Elite and Effete Universities Get Their Comeuppance

They’re not entitled to endless money, tax breaks, and visas, and they have to obey the law.

I rarely stray from my art lane and never write about politics but sometimes cite absolute truths since, in these parlous times, they need to be repeated and reinforced. Men in women’s sports? Daft, and a grotesque assault on women. Queers for Palestine? Queers, you go first. “Splat” lands the fey dunce as he/she/thez plunges from a Rafah roof. Canada as the 51st state? Who’d want them? They’re socialists.

Colleges and universities need the slap of firm government? Indubitably. They’re too essential, too powerful, and too rich to be left to rot from vice. They won’t save themselves. So the government ought to be using carrots as well as cudgels and cleavers to put them right. If left on their own, they’ll destroy the country.

In the news last week was the Department of Homeland Security’s kibosh on special visas for all of Harvard’s foreign students, some 7,000, or 28 percent of its student body. It’s a fierce retort and a tit for tat after Harvard refused to help the government’s rightful investigation of antisemitic and pro-terrorist activities by foreign students. These are illegal, via a boatload of civil rights, racketeering, and anti-terrorism laws. “Break the law, you’re outta here” seems like a good standard to me.

An Obama-appointed, which means Soros-sanctioned, judge temporarily blocked the DHS. We’ll see what happens. Harvard, in any case, thinks it’s entitled to rise above petty things such as law, decorum, and morals. All that la-di-da is for the little people. Still, the dons along the Charles are terrified. After all, Kristi Noem shot her dog for bad behavior. Shipping Harvard Hamasholes back to the Old World of blood libels is, for her, easy-peasy.

Thousands of students are affected, but Harvard has never cared much about its students. It’s a research university. It cares about how it looks, and chaos isn’t a good look. It cares most about its bottom line. Foreign students are cash cows. The dozens of colleges and universities whose foreign cohort is 20 percent or more of the student body should sit up and take notice. These students, as a rule, pay full-freight tuition. Often, their governments pay. Often, their parents are crooked-rich. Invariably, these students bring their defective politics with them, which are naturally either obtuse about American tolerance or positively hostile to it. They also, often, bring a robust antisemitism in their Vuitton bags.

I read the New York Times every day, skimming the news stories to know what the lies du jour are. The arts section is very good. I read the food section, knowing it’s unlikely that they’d distort a recipe, and the wedding section. I’m a sucker for a love story. Last week, a table in the paper listed the American colleges and universities with the highest share of foreign students. At Cal Tech, NYU, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, well over a third of the students are foreign. At Yale, where I went to school, and at Cornell, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and, of course, Harvard, it’s 25 percent or more.

This is outrageous. A few weeks ago, I suggested that the federal government cap foreign enrollment at a tiny percentage, say, 1 or 2 percent, and I didn’t know how big the foreign cohort actually is. So let’s say 5 or 10 percent, since schools need to be beggared, not bankrupted, and I’m reasonable in all things. The government can do it by controlling visas.

Harvard is honest on one point. It considers itself a citizen of the world, and not an American university. It’s certainly just as shady and smarmy as the U.N., but these schools ought to understand that they’re American, which means they need to embrace, celebrate, and advance American values. This includes free, uncensored speech and inquiry; respect for the law; hard work; the primacy of the individual; religious tolerance; an aversion to tribes; love of liberty; and an egalitarian spirit. With 25, 30, or even 40 percent foreign students, schools leave these values in the dust. There’s the practical issue of spies, too. The big, private universities are sitting ducks. Why do we think the Chinese government is furious at the Department of Homeland Security?

The House of Representatives just passed a big, beautiful tax increase on college and university endowments. I hope it survives the sausage factory, and not because I want to punish anyone. The elite schools, and I went to three of them and had a great time, have too much money. From this curse comes bloated, bossy bureaucracies, an entitlement culture, the prioritization of research to the detriment of teaching, lazy professors, low standards, grade inflation, campus building booms, incessant fundraising campaigns, useless majors, Ph.D. gluts, and ghastly DEI regimes. Wordsworth would call them fens of stagnant waters, muddy and defiled. They’ve got too much money to be entrepreneurial, curious, open, and captivating. It’s in the public interest to whack these mountains of lucre down to size.

Over time, the new tax, along with the cap on foreign enrollment and a ban on federal research grants, will help bring the prestige colleges and universities back to the earthly realm where merit matters, green eyeshades abound, and inquiry is the norm.

Federal anti-discrimination laws have to be enforced, of course. No more disguising race-driven admissions and hiring.

