Harvard and the Battle Over Higher Ed

On this week's On the Media, the leadership crisis at Harvard and the backlash to decades of diversity efforts didn't begin or end with the resignation of its first black president last year.

Diversity wasn't much of an important political term in the 1970s.

Integration was a much bigger term.

Nobody was buying stock in diversity.

I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard Admissions Program as one example of how race, properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account.

Tonight, President Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests, ramping up immigration agents taking a second student involved in the Columbia University demonstrations into three.

We will continue to look for people that we would never have allowed into this country on student visas had we known they were going to do what they've done.

But now that they've done it, we're going to get rid of them.

We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Michael Lewinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

After months of witnessing the demolition of federal agencies that safeguard our health and our security, of seeing violent lawbreakers and corrupt POWs and tycoons set free, of watching the firing of civil servants who process our benefits and researchers that gather data so that we can better understand the true state of the nation after months of action against public institutions and even private ones who may see that nation differently.

After months of the chainsaw, this week there finally was a protracted call from the loyal opposition to make good trouble.

Don't become like him.

Be an American that says, I look to the future and I'm excited.

Corey Booker, senator from New Jersey, speaking for a record-breaking 25 hours from the Senate floor.

We are a nation that is great not because of the people that are trying to whitewash our history,

to remove great people, Native Americans, black people, and women from our military websites.

I don't want a Disneyification of our history.

I don't want to whitewash history.

I don't want to homogenize history.

Tell me the wretched truth about America because that speaks to our greatness.

Booker's marathon speech topped 350 million likes on his TikTok live.

It's been called a desperately needed reset for the Democratic Party.

It definitely was a teachable moment.

Teachable also, the momentous election this week of a Democratic judge in Wisconsin and a recent fleet of new polls that show most Americans are heartily sick of Elon Musk and suspect that the mass firings and tariffs may make America a harder place for the non-rich to thrive.

And that Donald Trump's obsession with silencing his ideological foes may have distracted him from what matters most.

Among those foes, America's great institutions of higher learning.

Tonight, President Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests ramping up

immigration agents taking a second student involved in the Columbia University demonstrations into custody.

Earlier this week, the National Institutes of Health said it's terminating more than $250 million in funding to Columbia in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.

Another Ivy League shakeup as Columbia University's interim president, Katrina Armstrong, steps down from her role.

This comes on the heels of Columbia caving to President Trump's demands after he pulled $400 million in federal funds.

The federal government also suspending several research grants at Princeton.

All right, the crackdown against campus anti-Semitism continues, now putting Harvard University under the microscope.

The Trump administration saying it plans to carry out a review of federal grants and contracts awarded there to the tune of nearly $9 billion.

Last winter, we produced a three-part series with the Boston Globe called The Harvard Plan about the crisis in American higher education.

We aired it in December to coincide with the one-year anniversary of that infamous congressional hearing, the one that pitted the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT against Republican lawmakers.

The hearing was purportedly about anti-Semitism on campus, and it was the aggressive questioning by Representative Elise Stefanik that made the whole thing go viral.

So based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for Intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

I will say again, that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.

Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard's code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?

It is at odds with the values of Harvard.

Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?

Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president, resigned at the beginning of January 2024 after weeks of attacks on her record, including accusations of plagiarism.

The series was about the short and troubled tenure of Claudine Gay.

But as reporter Ilya Merits discovered, anti-Semitism was just a pretext to go after gay.

The real target?

Diversity programs, or DEI.

Does Harvard Harvard value Veritas or truth, or does Harvard value DEI and having the right race and gender symbolism at the top of its university hierarchy?

In light of the administration's current actions, we thought it was a good time to revisit episode three, in which we excavate the origins of diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.

Ilya was well placed to tell the story because he happened to be a visiting fellow at Harvard and watched the whole thing unfold from a ringside seat.

The brutal takedown of Harvard's first and only black president seemed to register very little on the Harvard campus.

This surprised me.

It happened during winter break.

Sure, people were away.

When they came back, I expected to see posters for assemblies and talks about what it all meant.

I waited, and nothing happened.

I started to feel like a house guest in one of those families where they don't discuss uncomfortable things.

One day, I imagine, Claudine Gay's portrait will hang on a wall someplace at Harvard.

People will walk by, maybe stop and wonder who she was and why she was in the job for not even one full year.

I've been puzzling over a few questions since I watched her flame out.

