This week, President Donald Trump froze $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University, angering members of the Elbow Patch Mafia around America. Critics quickly pounced, accusing the president of strong-arming private institutions and turning elite universities into political vassals. To be fair, they’re not entirely wrong — Trump’s move is a transactional attempt to bend higher education to his will. Yet it must be acknowledged that the impetus for the freezing of federal dollars for certain universities was a crisis for Jewish students, caused by the failure of college administrators to counter antisemitism and the harassment of Jews on campus.
The progressive ire over this move is rich with irony: administrators and faculty who have long championed a larger role for the federal government in American life are now experiencing the downside of that arrangement firsthand. When they were calling for more federal funding for public education, climate research, and social justice initiatives, they weren’t picturing a president like Trump holding the checkbook. They wanted the government to be a silent partner — one that funds without fussing.
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