Apr
18
2025

Veritas, My Ass

On this Good (but not Great) Friday, I'm interested in the Trump-Harvard War. Like most things, Trump's doing a mixture of good, iffy, and awful things. One potentially good thing is a righteous weapon, as described by John Hinderaker: Harvard, Meet Bob Jones. Led off by:

And John continues:

It had been a long time since I had thought about the Bob Jones case, decided in 1983, so I looked it up. You can read the Supreme Court’s decision here. Bob Jones was a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, and it had a policy that prohibited interracial dating or marriage. Because of that policy, the IRS revoked Bob Jones’s tax-exempt status. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the IRS’s action on an 8-1 vote. The Court’s holding was unambiguous:

The IRS’s 1970 interpretation of § 501(c)(3) was correct. It would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private educational entities. Whatever may be the rationale for such private schools’ policies, racial discrimination in education is contrary to public policy. Racially discriminatory educational institutions cannot be viewed as conferring a public benefit within the above “charitable” concept or within the congressional intent underlying § 501(c)(3).

Emphasis added. I am sure Harvard never imagined that it would fall under the same condemnation that befell Bob Jones University. But why shouldn’t it? Hasn’t the Supreme Court already found, in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, that Harvard engages in illegal race discrimination? Yes. […]

I am not a lawyer, but if this isn't a slam-dunk for revoking Harvard's 501(c)(3) status, someone will need to explain why it isn't using very small words.

The NR editors don't have a lot of sympathy for Team Crimson: Harvard Discovers What Federal Money Costs. And note that there is adequate precedent for going beyond the 501(c)(3) thing:

In leveraging their receipt of federal research and aid funding to impose terms on the universities, the Trump administration is not writing on a blank slate, but is instead indulging in the Trumpian habit of making loud and explicit what was previously done with more subtlety. The Solomon Amendment long made the modest demand that federally funded universities allow military recruiters on campus, but we have gone much further down the road since the Supreme Court upheld that single condition in 2006. The Obama and Biden administrations were relentless in using federal law to influence or outright dictate how universities were managed. In 2011, the Obama administration discovered, in Title IX, a mandate for universities to police both sexual assault and sexual harassment (including potentially “unwanted” speech) according to federal standards that deprived students of due process. That standard was used to suppress the speech of faculty, such as Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis, who in a Kafkaesque turn was the subject of a legal complaint by students under Title IX for writing an op-ed column criticizing the Obama view of Title IX. The Obama rules were later even weaponized in a lawsuit against Hillsdale College, which takes no federal funds. When Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, repealed the Obama standard, the ACLU sued her to try to preserve the lever.

In 2016, the Obama administration again used Title IX to insist that colleges adopt transgender ideology and punish students and faculty who dissented from it. In 2021, the Biden administration went further, and sought to prevent even state colleges from following state laws that protected women’s sports from men. In 2022, it demanded that colleges police “hostile environment” speech even if the conduct in question occurs “outside [a school’s] education program or activity.” In 2023, it released a Title IX rule specifically focused on foisting transgender athletes into women’s sports.

I didn't like the Obama/Biden pressure on universities, and I wouldn't like Trump's use of the same tactic. Still, the right time to complain about it was back then.

On that note, as Robby Soave points out: Obama is a huge hypocrite for praising Harvard's anti-Trump stance. Specifically:

Obama clearly believes the Trump administration's threat to deprive Harvard of billions in federal funding is wrong; he also seems to think that the federal government should not be in the business of harming the climate for free speech and academic freedom on campus. On both these fronts, he is engaged in profound hypocrisy.

As I explained previously, the Obama administration carried out the exact same policy against not just a small number of elite educational institutions, but virtually every college and university in the country. Under Obama, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights compelled schools that receive federal funding to change their sexual misconduct policies in ways that undermined basic due process protections for accused students and professors; these new policies also harmed free speech and academic freedom, as several professors who spoke out against the policies were subsequently accused of violating them. This was the perverse logic of Obama's approach to Title IX, the federal statute that outlaws sex discrimination in education: His federal bureaucrats created such a morass that campus administrators felt obligated to investigate professors for criticizing the Education Department.

So I said "good, iffy, and awful" above, so let's go to the "awful". At Cato, Walter Olson points out the unconstitutional overreach: Feds Can't Regulate "Ideological Diversity" at Schools Like Harvard.

