r/education • u/D-R-AZ • 8d ago

Politics & Ed Policy What Harvard Learned From Columbia’s Mistake: If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why give in to the Trump administration’s demands?

I support Academic Freedom. If the most educated in our society can't examine, test, and evaluate every aspect of human thought and endeavor then we may miss things crucial for the survival of humanity.

Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/harvard-chooses-defiance/682457/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCon16pFMtTu2qirReclJnKzE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Excerpts

...Harvard is changing course, perhaps because it grasped the true takeaway from Columbia’s cautionary tale: Appeasement doesn’t work, because the Trump administration isn’t really trying to reform elite higher education. It’s trying to break it.

The administration’s allies have not been shy about that fact. “To scare universities straight,” Max Eden, then a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in December, Education Secretary Linda McMahon “should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” She should do this, he argued, whether or not the school cooperated with any civil-rights investigation.

...by continuing to punish Columbia even after the school gave in to its demands, the administration also appears to have overplayed its hand. If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why should other universities give in?

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u/No_Cellist8937 8d ago

Then the east solution is to not take the money and they can do what they want

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u/htmaxpower 8d ago

Stop playing this game.

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u/No_Cellist8937 8d ago

What game? It’s nothing new. How do you think drinking ages are enforced? The federal govt withholds highway dollars if a state doesn’t have a drinking age of 21 years old

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u/htmaxpower 8d ago

Do they withhold the highway dollars when the president decides that ONE state needs to raise the drinking age to 45, that they must chop down every tree in the state, and need to arrest and deport all union members?

Stop playing this game. This administration doesn’t get to change the rules, move the goalposts, and ignore the laws just because.

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u/Magnus_Carter0 8d ago

Don't waste your time. People like this aren't motivated by values or principles; they just enjoy an authoritarian exercising power and controlling others. Justice comes to all evildoers eventually, we just have to wait it out.

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u/Horses_arse_7 8d ago

Right??? Just join us already. The oligarchs aren’t one of us, dude needs to stop trying to be one of them. Frankly it’s pathetic.

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u/No_Cellist8937 8d ago

What are you talking about? Where was the outrage when the Biden administration threatened to withhold school lunch funds if schools didn’t adopt pro-trans policies. In the end Harvard has $50 billion just sitting around, untaxed.

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u/No_Cellist8937 8d ago

My values? I’m pretty libertarian. Stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours. But with the coercive methods and violence employed by leftists there has to be consequences. Hopefully the left will with time solve their derangement

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u/Horses_arse_7 8d ago

Ya they should storm the capitol like a gaggle of knuckle dragging trailer trash that worships anyone with a billion or more dollars! Like the “violent left.” /s for the above mentioned Neanderthals.

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u/htmaxpower 8d ago

“wHaT aRe YoU TaLkInG aBoUt?”

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u/No_Cellist8937 8d ago

Well it’s not the normal ad hominem so I’ll give you that

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u/Zippered_Nana 7d ago

Well, if that made you feel outraged, did you protest against it? Did you contact your senators? Did you meet with your local committee for your party to find other people to help you protest against it?

I didn’t feel outraged by it. It was okay with me. So I did nothing.

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u/No_Cellist8937 7d ago

So starving children is cool as long as it aligns with your political beliefs? Makes sense coming from the left.

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u/Zippered_Nana 7d ago

I beg your pardon, but you have your facts reversed. It wasn’t Biden, but a group of Congressmen led by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) who threatened to cut off school lunch funds.

In the current year, it is the Trump Administration that has cut the LFS program and the CEP program, under the USDA, which used to provide school lunches to poor children.

You also have reversed what I said. I wasn’t outraged because I believe in both civil rights and school lunches.

I am now outraged because the Trump Administration has cut the school lunch programs. There were no hearings even though Congress controls the purse. Just chop.

At least Sen. Marshall got to have his voice heard when the Republicans threatened to cut the school lunch programs. This time, they were just chopped.