Harvard’s Just Comeuppance

Despite the best efforts of its media lackeys, Harvard University has spent the better part of the past two years going through the meat grinder of bad publicity. Is this the comeuppance we have awaited for so long? Has it actually arrived? Are buried dark secrets about to be revealed? Are other shoes about to be dropped, and is it okay to pile on, because, after all, this is a rare opportunity to punch up and win?

As everyone not living on the island of Bali knows, Harvard is being violently gripped by a presidential administration not inclined to ease up. Already shamed by the U.S. Supreme Court for having practiced egregious and illegal racial discrimination in student enrollment, the university now finds itself at the center of a vortex of intense federal-government scrutiny for its mishandling of vandalism, trespass, assault, intimidation, and bullying on its campus by both faculty and students. Lawsuits abound, $3 billion in federal funding is at stake, and Harvard’s well-worn publicity machine is being put to a stress test unlike any it has faced before.

One great fact stands out. Harvard is guilty. And it’s not even a close call. White Hat and Black

This titanic confrontation invites a simplistic formulation of “white hat” versus “black hat,” and the legacy media are pleased to provide it: the white-hat champion of higher education going up against America’s number-one philistine, Donald J. Trump. It’s Dudley Do-Right versus Snidely Whiplash.

The only play left to Harvard is to determine how much it can yield to the government to halt its plummeting brand equity. The flurry of today’s events is difficult to make sense of, but much of the confusion is contrived. Through it all, one Great Fact stands out. Harvard is guilty. And it’s not even a close call. You can see it for yourself in the Notice of Violation sent to Harvard on June 30. All that remains is sentencing. The only play left to Harvard is to determine how much it can yield to the government to halt its plummeting brand equity while retaining a bit of face … as well as the $3 billion in funding.

Harvard’s current ignominy began two years ago, almost to the day, when the Supreme Court ruled that, yes indeed, Harvard had been guilty of racial discrimination in its student-admissions practices. The case confirmed what had been obvious for years, and this crack in the Harvard veneer quickly became a yawning chasm.

On the heels of that decision came an event so horrifying that Harvard’s tepid response was its own affront. This was the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which saw more than 1,200 Israelis killed and many more taken hostage. In a series of mind-boggling decisions all tallied in the Notice of Violation, the university refused to act against anti-Semites on its campus, refused to enforce its own regulations, allowed chaos and intimidation to rule its campus, and sent its overcoached, DEI-hire president Claudine Gay before Congress and the nation to utter some of the most distasteful platitudes ever contrived. After 20 months of this, the Joint Task Force letter to Harvard dropped like an anvil into a placid pool:

After a thorough investigation, HHS OCR finds that Harvard University is in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin.

The Notice of Violation is damning but makes for damn good reading if you enjoy fully substantiated accusations of malfeasance by America’s premier university:

Harvard’s inaction in the face of these civil rights violations is a clear example of the demographic hierarchy that has taken hold of the University. Equal defense of the law demands that all groups, regardless of race or national origin, are protected. Harvard’s commitment to racial hierarchies—where individuals are sorted and judged according to their membership in an oppressed group identity and not individual merit—has enabled anti-Semitism to fester on Harvard’s campus and has led a once great institution to humiliation, offering remedial math and forcing Jewish students to hide their identities and ancestral stories.

The indictment removes any moral veneer that Harvard might construct.

Harvard in the Imagination

The public imagination has tended toward a picture of Harvard as untouchable, unaccountable, and unrepentant—cool and unsympathetic to the muddy-boot world of work yet emblematic of an Ivy League gold standard. Harvard, above all else, has been thought correct.

The university has shattered its image with a series of own goals. Yet the university has shattered that image in a series of own goals that betray an administration that is tone-deaf and aloof. The pristine image has been replaced by one that is closer to reality: of a clique of elitists with upturned noses, jaunty top hats, fine wines, dark wood, and effete concerns as unconnected with America’s mundane routines as any multi-billion-dollar nonprofit could be.

The institution’s comeuppance cements a correct image of Harvard as an impassive, calculating corporation. Is the comeuppance deserved? I think so, if only because it cements a correct image of Harvard as an impassive, calculating corporation subject to the demands of the market and the pressures of political winds. It’s been a long time coming, and many are delighted that it has arrived. The central entity to find a positive side to Israel’s 12-day war against Iran may well have been Harvard’s PR department—the war took Harvard off the front pages. Ditto with the lead-up to the “Big Beautiful Bill” and its passage. All the while Harvard furiously tries to thread the needle.

