Harvard, Oh Harvard, Wherefore Art Thou? What is Thy Veritas?

             Harvard Graduation. May 2025

Harvard, Oh Harvard, Wherefore Art Thou? What is Thy Veritas?

"As someone teaching [at] a Harvard Law School, I can certainly tell you that, around the law school and the surrounding areas, the idea that there is rampant anti-Semitism at Harvard is just hopeless, I mean it is just not the situation… As in any place in the world, there will be examples of antisemitism, no question at all, but the idea that it is rampant and all over the place is complete nonsense." 

 Phillipe Sands, a lawyer, author and visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification programme, a de-woke-ification programme.” 

 Future VP, JD Vance in Vanity Fair, 2022.

“Their goal is to intimidate and break down institutions of higher learning in America because that is where most of the resistance to their authoritarian tendencies is going to come from… They figure, if we can bankrupt Harvard, if we can embarrass Harvard, if we can put Harvard in a position of weakness or at least get them to bend the knee, then all the other institutions in America will follow. That’s why they’re doing this.” 

Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland,

“Mr. Trump should understand the trade-offs. One of the reasons that U.S. higher education is the gold standard is the presence of international students. A disproportionately high number of doctorates at American universities are awarded to foreign students—especially in the more demanding fields of science, mathematics and engineering. ‘International students accounted for more than 40 percent of the roughly 500,000 doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. universities between 2000 and 2019,’ according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.” 

Jason Mr. Riley, 6/2 WSJ, a 2018 Bradley Prize recipient, is the author of four books: “Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders” (2008); “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (2014); “False Black Power?” (2017); and “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell” (2021).

Since the Israeli massive response against all of Gaza since the brutality of the October 7, 2023, attacks on innocent Israeli citizens (taking well over 100 hostages) – Israeli forces have killed around 54 thousand Gazans – reality has spawned a vicious response in the United States. Those of Jewish faith represent 2.4% of the US population, yet there has been a threefold increase against Jewish synagogues, associations, charities, support groups and Jews in general, representing 70% of the hate crime perpetrated in the United States since October 7th. A schism has pitted supporters of Gazans (not Hamas) vs those who remain committed totally to Israel.

Zionism (based on loyalty to Israel) and Judaism (the religious faith) have often been conflated by supporters of both sides and the Trump administration. The administration calls any support for Gaza and against Israeli policies “antisemitism,” which is a dangerous and indiscriminate conflation… and is often seen as a call to arms to his followers against anyone who protests against Israel… and which has drawn an opposing reaction – the destruction of US Jewish targets noted above. Tensions have escalated, often expressed on college campuses where divergent causes are often hotly disputed.

But the Trump administration has used college protests against killings in Gaza as evidence of antisemitism, a concept which has been abused and misused by Trump to crush, or attempt to crush elite universities into surrendering their curricula, their selection of faculty, the composition of their student body, admissions and administration, cutting funds, banning foreign students, etc. And here sits Harvard, ostensibly the most visible of America’s elite universities. While bigoted antisemitism is everywhere, including Harvard, it is not a particularly significant issue for that university, with a Jewish President and a significant Jewish student body and faculty constituency. For Trump, using that word, reaching for his blame attack knife, it is a way to impose his cultural mandate as the only correct thinking permitted in America.

Taking down Harvard has become Trump’s priority at all costs. Despite the loss of millions of dollars of federal research grants (so much of which is focused on curing disease), the attempt to collect personnel data on students and faculty, Harvard is fighting back against this unique MAGA attack. As Fareed Zacharia, writing for the May 30th Washington Post writes: “What is new and surprising is that these challenges, far from uniting America, have turned it on itself, with its government tearing down many of the crucial elements of its extraordinary success…

“Consider the Nature Index, perhaps the most comprehensive guide to high-quality research in the sciences. It tracks contributions to the world’s leading academic journals. Its newest rankings show what scientists already know: China is leaping ahead. Of the top 10 academic institutions in the Nature Index, nine are Chinese. But still sitting in the topmost position on that list is an American institution: Harvard. And it is this university that President Donald Trump is trying to destroy…

“America’s universities have problems, and I have written about them, urging them to abandon fashionable political causes, end the obsession with diversity and marginalization, and return to a focus on excellence. But it is worth noting that these are still by far the world’s leaders in higher education when you consider teaching, research and the academic environment more broadly. This can be seen simply in the tsunami of applications that America’s top universities get from the brightest students around the world. It would be hard to find many industries in which America is more dominant. Xi Jinping and his erstwhile rival for the Chinese presidency, Bo Xilai, disagreed about many things. But both believed that the best place in the world that their daughter and son, respectively, could go for higher education was Harvard.”

Even as courts rule against him, as Trump is voiding student visas, telling Harvard’s foreign enrollees (27.2% of all students there) that they must leave, his edict, if truly implemented, will devastate the “best and the brightest” researchers in their field, decimate the massive “full tuition” revenue to the school, but more importantly will take Harvard off the list of top universities and clearly devastate one of the primary reasons for American greatness: her domination of globally great universities. He has spread this anti-foreign student toxin across the country. But looking at the bigger picture, the role of taking down universities is an autocratic necessity by destroying the most important bastions of culture needed to support democracy.

Writing for the June 2nd NY Times, Jonathan Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain, author of “The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law,” opines: “As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies.

“They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the streets, but slowly, they are drained of everything that once made them democratic, often with substantial public support… These countries have elections, legislatures, courts and so on. The institutional framework is still there. But they are no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.

“Now the United States is in danger of being added to this list. There are tensions among its institutions, though they are still largely functioning. But the deterioration of its political culture is striking — and alarming. The country resembles other Western democracies in buckling under the weight of increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state from its electorate.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Donald Trump kills the goose that laid the golden egg, the best in higher education, the United States faces serious degradation at all levels… which is why I, a proud Yale graduate, fiercely support Harvard’s battle against this tyranny.