What did it all mean?

I have come up with two answers to that question.

And I'm going to give you both of these answers in this story.

The second answer, which we'll get to a little later this hour, is all about the present present political moment, polarization, social media, and the Trump-Vance campaign's promise to attack universities.

Now that they are in office, I can say it's a promise Trump and Vance are keeping.

The first answer has to do with the long and surprising history of a very potent, very American concept, one that was developed at Harvard and spread to the world.

Diversity.

So let's start there.

When Claudine Gay was announced as Harvard's next president, there was grumbling because she hadn't published many articles or a book.

This observation goes hand in hand with a belief I also heard as I reported this story, that Gay was a diversity hire.

People who know Claudine Gay professionally as a colleague describe her with words like thoughtful, intelligent, and good listener.

She was low-key, low-drama.

And you could argue that those qualities made her not the best pick for this moment in time.

Still, a black woman was made president of Harvard University.

Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School.

He's written many books on race and the law.

Now,

I'm sorry that her tenure was so short and that it was cut off in such a terrible way.

But I don't think it should be forgotten that a black woman was president of the most famous university in the United States.

Part of

making that happen

was,

you know, diversity consciousness.

Kennedy heard the whispers and insinuations that she was chosen for her race, and he thinks this is true to a point, but also, so what?

There are going to be some people who are going to, you know, sort of look at that and snicker and make that part of a deficiency story.

Well, she must be deficient.

And, you know, I think that's ridiculous.

I look at the

social forces that made her presidency possible as

on balance, a good thing.

We're going to go deep now on Harvard and diversity because the conversation didn't begin with Claudine Gay.

It stretches back decades, actually a whole century.

To walk us through this history, our guides are Randall Kennedy, who you just met, and his colleague, another Harvard Law professor, Noah Feldman.

I'm a Felix Frankfurter, a professor of law at the law school.

Feldman pointed me to the very beginning of the diversity conversation.

It goes back to a time before there were many black or brown people at Harvard.

The discussion then was about Jews, and it wasn't pretty.

At the start of the 20th century, Jews were arriving in America in large numbers from Eastern Europe.

By the 1920s, their sons were taking the Harvard entrance exam and getting in.

And people at Harvard did not like it.

There's no very exact count, but people's estimates at the time put the number of Jews up at 20% of the population.

This led to concern and backlash from, among other people, A.

Lawrence Lowell, who was the president of Harvard at the time.

President Lowell fretted that the character of Harvard was changing and wrote that there was an urgent need to prevent a dangerous increase in their proportion of Jews.

What to do about it became a high priority, but Lowell's initial proposals to simply cap the number of Jews admitted didn't fly with the faculty.

It was too much of a blunt instrument.

And so he, with the assistance of advisors, came up with an alternative strategy.

And this was a strategy they called the Diversity Strategy.

And what it set out to do was to make Harvard a national university, drawing on people from all over the country.

Diversity not to bring people in, but to keep them out.

This is the moment when Harvard moved to an admission system that looks more like what we know today, with interviews for applicants, an emphasis on character, and an effort to recruit from all over the nation, tools that enabled the school to have more of a say in its own student body.

The point of this plan, the diversity plan, was to say, by making it a national school, we'll draw in people from Nebraska and Iowa, still men, of course, at the time.

And the idea was that the university would then be more diverse nationally.

And by magic, it would also have very many fewer Jews because it wouldn't have urban ethnic Jews.

And it worked.

Jews continued to get into Harvard, but in smaller numbers.

And hang on to Harvard's concept of diversity as a key principle in admissions because a few decades later, it comes into play again in a big Supreme Court case.

First case on today's calendar is number 76811, Regents of the University of California against Backe.

In the late 1970s, a white plaintiff named Alan Backey claimed he'd been denied admission to the University of California Davis Medical School because of his race.

Many colleges and universities had begun considering an applicant's background in response to the civil rights movement.

They felt it was time to give opportunity to more minority students.

Mr.

Cox, you may proceed whenever you're ready.

This was sometimes called affirmative action, but it wasn't clear whether it was constitutional.

Mr.

Chief Justice, may it please the court?

The Bakke case involved a challenge to affirmative action in which the challengers claimed that affirmative action violated the equal rights of white students who had the same scores as black students who were being admitted on the basis of there being an addition to diversity.

Among the nine justices, there was a clear divide.