Calling places such as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and hundreds of other schools “private” is an incongruity given the vast government — taxpayer — subsidies they get. It’s not just the billions in federal grants for research, which, by the by, central administrations usually plunder for school-wide operating expenses. The property at universities is tax-exempt, so cities and towns lose billions. Every dollar they raise from donors is tax-exempt on the federal, state, and local levels. Until now, every dollar their endowments earn has been almost entirely tax-free.

As a practical matter, why should taxpayers subsidize schools catering so much to foreigners? “We’re bringing over the best of the best,” Harvard argues, but are admissions standards lower for tuition-paying foreigners? Lower than the standards for Americans? I bet they are. Given the billions in taxpayer subsidies, Americans ought to be considered first. Lots of American kids are as thick as two bricks, I know. That’s mostly because of union-run schools. That said, having worked at Phillips Academy in Andover for years, I can tell you there’s plenty of super-smart, super-talented Americans, too.

I got a letter this week from Maurie McGuinness, the new president of Yale and my classmate in Yale’s history of art Ph.D. program in olden days. “Help defend Yale’s teaching, research, and scholarship,” reads the opening line, correctly conceding that the endowment tax is the gravest government threat Yale has ever faced. They’ll be on the hook for hundreds of millions. Since I’ve written so much about college and university art museums over the years, I’ve predicted here and there that, one day, the government would empty their endowments and those of foundations, too, much as the Tudors, Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, and many other regimes did. An estate tax in the 1880s began to level the British aristocracy.

That day is now. Facing a new endowment tax, the schools have no one to blame but themselves. They’ve alienated — gratuitously, on a high horse — half the country, nearly all their right-of-center alumni, and almost every right-of-center opinion maker and power broker. Academics, it’s good to remember, are very smart in very narrow ways. Beyond these, they tend to be petty, socially maladroit, hubristic, naïve, ignorant, and conformist. “Best to be nice to everyone” is an alien impulse.

The Trump people seem to want to yank Harvard’s 501(c)(3) status. Doing so would prevent gifts to the university from being tax-deductible, and it would make Harvard liable for sales taxes and a million other taxes. I think the White House might have sullied the stew by citing extremism that, at Harvard, surely exists in nearly every nook and cranny. Killing the entire university’s nonprofit status could therefore be called political retaliation.

Many parts of Harvard, however, have their own nonprofit designations and raise their own money. It’s best to do teachable moments and set an example by, say, pulling — call it suspending — Harvard Law Review’s nonprofit status since the feds have the goods on its illegal race preferences for membership and even article selection. Goodness, editors are even applying race-based quotas on the writers cited in footnotes! That’s psychotic. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health blatantly puts DEI at the forefront of its medical program. The divinity school? They’re less into Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and more into Lenin, Soros, and Code Pink.

Yale as well as Harvard and other big universities do lots of good science research, and I hope they continue to do so with private foundation money and donor money. Foundations and donors are probably better at quality control and monitoring than the federal science, defense, and medical establishments are. It’ll be liberating. All government money is susceptible to strings, as we saw when Anthony Fauci pulled them to advance Covid cover-ups, quack science, and sweetheart deals for drug companies, though Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other schools were happy to comply. Maybe professors aren’t as smart as we think. I raised money for years to fund my museum. Sometimes it’s a grind, sometimes it’s grubby, but it keeps charities, and these schools are charities, on their toes.

If federal money is to continue to flow to colleges and universities, recipients will need to comply with more deeply and broadly demanding standards. The Trump team will need to develop these over the next couple of years. In the meantime, the big, Northeast, elite schools — Rot Central — need to get their ivory towers in order. I hear that science, engineering, and medical-research labs at Duke, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Purdue, Baylor, and the University of Texas are ready for their close-up.

The House also overhauled the federal student loan program but didn’t go far enough or in the right direction. The Department of Education should have the power to bar federal loans to, for instance, law school students. America has too many lawyers. Graduate schools for journalism, social work, and teaching are a waste of money. Divinity schools produce agitators, not pastors. No loans for women’s studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and ethnic studies, either. Or graduate programs in oversaturated fields, including, I’m sad to say, art and art history and most humanities. If schools want to support these students, they can establish their own loan programs and bear the risk of default.

All of this is hard and demands stick-to-itiveness. “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent,” sayeth Calvin Coolidge. The colleges and universities are counting on what its gowned snoots think are clueless Trump hayseeds, the 2026 elections, and a Democratic president after 2028. Prove them as dense as they really are.