No civil rights law on the books requires “viewpoint diversity” in university admissions or hiring or creates a protected class of students or faculty based on ideological views.

No law of any sort entitles the federal government to reach into private universities to restructure their governance and disciplinary procedures to “improve [their] viewpoint diversity and end ideological capture”—whatever that means—or to require college brass to intervene to restructure named departments and schools that federal overseers designate as ideologically out of line—even, incredibly, a divinity school.

These are all things that the Trump administration is demanding of Harvard University on pain of massive peremptory cutoffs of funding for ongoing scientific research and other programs—cutoffs that appear to violate a number of legal safeguards meant to prohibit arbitrary or spiteful defunding without due process.

So, yeah, Trump shouldn't do that. But (good news) the 501(c)(3) thing all by itself would make universities freak out. Bigly. Stick to that, Team Orange.

Also of note:

  • I can't say enough good things about Dominic Pino. He uses his substitute perch doing Geraghty's Morning Jolt newsletter to tell us What’s Really Going On with U.S. Manufacturing. It's long and full of eye-openers. RTWT, but here's a sobering stat:

    A U.S. manufacturing worker in 2010 was twice as productive as a U.S. manufacturing worker in 1990. A U.S. manufacturing worker in 2025 is slightly less productive than a U.S. manufacturing worker in 2010.

    This is an example of why targeting job growth is not a very good economic policy. There are all sorts of ways to create jobs that don’t make people better off. There’s the famous example of Milton Friedman surveying a construction site in China and being told by the authorities that the workers were using shovels instead of machinery so that more people could have jobs. Friedman suggested that if they really wanted to create jobs, they should give them spoons instead of shovels.

    A bookstore in Chelsea, Mich., recently moved to a new location about a block away, and to transport its 9,100 books, a few hundred people stood in a line on the sidewalk and passed each book to one another. This was just a fun publicity stunt, of course, but if creating jobs was your sole economic goal, it would be a good policy to ban trucks and force all goods to be transported this way.

    The problem with U.S. manufacturing, to the extent that there is one, is that it isn’t destroying enough jobs. When all those jobs were being destroyed in the ’90s and ’00s, the workers who were left were becoming much more productive. Output has been rising despite workers becoming slightly less productive over the past 15 years, only because employment has been increasing.

    On a historical note: Hitler decreed that the massive 1936 Olympic Stadium be made by hand as much as possible, even when machines could have done the job quicker. For precisely those "job creation" reasons.

  • I'm not a RINO! You're the RINO! I would imagine that's being said a lot behind D.C. closed doors. Kimberly A. Strassel notes Whispers of a ‘Millionaire Tax’ . (gifted link)

    A popular knock on this second Donald Trump term is that the president stocked his administration with nothing but saluting loyalists. Tell that to the staffers scheming to undercut his signature tax reform—by “managing” him into surrendering to the left’s favorite talking point.

    A (delighted) mainstream media several weeks ago started writing stories about a new Republican interest in raising taxes on “the rich”—namely hiking the top individual tax rate from 37% to 40%, higher than even under Barack Obama. These reports all come from anonymous White House officials, and always take care to insinuate Mr. Trump is “open” to this idea—despite his never saying so.

    This is an awful idea. Nikki Haley wouldn't be "open" to it, I betcha.

  • Among the many Washington fixtures we don't need… Daniel J. Mitchell says We Don’t Need Two Class-Warfare Political Parties. Looking at the advocacy of Steve Bannon and Henry Olson:

    They make a political argument that the GOP will benefit politically if it embraces class warfare.

    I’m very skeptical. If voters want that approach, they’ll go for Bernie Sanders and AOC. And I’ll observe that the Republican presidents who supported higher tax rates, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, are not exactly role models of political acumen and success.

    Pro-tax increase Republicans also argue that higher burdens on the rich can help finance some of Trump’s goofy tax proposals, such as no tax on tips or overtime. That’s true, at least on paper, but that doesn’t change the fact that more tax loopholes and higher tax rates is exactly the wrong direction for tax policy.

    Dan notes (however) that it's "risky" to rely on Trump's devotion to principle on this, like many other things.

Recently on the book blog:


Last Modified 2025-04-19 6:04 AM EDT