Four justices said essentially affirmative action should be unconstitutional as a violation of equal protection.

Four justices said affirmative action should be perfectly constitutional because we have a history of racial exclusion and discrimination in the United States, and admitting students to remediate that history of discrimination is totally legitimate and doesn't violate equal protection.

That left one swing justice, Lewis Powell, a white Virginian and Harvard law grad, class of 32.

Powell was not ready to go with the four justices who supported affirmative action on the grounds of history, but he was also unwilling to close the door on the notion that the applicant's personal background could play some kind of role.

He found a middle way in arguments made by Harvard, specifically by a slow-talking patrician Harvard law professor who was a bit of a legend.

Certainly, the objective of improving education through greater diversity.

His name was Archibald Cox.

Here he is arguing for Harvard at the Supreme Court.

There is no racially blind method of selection which will enroll today more than a trickle of minority students in the nation's colleges and professions.

Randall Kennedy got to know Cox when Kennedy joined Harvard Law School in 1984, fresh from clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall.

There hadn't been many black people on the faculty, and Cox took an interest in his young colleague.

You can tell just from the tenor of my voice, I remember him with tremendous fondness and respect and admiration.

If he was being portrayed in a movie, the directions would say, you want a person who looks like a Boston Brahmin.

Cox was partial to bow ties and semi-rimless readers, but what he was famous for was being fired by President Nixon.

Just a few years earlier, Cox was a special prosecutor investigating Watergate.

He had refused to drop a subpoena for recordings Nixon secretly made of his own conversations in the White House, and he was canned.

That gave Cox a particular kind of gravitas as he went before the Supreme Court and sketched Harvard's idealistic vision for higher education as a vehicle for social advancement, open to all.

So that they, other, younger boys and girls, may see, yes, it is possible for a black to go to the University of Minnesota or to go to Harvard or Yale.

I know Johnny down the street,

and I know Sammy's father.

He became a lawyer, and John's father became a doctor.

This is essential if we are ever going to give true equality in a factual sense to people.

And what Archibald Cox says was the community that we want to facilitate is a community in which individuals come here, they're selected to come here, and a lot of the learning comes from, you know, people learning from one another.

Well, for people to learn from one another, won't that happen best if there is some degree of curated difference?

It's not about repairing past wrongs, but about who's in the classroom.

At that time, there was something novel about this idea.

Diversity wasn't much of an important

political

cultural term.

in the 1970s.

There were other terms.

Integration was a much bigger term.

Diversity, you know, nobody was buying stock in diversity.

But then in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, into the 2000s, diversity becomes more and more and more influential as an idea.

Thanks in large part to the U.S.

Supreme Court.

Mr.

Justice Powell will announce the judgment of the court.

There is no opinion of the court supported by a majority.

Justice Powell's one-man opinion carried the day.

And in that opinion, Powell said, diversity is the rationale that justifies affirmative action.

Not remediating past discrimination, but having a diverse class.

Again, Noah Feldman.

One justice, Justice Lewis Powell, wrote a narrow opinion only for himself that became the law because it was the narrowest opinion upholding affirmative action.

A majority of one.

Although the University of California was the school whose policies were being challenged, it was Harvard and law professor Archibald Cox who supplied the blueprint for race-conscious admissions to Justice Powell.

Here's Powell at the Supreme Court.

I refer, in my opinion, to the Harvard Admissions Program as one example of how race, properly, in my opinion, may be taken into account.

Sometimes also called the Harvard Plan.

I will quote briefly from the description of the Harvard program, a copy of which is in the appendix to my opinion.

And here I quote in substance:

the committee, the admissions committee, has not set target quotas for the number of blacks or musicians, football players, physicists.

So, in that moment in 1978, Harvard's diversity admission policy became the law of the land.

The difference it made is still much debated, but either way, universities adopted this approach.

Student bodies did become more diverse.

In 1991, Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law.

In time, corporate America embraced diversity.

You can see diversity on TV and in movies and panel discussions.

It's so everywhere.

You notice when it's missing.

Again, Randall Kennedy.

The diversity rationale

says, you know, actually,

the people that we are selecting are bringing something very special and very good to the the table.

I think this may be the very first time in the history of the United States in which a policy, a racial policy, actually valorized people of color.

Diversity doesn't dwell on history.

It's inclusive.

And so everyone, the whole community is going to be uplifted through diversity.

At least in theory,

everybody, you know, gets a role in the show.

