Harvard Must Not Yield

Life, death, and the Trump administration coming for Harvard. What else is new?

The Department of Justice sued Harvard last Friday, accusing the University of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs, by failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.

The DOJ made a variety of accusations in the complaint, ranging from Harvard not fairly enforcing its disciplinary policies on campus protests to the University remaining “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias. Most outlandish of all, the government seeks injunctive relief — cutting off future funding — and the withdrawal of nearly $1 billion in federal grants.

We’ll repeat the claim as many times as needed: This is yet another political attempt by the Trump administration to wage its ongoing war against Harvard and higher education in general. The administration has had a bone to pick with the University for over a year now: it has frozen billions in funding, attacked our international students, cut even more in funding, you name it.

The Trump administration has not fared well in court when it comes to its battle with Harvard — and it appears this lawsuit will be no different.

With the bar below the ground, perhaps we can applaud the administration for choosing a legal channel to attack Harvard. The baseless claims levied at the University will be formally scrutinized in court, as opposed to arriving in the form of sudden, unconstitutional cuts in funding — the applause ends there.

According to legal experts interviewed by The Crimson, the Department of Justice will have a hard time proving that Harvard did in fact violate Title VI. They also emphasized just how difficult it is to prove something like “deliberate indifference.”

Antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias have certainly occurred at Harvard; that’s not itself sufficient for the indifference standard. The government would have to show that the bias deprived educational access and that Harvard’s response was unreasonably inadequate, among other things.

It’s also important to note that courts in the First Circuit have previously held that pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist slogans are not prima facie evidence of discrimination, at least without proof of intent.

To try and bypass the issue of intent, the suit has chosen to reflect the worst illiberal tendencies of the left identity politics that MAGA claims to oppose. The lawsuit, for example, claims that chants like “from the river to the sea” come off as “racial slurs” to Jewish and Israeli students and ought to be silenced.

Analyzing a June report by the administration, Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Eidelson lays out the gimmick in the Boston Globe: these kinds of accusations lean on an expansive notion of discrimination, one the administration has elsewhere denounced. The DOJ would like to punish speech based on the offense it is alleged to produce, rather than what the language actually means.

This form of woke heresy has earned so much ire from Trump that he felt the need to dedicate an entire executive order commanding regulators to elide it. Perhaps the right's “war” on woke is more coup-d’etat.

Worse still, the administration applies these standards exclusively to political speech offensive to Jewish people. In so doing, the Republican party does Jewish students an enormous disservice, using them as a political football in the culture war and trivializing antisemitism.

The case is made clearer by the relief they’re asking for: recovery of distributed funds, federal oversight of the University via an independent monitor, and freeze of future grants. All three are political wins for the Trump administration, but none seem particularly disposed to fighting antisemitism.

A world where Harvard has less money and fewer resources is a world where it is worse off at fighting antisemitism, let alone Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian bias. It’s also one where Harvard is less suited to pursue its core mission of academic excellence.

Worst of all, it is a world where the very democratic freedoms meant to protect Jewish people, and all America’s minorities, have been effaced for the sake of a grumpy, warmongering man-child’s satisfaction.

We urge Harvard to keep that in mind as it braves through the latest shakedown by the biggest bully on the playground.

Don’t settle.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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