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Of Harvard and Harsanyi

Michael Minnott
@MichaelMinnott
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David Harsanyi provided a response to David French's defense of Harvard. Per French, Trump is apparently a threat to the First Amendment for withholding taxpayer money from Harvard. If that's the case, then perhaps I should start billing Uncle Sam for my posts here on Ricochet. It would certainly be preferable to keeping my day job.

Harsanyi echoes my own views regarding antisemitism; although most pronounced on the left, its influence is also creeping into the right. He also does nothing to dispel my low opinion of TDS and its practitioners.

You can find the whole article here: No, David French, we have no constitutional duty to subsidize Harvard

If you prefer a TLDR version, below are some key snippets from Harsanyi's article:

David might not be aware that in addition to the joint-government task force’s claim that Harvard leadership failed to meaningfully confront pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation of Jewish students, there’s also a blistering internal university taskforce report that maintains that Harvard allowed antisemitism to permeate “coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.” Harvard concedes, “members of the Jewish and Israeli communities at Harvard reported treatment that was vicious and reprehensible.”

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Harvard, a private institution, can do as it likes. There’s nothing illegal about coddling extremists or pumping out credentialed pseudointellectuals. If the Trump administration failed to follow a bureaucratic process before freezing funds to the university, fine. Get it done. But what “constitutional principle” dictates that the federal government must provide this specific institution with $3 billion in federal contracts and grants? Giving it to them was a policy decision made by the executive branch. Withdrawing the funding is the same.

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If your answer is that the school feels a profound obligation to defend free expression, I suggest you speak to some pro-Israeli or pro-capitalist or pro-American or social conservative student on campus and see how comfortable they feel about airing opinions. Harvard finished last for the second year running in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s “College Free Speech Rankings” in 2024, along with Columbia University and New York University. The only speech Harvard values is the extremist variety.

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Discussion (33)

  • Arahant@Arahant
    Michael Minnott (View Post):

    If that’s the case then perhaps I should start billing Uncle Sam for my posts here on Ricochet. It would certainly be preferable to keeping my day job.

    I like the way you think. First Amendment, baby!

  • RufusRJones@RufusRJones
    Michael Minnott (View Post):
    Harvard, a private institution, can do as it likes. There’s nothing illegal about coddling extremists or pumping out credentialed pseudointellectuals. If the Trump administration failed to follow a bureaucratic process before freezing funds to the university, fine. Get it done. But what “constitutional principle” dictates that the federal government must provide this specific institution with $3 billion in federal contracts and grants? Giving it to them was a policy decision made by the executive branch. Withdrawing the funding is the same.

    This gets at something that I have been wondering about. The government gives these institutions unfathomable amounts of money. I assume it's mostly tax money. What would happen if they stopped doing that? Where do the drug companies get their money? How much of that is profits and how much of that is from the government? Honestly, how much of this is just waste and ripping people off?

  • Mark Camp@MarkCamp
    ReplyingtoRufusRJones

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    Michael Minnott (View Post):
    This gets at something that I have been wondering about. The government gives these institutions unfathomable amounts of money. I assume it’s mostly tax money.
    1. The money deposited in the Treasury’s deposit accounts comes from taxes and other outside sources.
    2. Each deposit is commingled with the money already in the account. In other words, it is all just money—you can’t tell one electronic penny sitting in the computerized bank account from any other. Much less where it came from. It is all just money!
    3. So when a million dollars is withdrawn from a Treasury checking account (like the TGA account at the Federal Reserve) and wire transferred to Harvard, for any employee of the Bank where that deposit account is located to answer your question, “How much of that money came from taxes?” he or she would have to to look at each cent of that transfer as the electrons as they flow through the wires and say, “ok, this cent came from taxes,” or “this one came from a Treasury Bond purchaser” and then add up all the electronic cents and say, “OK, Rufus, we have your answer. We counted 80 million 321 electronic pennies that originally were deposited by taxpayers.”
    4. But since every electronic penny is indistinguishable from every other, the Bank worker would not know which came from taxpayers and which from other sources.

    Does that make sense? Basically, you are asking a meaningless question. It would be impossible for even an omniscient observer to answer.

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