But in higher education specifically, affirmative action has always had its critics.

In 2022, the Supreme Court heard a major challenge to considering race in college admissions.

The plaintiffs said that, like Jews decades earlier, Asian Americans had become too successful for some people's comfort.

Race-based affirmative action was used to keep their numbers down.

The defendants were the University of North Carolina, a public institution, and Harvard.

Noah Feldman says that was no accident.

You didn't need Harvard, which is a private university.

They added Harvard to that same case because they wanted the oomph of being able to say diversity came from Harvard, diversity was bad from the start.

The decision came down June 29th, 2023.

The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC's programs are permissible under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

We conclude that they are not.

Two days after that, Claudine Gay formally assumed the job of Harvard president.

Incredible timing.

To my mind, not at all a coincidence that the Supreme Court strikes down the diversity rationale, and then almost immediately the attacks on Claudine Gay start to depict her as quote-unquote a diversity candidate with the intent of undermining her.

For critics of diversity, depicting a president who was already in a lot of trouble as a diversity candidate was a way of weakening diversity as a cultural category that can be used positively for anybody else in the future.

Diversity is on the ropes, and race-based affirmative action is legally dead.

So, what now?

For me, racial affirmative action, I wrote a book defending it.

I've been defending it.

And then Kennedy said something that I did not expect.

Is it the last word?

No, I don't think it's the last word.

It may very well be that

there are superior alternatives.

It's even possible, it's even possible that the Supreme Court of the United States decision, which I don't like,

it's possible that that decision will lead to better policies in the future.

Life is just complicated like that.

Coming up, black alumni of Harvard get together to process everything that just happened.

This is on the media.

is a thing of the past.

It was treated as being something that can be dealt with rationally, and that was a big, big mistake because

rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict.

Hussein Aga and Robert Malley join me on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is on the media.

I'm Michael Lowinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

We're listening to the Harvard Plan, a series we aired last winter.

The story started as a deep dive into Claudine Gay's very public ouster from her position as Harvard's first black president.

But it soon became clear that there were much bigger forces at play in the controversies beleaguering America's institutions of higher learning.

Here's reporter Ilya Merritt.

It's great to see you.

Last fall, I got a glimpse of all that 45 years of race-conscious admissions has accomplished.

So this is called the Harvard Black Alumni Weekend.

Mount Holyoke College President Danielle Hawley.

It started, I think we had the first one maybe 20 years ago or so.

You'd have to look.

Hawley became a college leader on the exact same day that Claudine Gay did.

We're sitting on a bench outside the Harvard Science Center.

It's college weather, sweaters, autumn leaves, and all around us, black Harvard grads in their 40s, 50s, and upwards are hanging out in little clusters as undergrads come and go on foot and on scooter.

And so there are over a thousand alums this weekend, black alums who are here to celebrate together.

We spotted Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, and an actress from Riverdale.

Oh, there's Soledad O'Brien right there.

I hadn't really prepared for all the famouses, but yeah, of course.

Whether it's Justice Jackson or President Obama or Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch, every major leader who's black American in this country, the road to that leadership runs through the Ivy League schools and Howard.

So if you cut off access to Harvard, you're cutting off access to leadership in this country.

In the days just before the Black Alumni weekend, colleges started releasing the numbers on their first post-affirmative action classes.

At some schools, black admissions are down a lot.

Other places, there's no big change.

At Harvard College, the percentage of black freshmen is down four percentage points.

At Harvard Law School, just recently, we learned black admissions are down by more than half.

No one I talked to at this gathering seemed to have an answer for what the post-affirmative action world should look like.

Again, this was September when it seemed possible that a black woman lawyer might become the president of the United States.

Holly told me it was former Attorney General Loretta Lynch who brought the most fire in her talk.

We will not back down from the notion that we belong here and there's a sense that many of us have sacrificed quite a bit personally to contribute, build this place up.

And then we see one more famous person.

Oh, but here's President Gay right here, behind us.

Claudine Gay is making making her way across the plaza.

People keep stopping her, wanting to talk.

She's wearing crimson flats and a very colorful dress.

Holly and I sort of hover nearby, waiting for an opening.

Okay, okay.

Holly wants a selfie.

I just want to introduce myself.

In person, Gay is warm and relaxed.

Here, this weekend, she's been celebrated.

While I stand just a little to the side, the women kibbits.

