The derangement of Harvard

It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said he would “rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today.

Harvard has recently been embroiled in a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way the university responded to the October 7 attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still ongoing, more than 30 Harvard University student organizations signed a letter which claimed to hold the “Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

You might wonder why students at Harvard have such an inflated sense of their own importance that they imagine any “regime” or government would be waiting for their take on things. Stranger still was the students’ apparent belief that Harvard was somehow central to the Israeli war effort. “Harvard out of Occupied Palestine” was one of their demands. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the Middle East who believes that their lands are occupied by Harvard University, whoever else they think culpable.

Since then, events on campus have become increasingly insane. Jewish students were subjected to assaults, insults and intimidation – all while the university authorities defended it as a “speech” issue. In a set of notorious hearings in front of a congressional committee, the then-president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, insisted that calls for “genocide” against Jews would have to be judged based on their “context.”

Harvard’s best defense would be to return to being a genuinely world-class university cultivating excellence

Many observers noted that if it had been black students being chased across the Harvard campus with calls for lynchings then things might have been regarded differently. If foreign students were shown to have participated in such activities, then withdrawing their visas would have been the least of the demands. Yet students at Harvard who were part of a group that attacked their Jewish peers were not only given free rein to do so, but a number of them were recently honored by the university and given further scholarships.

The current Trump administration has made Harvard one of the focuses of its attempts to de-radicalize the American university system. It has threatened to freeze tens of millions of dollars of federal subsidies to the university and warned that the Internal Revenue Service would take away the institution’s tax-exempt status. The Department of Homeland Security said in May that it was revoking Harvard’s certification for participating in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program – effectively cutting billions of dollars of further financing.

Many Americans will have been surprised to learn that billions of dollars of their taxes have been going toward educating foreign students at Harvard – including the sort of foreign students who use their time to foment revolution in the United States. Harvard started legal proceedings against the government within the day, once again reminding us that the only people who always benefit from this sort of dust-up are members of the legal profession.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in May that the Trump administration is “holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, anti-Semitism and co-ordinating with the Chinese Communist party on its campus.” She went on: “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”

Harvard and its supporters have done what any university would do, insisting that the cuts threatened by the Trump administration have already affected research into cancer and other diseases. This is a pretty cunning move. Harvard knows what it could do to clean up the mess made by its students and faculty, yet it presents itself as the victim of brutal and inexplicable cuts that threaten the very things that everybody agrees a research university should focus on. It is the playbook the left always uses when financial cuts occur – portraying them as falling hardest on “the most vulnerable.” Campaigners are one step away from proclaiming: “It is such a shame that since the government’s slashing of funding to our egregious and politicized campaigns all the puppy sanctuaries will have to close.”

Harvard is betting that it can win the war with Trump. His administration is clearly enjoying the opportunity to sock it to an institution that has become increasingly partisan and political. Yet all the time the obvious correction remains in plain sight.

The trouble lies in the fact that Harvard is no longer Harvard, just as so many other institutions in the West are not what outsiders imagine them to be. Harvard’s best line of defense would be to return to what it is meant to be – a genuinely world-class university which prioritizes the cultivation of excellence. It is many years since it or most other higher education institutions in the US have been any such thing. It is one reason why so many students are desperate to enroll in new establishments such as the University of Austin and Ralston College in Savannah.

One left-wing author claimed recently that through its attacks on Harvard, the Trump administration “has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself” which “if successful, will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us.” We shall see. But for that line of argument to work, the people in what used to be the phone directory would have to be persuaded that Harvard has been an enlightening presence in American life of late, rather than an utterly deranging one.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.