the Senate floor will be of equally nil effect.

This will be very, very difficult to stop, in some measure because Trump's opponents don't have his imagination. His solutions immediately knock legs away from stools that simply can't be replaced.