I notice they're now holding hands, swinging their arms.

We would love to have you come to Mount Holy.

Yeah, yeah, we would.

I know you're on sabbatical.

I'm like, but whenever, and it doesn't even have to be it, but like whenever.

Yeah, we are on Sunday.

I know.

Yes.

Yes, and we would have to go.

And you were at the

new president.

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember.

After Gay moved on, Danielle Holly told me she had expected this weekend to be something like a reckoning or a family conversation.

It hasn't been that at all.

I think it's really been more about, wow, you know, look what this community has been able to do.

And look what the institution for years believed was important for it to do.

And I think the question is, does the institution still believe that?

There is a movement in the opposite direction to take the Supreme Court's decision and the DEI backlash and decisively lock racial diversity out of the university's goals.

And as I reported this story last year, I watched it gaining ground.

I want to introduce you now to Sam Lesson, Harvard College Class of 05, California venture capitalist, friend of Mark Zuckerberg's.

You know, I'm a stereotypical Silicon Valley guy.

Lesson is someone who used to defend Harvard when his friends complained about trigger warnings and political correctness.

He had an awakening after Hamas attacked Israel.

I'm the one who's wrong here, and that sucks.

If you think of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman or culture warrior Chris Ruffo as the the clean-cut grads who fanned the flames of outrage, does Harvard value Veritas or truth or does Harvard value DEI?

True free speech has been curtailed on many campuses and conservative voices have been shouted down.

Lesson shares some of their views, but his approach is different.

There's a lot I respect about Bill Ackman, a lot of the good I think he's done.

But I also think, you know, from a purely political, how do you fix things perspective, there's a difference between the aggressive yell at things versus give people paths forward, right?

And so I think that's like the interesting balance to play in terms of saying, no, I want substantive change and revival.

I don't want to just be mad.

He's been circulating a 97-page slide deck about how Harvard should change.

There's a weekly newsletter with 20,000 subscribers and counting.

Lesson is talking with donors about how they can leverage their dollars for accountability.

We believe the school needs to refocus on academic excellence, improving governance, real free speech and free inquiry.

Like there's a bunch of themes we have.

Notice diversity is not one of the core values.

Lesson thinks it's a mistake to try to solve bigger social problems through university admissions policies.

He's okay with what the Supreme Court did.

More than okay.

I actually believe this was the right decision, right?

Which is, how can we as a society say that it should matter, you know, what the color of your skin is in terms of who gets into college?

That's that's crazy, right?

By the way, Lesson's father and sister sister went to Harvard too.

I asked him about that.

He told me doing away with legacy admissions is, quote, a valid conversation.

But he worries that the kind of classroom environment where students learn from each other is more difficult to achieve today with people growing up online.

They created a sense of identity and purpose and meaning by being extreme.

And you say, oh, now we want you to go to college.

And we want you to be in a diverse community and work with all these people that you're not going to agree with completely.

And they all come in like atoms, just bouncing off of each other.

You're supposed to learn to learn from people you don't agree with.

It's just like, it's oil and water, right?

Is what's going on.

You're a Facebook guy.

I mean, do you blame

social media?

No, social media, like, I think the answer is I think it's like such a simplistic read, right?

Like, you know, people love scapegoats, right?

Like, because it's fun.

Okay, so I put him on the defensive a little.

He said, it's not social media per se, se, but the underlying technology and what it enables.

Lesson told me in his ideal world, universities would be monasteries of truth, less online, more focused on IRL debate and discussion.

They defend the truth, they search out the truth, they look for the best of the best to do that, they train the best, etc.

And in that world, I think it would be great for them to be set up in such a way that they have incredible independence from any politics, right?

Well, sure.

But especially after what happened to Claudine Gay, that is increasingly hard to do.

Good evening, Milwaukee.

Representative Elise Stefanik, the tormentor of college presidents, at a hearing in December 2023, took a victory lap in prime time at the Republican National Convention.

Who saw that congressional hearing with the college presidents of so-called elite universities?

As if to declare, yeah, college is political now.

Suck it up.

Oh, wait.

They are former presidents.

This year, Republicans campaigned against universities.

It is a big change.

They used to talk about making college more accessible.

Now they're saying college itself is bad.

The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left.

And this little nugget from then-candidate Donald Trump made Hillary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter, sit up straight.

