10/1/25

HARVARD:
The Ideal Deal Is No Deal;
But 2nd Best Would Be . . .

YET ANOTHER CHILLING ANNOUNCEMENT came this week from the White House, suggesting that Harvard University has agreed to a deal with the Trump Administration.
     The only glimmer of hope is that the statement came from Trump himself, since the president almost never tells the truth.
     Still, that Harvard and the Trump autocracy are even talking is dispiriting, since the university’s resistance has been a rare moment of hope that the Trump juggernaut can be stopped.
     The stakes are enormous. If Harvard, the nation’s oldest and arguably most important university can be bullied, how likely is it that lesser colleges, to say nothing of other kinds of institutions, will be willing or able to fight back?
     That’s why its so important to mortals who’ve never set foot in Harvard Yard that the university should make no deal.
     No. Nyet. Nope. Nada. Nein. Zero.
     The symbolism is important: Eggheads, 1 / Knuckleheads, 0. 
     More critical is the lesson that every schoolyard scholar learns the hard way: there’s no such thing as a deal with a bully. The tormentor always wants more. And more.
     The Trump administration, falsely claiming egregious antisemitism at Harvard, withheld billions in federal research dollars and demanded severe control over campus governance.

A 2nd BEST DEAL
       Trump said on Sept. 30 that Harvard would agree to finance $500 million to operate “trade schools.” What other concessions might be on the table wasn’t clear. 
      But if Harvard ends up making a deal, I have some thoughts that might help Harvard – and the rest of us. 

• ABJECT APOLOGY – The administration will issue an apology – signed personally by Trump with his trademark scrawl, like the one he used on the Epstein “birthday drawing.” The document admits the government’s violations of the university’s First Amendment free speech rights, and apologize for the strain it has put on the university’s students, faculty and administrators.
• FINANCIAL TERMS – The government agrees to pay the university a penalty of $500 million, in addition to court-approved legal and administrative costs resulting from the government’s abuse of its powers.
•  DEMOCRACY INITIATIVE – The university intends to use some of the above-cited penalty payments to establish a Harvard University School of Democracy, to study defense of democratic governments against becoming dictatorships. The Administration agrees to make its officials available for symposia, research and other initiatives.
  
• FOREIGN STUDENTS – The government acknowledges foreign students have been demonized and disadvantaged by the administration’s false or exaggerated antisemitism claims. The government, at its cost, will undertake remedial measures to make these students whole. Select students, who need transportation from their home countries to the Cambridge, Mass. campus, will be offered free passage aboard Air Force One and Marine One aircraft.
  
• TRANSSEXUAL RESEARCH – The federal Department of Health and Human Services agrees to provide Harvard and its partner universities  sufficient grants for comprehensive research and teaching initiatives into the experience of individuals experiencing and seeking gender change.
  

HARVARD’S FUTURE
     There’s no question that Harvard has much at stake if the Trump Administration succeeds in extracting concessions, or if Harvard fights and loses its legal challenges.
     Indeed,  although Harvard has enormous resources - $53 billion in endowment funds, nearly 25,000 students, 20,700 faculty and staff,  the federal government has far more financial and legal (illegal) firepower.
     Harvard wins on the merits.
     Last month, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled in favor of the university,  cancelling funding cuts.
     “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote.
     But who knows how an appeals court, or the Trump-compliant Supreme Court would rule.
     A loss could mean a far diminished Harvard, and in the worst case, maybe a failed institution.
     But in settling with Trump, and the precedent that sets, Harvard has to ask itself this question:
     What’s more important: Harvard University’s survival? Or continuation of the United States as a democracy?