Find the cost of freedom
By 
George Norlin
President Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status on Tuesday after the school rebuffed the administration’s demands ostensibly aimed at purging “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. The changes, Harvard officials said, required severe restrictions, including to freedom of expression, that they could not accept.
Mr. Trump’s threat escalated the pressure being applied by the Trump administration on Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
It’s the latest turn in a fight between Mr. Trump and academia more broadly, in which the Trump administration has been threatening to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from various colleges and universities over diversity hiring practices and the tolerance of anti-Israel protests on campuses that sometimes included antisemitic behavior.
Last week, Harvard was sent a letter by the Trump administration demanding reforms and routine progress reports on how they were being implemented, in order to continue to “maintain” the financial relationship with the government. Harvard rejected the demand, and the Trump administration instituted a funding freeze of more than $2 billion.
Harvard is uniquely positioned to withstand such a change, with an endowment totaling more than $50 billion. By contrast, Columbia University, which has a far smaller endowment, settled with the administration when it was pressed to make changes to its policies and programs.
Columbia’s endowment of $14.8 billion is larger, in real dollar terms, than Harvard’s was when I was in college in the early 1980s, and Harvard had by far the largest endowment in the nation at the time.
As to “affording” the battle against what at this point even the Cory Robins of the world have to admit fits the F word pretty snugly, here’s a little historical nugget from my own institution:
[George] Norlin is also remembered for resisting efforts by the Ku Klux Klan, which had taken control of the Colorado legislature in about 1922. The Klan insisted he dismiss all Catholic and Jewish faculty, but he resisted and guided the University through the years until 1926, when the Klan lost control of the legislature and governorship. During that period, the University subsisted on a millage built into the state constitution; its budget was cut to zero.
The university at the time had essentially no endowment, so when all state support went away courtesy of the KKK (the original Klan, btw, has some claim to be the world’s first fascist organization, or at least an important precursor to fascism proper) he organized food and fuel drives to keep faculty fed and housed.
Comment this morning from Karen, Cassandra of Texas:
If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now.