Our secret weapon will be the college college accreditation system

accreditation a secret weapon no one knows what accreditors do or what they are and they certainly have never been the topic of a political campaign so i think it has everyone on edge a creditor is this totally obscure job you really only pay attention to the accreditor when a college closes that that's where you get the alert from the accreditor accreditors come under the oversight of the department of education last month trump signed an executive order aimed at eliminating the department.

It didn't mention accreditors.

They are like the quality assurance.

They, you can kind of think of it as like they work for the consumer and they do visits to colleges.

They call out once colleges are, you know, doing something not good.

Like we've seen colleges that have closed sometimes at the end when they're financially crunched, they start doing things that lessen the quality.

And that's where the accreditor steps in and says, you know, this isn't okay.

When I return to the White White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics.

We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.

Trump, who is the founder of the now-defunct, never-accredited Trump University, said he would pressure schools to refocus curricula on Western civilization, American tradition, and of course, to get rid of DEI.

On the campaign trail, he got specific about leverage, investigations, taxes on endowments, cuts to research funding.

And now that he's in office, he's reaching for those levers.

Do universities have like a plan to deal with this?

Are they ready for this?

Universities have been very quiet since the election.

That's something I've been speaking with people about.

Universities have so many fires they need to be watching right now.

Like not only it's their finances and

academic freedom, but also

their students and their professors, their employees are being threatened with many of Trump's immigration policies.

Candidate Trump said he'd deport foreign students who joined pro-Palestine protests.

Already in the presidential transition, some universities were planning for this.

What I'm hearing from higher education watchers and lawyers who are working on this is the universities are doing the work behind the scenes, like quietly, because they don't want a target on their their back.

So much for that.

Last month, ICE agents took custody of a recently minted Columbia University Masters in International Affairs and green card holder named Mahmoud Khalil.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, by way of explanation, that he, quote, will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.

More students and faculty members identified with the Palestinian cause have been arrested since then.

The tools, the pressure points were always there.

But it's new that there are politicians willing and empowered to use them.

Coming up, J.D.

Vance's plan to attack the universities looks to Victor Orban's Hungary for inspiration.

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So, where are you?

You're at Radio Lab.

We go places.

Riding in an elevator.

From her bathroom.

We're walking through shin-length grass.

Are we in a boat?

No, but we're gonna be in Namibia.

On Mars.

In my closet.

Poughkeepsie, New York.

To Kolkata.

Inside the womb.

Wow.

And everywhere.

New York King John.

Radiolab.

Adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

This is On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Leminger.

Earlier in this hour, we delved back into the history of diversity in American college admissions.

Part one of Ilya's answer as to what exactly happened last year at Harvard.

Now we get to part two, the politics of our current moment.

So much of what we want to accomplish.

Vice President J.D.

Vance.

So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities.

Vance gave this speech in 2021 when he was running for Senate from Ohio.

Everything about it is blunt, starting with the title, The Universities Are the Enemy.

I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Next, Vance explains the concept of red pilling.

If you don't know it, it comes from the movie The Matrix, which, as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room.

The writer-directors of the film are siblings and trans women and critics of Donald Trump.

Still, there is an idea in their movie that people on the right love.

The basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it.

He runs the audience through some examples of campus liberals taking things too far.

This, of course, is the key ingredient in all conversion narratives about universities.

A pogrom started on social media.

The guy was turned into...

And it's effective because, you know, enough of it is true or feels right.

A paper came out suggesting that gender transition surgeries and hormonal therapies for adolescents was in fact when I was at Harvard, I had a class where the students routinely reached for words like colonialism or oppression.

I found that annoying.

Student who invited a bunch of students over to his house in a joking way has been threatened by the diversity bureaucracy at Lee Law School.

Vance speaks with the fluency of an insider.

He graduated Yale Law School in 2013.

I really want to end this on an inspirational note.

I'm including the end of his speech because it contains this weird historical coda.

Vance says he looked for a quote from scripture or from history.

And the person whose quote I ultimately had to land on was the great prophet and statesman, Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Vance releases a little smile, and his eyes sweep the room as if to say, Are you ready for the mic drop?

There was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago.

He said, and I quote,

the professors are the enemy.

The end, the professors are the enemy.

I want to underline what a choice this is.

President Nixon said those words not in public, not in a speech, but in a secret recording made in the Oval Office in 1972, right after he won a landslide re-election.

The tape was only released to the public in 2008.