The Joint Task Force’s report and other Trump Administration actions constitute the first actual threat to an institution that, for many, represents all that is corrupt and misshapen in higher education. Predictably, the mainstream media has labored hand-in-hand with Harvard to portray it as the front-line defender of traditional academia against “outside interference,” even as its real governing power resides in a ruling oligarchy called the Harvard Corporation, a murky collection of billionaires and millionaires drawn from America’s self-sustaining corporate and political elite. In fact, the Harvard Corporation is America’s oldest corporation—Harvard is actually a lucrative business. The secretive body is led by billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker (whose billionaire brother is governor of Illinois).

Harvard’s PR office and its allies have framed the contretemps as an apocalyptic battle between Harvard, representing all of higher education, and the personification of evil, fascism, and authoritarian interference as embodied in President Donald Trump (see also here, here, and here).

This white-hat/black-hat framing marshals the resentment of anti-Trump cadres in service to a $53-billion corporation, whose tax-break status is threatened and whose grotesque ideological capture has been confronted boldly for the first time in its history. This is the stuff of legend, and would-be authors are cobbling together books even as you read this. Current president Garber, certainly. Gay, probably.

Nevertheless, the cognitive dissonance of such a position must weigh heavily on those who continue to perpetuate the myth of higher education as it existed 50 years ago and who refuse to recognize the thoroughgoing colonization of universities by radical progressives who only now are being outed.

Enter Garber

In the middle of all this labors Alan Michael Garber, president of Harvard since the ignominious departure of Claudine Gay in January of 2024. Garber inherited an unenviable task of refurbishing a Harvard brand tainted with academic scandal, credible charges of anti-Semitism, and a perceived inability to govern itself.

President Gay revealed herself to be incompetent at managing the anti-Jewish sentiment on campus, refused to denounce a call for genocide of the Jews, and was exposed as a plagiarist. The Gay sore festered and became a boil until the corporation cut its losses and forced her to resign (allowing her to keep her $900,000 salary as she returned to the faculty).

Garber is a 70-year-old physician, a soft-spoken and longtime college functionary with no track record of public confrontation, let alone one of this magnitude. As president, Garber has attempted to thread an impossible needle. On the one hand, no one really likes Harvard except those on its payroll, and many likely feel schadenfreude at the institution’s decline. On the other hand, folks feel compelled to defend the $53-billion behemoth against the naughty Trump, America’s number-one philistine, who represents everything higher ed hates.

It’s a rare moment when we get to see well-heeled, lavishly compensated bureaucrats squirm under the spotlight. The soft-spoken Garber is at times attempting to cosplay as a principled opposition leader standing up to the enfant terrible Trump while also negotiating to extract Harvard from its convoluted situation. It’s a rare moment when we get to see well-heeled, lavishly compensated bureaucrats squirm under the spotlight. What we must remember is that Harvard is not necessarily the fount of our best and brightest. The legacy of Harvard is not only T.S. Eliot, John Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, and Steve Ballmer but also Alissa Heinerscheid, creator of the Bud Light campaign that destroyed a major American brand, and Joy Reid, radical racialist talk-show host.

Of course, the philistines are not at the gates. They’re in charge of Harvard. When we couple the growing legacy of addlepated Harvard graduates with the shame of America’s premier university offering a remedial math class, we see a Harvard brand approaching freefall (almost as if Alissa Heinerscheid were managing the PR office). On the matter of the remedial math class, Harvard addressed the issue with a PR flack, who denied that the remedial math class is a remedial math class, despite the fact that everyone can see that it is a remedial math class.

Denouement

With the Joint Task Force’s resolution of its Title VI investigation and its letter of indictment to Harvard, the melodrama that is “Harvard Besieged” now moves into the denouement stage. Whatever the result of this week’s courtroom argument, Harvard is indeed guilty as charged.

Many in higher education hold their noses and support Harvard as the default point-institution defending their prerogatives against the philistines. As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Harvard University’s resistance to many of the Trump Administration’s escalating demands has served as a kind of beacon to higher ed. ‘Can’t believe I’m saying this, but—go Harvard!’ enthused a community-college administrator.”

Of course, the philistines are not at the gates. They’re in charge of Harvard.

Thus, how many worthies in higher education really want to tether themselves to a sprawling, racialist, anti-Semitic, extremist, bombastic, chaotic, impotent institution that is in “violent violation” of U.S. Civil Rights law, an institution whose comeuppance has been decades in the making?

I’m betting not many.

Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D., IMBA, is clinical full professor at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. He is a former military intelligence officer with a Ph.D. from Duke University and has taught in Russia, China, India, Spain, and Colombia. He is the author, most recently, of DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.

[Correction: An early draft of this article misidentified Harvard Corporation fellow Biddy Martin as a billionaire. We regret the error.]