The Trump administration has frozen $2 billion in funding to Harvard and is threatening to cut another $1 billion. This has set Washington and the media on fire like nothing else.
To be honest, I get the concerns about this possible precedent (originating from Democrat Administrations).
We know Democrats set precedent, get mad when people use it and then double down when they are back in power. Alas, a point to cover another day.
There are two categories of people in elite journalism and politics: Those who went to Harvard, and those who get invited to speak at Harvard and hope to use their connections to get their kids into it.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they are all coming to Harvard’s defense and reminding us of all the wonderful medical research conducted at the university.
And they are right. It is. Harvard produces some of the best scientific and medical research in the world.
But why? Is it because it’s old? Or that it is famous? Or that it’s prestigious?
No. It’s because it gets more money per student than most other universities. Last year, Harvard received almost $700 million in federal grants. Harvard has 20,000 students. This means that Harvard received $35,000 per student.
In comparison, Arizona State received $800 million, and it has 180,000 students, meaning it received $4,000 per student in federal funds, almost 1/9 of Harvard.
When you receive the most money, you usually can produce the best research.
There are two sides to most universities: One is the classroom, and the other is research. Harvard’s labs are indisputably good, thanks to the money it gets, and its classrooms are undoubtedly awful.
Take, for example, the product (students) they are producing and polling showing employers are becoming less and less inclined to hire Ivy League students. Not to mention that Harvard (supposedly an elite academic institution) now has to offer "remedial math classes" to incoming freshmen. Something an elite teaching school should never have to do.
There is no way for the government to fix the classroom without withholding research grants—and Harvard, with more than $50 billion in its endowment, will be fine.
But also, Harvard is the most inaccessible school for most kids. Harvard admission requires one of these two criteria: connections or embodying woke orthodoxy. The average American high school student can never get into Harvard. They are also racist, see the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against them for unconstitutional racial balancing that limited Asian American students’ admission to the university.
These students who do not fit the Harvard criteria can get into Arizona State University, the University of Florida, the University of Texas, and other schools like that.
These schools are much better in the classroom. Little of the encampment nonsense we saw last year or the woke stuff is present on those campuses. All the craziness comes from elite schools that would not admit your children and grandchildren.
Better yet, all these universities have classical education programs. Their students are not taught to be right-wing or left-wing, conservative or progressive. They are taught the fundamentals of our system, critical thinking, and history. And they are left to make up their own minds. At Harvard and Columbia, students read Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. At these classical education programs, they study Plato and Aristotle, the Federalist Papers and Tocqueville.
The elite universities have become leftist indoctrination camps, but we should not despair because there are still colleges that teach free thinking and citizenship.
These elite schools produce the worst ideologies, poison the brains of their students to hate our country, and use their prestige to fill the ranks of media, politics, and corporations. Everything wrong with our politics originates from there. They are entitled to teaching stupid things to their students, but they are not entitled to doing so on taxpayer money. Something their left-wing media cheerleaders fail to recognize.
The administration is wrong to demand changes to Harvard before unfreezing the funds. They should cut it in the future with no conditions. Instead, they should redirect the money to better universities and help them build the research infrastructure, like science labs.
The argument for Harvard is that it is old and good. This is as un-American as a Harvard classroom. America is a country built on creative destruction, which means that new and better things are created, they phase out the old ones that are too beholden to old and outdated methods. By now, the free market would have fixed this problem with universities.
But universities don’t work in a free market system because the federal government picks winners and losers. And the federal government keeps picking Harvard as the winner—literally, Harvard “wins” these grants—at the cost of everybody else.
It is time that Americans stop picking as the winner a university that produces graduates to despise and hate our country.
But we still need universities that produce cutting-edge research with the federal government’s help—yes, dear reader, the private sector will not solve this problem alone. The administration should redirect all of the funding elite universities get to better schools that teach America’s children how to be citizens, not left-wing activists. It won’t be too long before those new recipients of federal grants produce cutting-edge scientific research, too.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
Harvard earned 11% return on its $42B endowment in 2024. Its’ students pay $86K/year for tuition and room/board. It can afford to self-pay for its faculty’s research.