You'd have to be a Nixon scholar or a fanboy to really know about it.

The press is the end.

The astronomy is the enemy.

The professors are the enemy.

The professors are the enemy.

Write that in the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.

Not long after Nixon said those words, the special counsel investigating Watergate requested some of his Oval Office tapes.

Nixon resisted.

When the special counsel refused to drop his subpoena, he was fired.

I tell you this because the special counsel was, of course, Archibald Cox, the same Archibald Cox who wore bow ties and taught at Harvard Law School, the same Archibald Cox who convinced the Supreme Court to uphold race-based affirmative action on the grounds of diversity.

I want to ask you about some of the things you've said about American universities.

I know you've been very critical of them.

CBS's Margaret Brennan had J.D.

Vance on Face the Nation in August, shortly after he became the Republican candidate for vice president.

By now, Vance had a specific model in mind for the change he wants to see.

You gave an interview in February.

You said the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orban's approach in Hungary.

Hungary's strongman president, Viktor Orban, grabbed control of state universities, putting friends from his political party in charge of the foundations that run them.

Gender studies have been banned.

Hungary is now ranked lower for academic freedom than Sudan, and just ahead of Uzbekistan, far below where it was when Orban intervened.

Is that what you're advocating be done in the United States?

Well, Margaret, what you're seeing in the United States, actually, is that universities are controlled by left-wing foundations.

They're not controlled by the American taxpayer.

And yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.

I don't want taxpayers controlling education necessarily.

Is that what you're advocating for?

Federal government?

Margaret, what I'm advocating for is for taxpayers to have a say in how their money is.

Does J.D.

Vance admire Hungary because it's producing like

better graduates and like finer research and like more medical breakthroughs?

I went back to Hillary Burns, the Globe's higher education reporter.

I have not heard anything about that.

I think we've only heard that he admires the government policing what's taught and how the university is run.

Aaron Powell, there's no shortage of authoritarian governments around the world at this moment, and there have been many in the past.

What do we know about universities in authoritarian systems?

So I asked a professor I spoke with over the summer, a CUNY professor, Benjamin Hett, about why is it that universities are among the first targets for authoritarian leaders?

And his answer was quite simple.

He said, because professors tend to tell them they're wrong.

Who likes that?

And I think that it's safe to say authoritarian governments target the people who are establishing truths and who are studying and researching controversial and difficult topics.

Like that, that's a playbook that we've seen throughout history.

And I think that's really concerning for anyone who cares about the truths or is in the truth business.

Uncooperative colleges could lose access to federally backed student loan programs, to research grants.

Endowment taxes could grow.

When I spoke with Mount Holyoke College President Danielle Holley only a few months ago, all that was still theoretical.

We absolutely are thinking about that.

How would we self-fund, for example, our entire financial aid system?

We're in a conference room.

Because it's a women's college, almost all the oil portraits on the walls are of women, which makes a nice change.

You know, if there's no funding for Pell Grants, if there's complete privatization of the loan system that we have, how will we be able to help parents and students?

We're lucky.

we're a small liberal arts college.

We believe that we actually probably have the resources to self-fund for four years or however the defunding lasts.

But many colleges and universities don't have that choice.

Holly had read some of Vance's words before, but she hadn't seen this speech.

So I played some of it for her.

It's breathtaking.

It's truly breathtaking.

When we ask the question of why universities, I think you heard a lot of it in that answer, which is they get to control what the truth is.

The universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research, that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

So if the truth is malleable, if the truth is just something that we play out on social media, but there is no actual truth.

I think when you put universities in the bullseye, you're essentially putting concepts like knowledge and truth, even values, what is right and what is wrong.

All of those things are being called into question.

It lines up with something Holly recently noticed.

When people find out what she does for work, they're sometimes skeptical or even hostile.

I've had people in airports and on airplanes ask me like, so what do you teach?

And, you know, what are, what are you doing in terms of indoctrination of students?

Because again, it's become such a, we've become like the tobacco industry almost for for some people.

They see us as a, as a harm to the Republic, as a harm to their values and to their communities.

And I think- She says it started in 2020 or 2021.

That's when you began to hear a lot of this.

And remember Ron DeSantis, of course, in Florida.

So some.

When Florida did its own strong arm reboot of education.

At one public college, the gender studies program was axed.

and more than a third of faculty left the school.

Today, the White House is taking a page from that playbook and going further, singling out universities, threatening their access to federal funds.

You know, please get as concrete as you can.

Like, with this institution, like, what are you going to do if

somebody comes to you and says you have to change the way that you're teaching, the way that you're teaching?

Like, are there compromises that you can make?

No.

There are no compromises to be made.

For me, my job is to promote the mission of my institution and to make sure that the students here get the best education possible.

Do you think most college presidents are going to take the same position as you?

Absolutely not.

I think what we will see is that we will see many institutions, we see that already, who are scraping their websites.

They're being very neutral.

They're trying to stay under the radar.

And all of this, again, is understandable as a college leader.

If I were leading a large research one institution, I would absolutely be positioning, positioning, I think, my university to probably keep as much federal funding as possible.

In the end of the day, who's going to defend the universities from the federal government, like from these entities?

Normally, it'd be people like me, right?

Again, Sam Lesson, Silicon Valley guy and alumni activist.

I followed up with him after the election.

Who would say, let's pursue truth at all costs, stay out of these schools, et cetera.

And I'm at the point where I'm like, look, I still believe that intellectually, but practically speaking, you don't really have a leg to stand on, right?

It's hard to defend the activities that have been happening on campus.

A few years ago, in a speech, JD Vance said, we need to attack the universities.

He said, professors are the enemy.

Do you have any concern about that kind of rhetoric?

You know, here's my thing on rhetoric: is

I think we live in this very split world at this point where everyone's scared of everyone else, right?

Lesson contrasted Kamala Harris's careful, more scripted media strategy with that of her opponents.

People make fun of Trump for spitballing live for hours.

It's actually a very reasonable strategy.

Before landing on what he thinks of Vance's words.

Yeah, that's a little, little intense.

Is it completely wrong?

Like, are there some crazy liberal professors who are using their brands they're associated with as a political platform and are not pursuing truth?

Yes, that is definitely true.

Right.

Again, does it scare me?

As a one-off, sure.

If you plucked it out and said, this is his one point of platform, it's not great.

But I don't think it's completely unreasonable in a spitballing sense.

And I think people need to give some grace

to this different communication strategy.

In Sam Lesson's world, J.D.

Vance gets grace, but universities don't.

They are under obligation to police their students, their professors and administrators, to police themselves, or risk being on the wrong side of the government.

Current Harvard president Alan Garber has told faculty he's worried.

The Republican talk about significant increases in endowment taxes, quote, keeps me up at night, the Harvard Crimson reported him as saying.

Before Trump's inauguration, Harvard made some changes that might help it with the incoming administration.

It did away with diversity statements for applicants to join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

It adopted a policy on institutional voice.

Basically, that's new guidance that says Harvard will only talk about stuff pertaining to Harvard and higher education.

We need to watch carefully for the next four years.

Who will get in line, who will be ready to participate and cooperate with the notion that we must readjust our academic programs and academic freedom, what we teach in our classrooms, to conform to what the current federal government wants us to do.

That was late last year, when it was all still hypothetical.

We now know what the Trump administration wants from Harvard per a letter dated April 3rd.

Harvard must, quote, address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture in its academic programs.

It should commit to, quote, full cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.

That's the agency that's been arresting students involved in pro-Palestinian activism.

The government is demanding, quote, immediate cooperation while it reviews billions in grants and contracts.

Harvard's response, response?

Like his predecessor, Claudine Gay, when she was faced with a hostile Congress, Alan Garber had conciliatory words.

He acknowledged an anti-Semitism problem and treated the government's concerns as sincere.

If this funding is stopped, he wrote, it will halt life-saving research.

A number of college leaders seem to be doing the conciliatory thing, but not all.

Just down the road from Harvard is Tufts University.

That's where Rumesa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student in child development, was arrested by DHS last month and had her visa revoked.

Tufts president Sunil Kumar filed a letter in federal court saying many students, faculty, and staff are now, quote, fearful of leaving their homes, even to attend and teach classes on campus.

He demanded that Oz Turk be released and defended her free speech rights and her scholarship.

He didn't stop there.

Kumar made the case for what universities do.

Their graduates build companies, go into healthcare and public service, improving American life.

The university is confident in this, he wrote, because of the thousands of its own alumni who, like Oz Turk, came to the United States on a student visa, determined to get a degree from an American university.

That's it for this week's show.

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.

Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering help from Jared Paul.

Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers.

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger.