Harvard Still Wants Its DC Sugar Daddy
21st April 2025
“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
This defiant and bipartisan defense of the purity of education, delivered by Harvard President Alan Garber, sounds fantastic, right? After all, what society that pretends to value objectivity would dare to allow a government to control the educational decisions of private institutions?
Barack Obama—blessed is he—agreed, celebrating Harvard as a shining beacon of academic freedom!
The reality is that the government, regardless of which party is in power, has been dictating what private universities can teach, admit, and hire since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, and which ares of study and inquiry they can pursue through the granting or withholding of ‘funding’. Harvard was perfectly comfortable with that while the government’s prescriptions aligned with the proglodytes that increasingly dominated the governance of the university; they’re only whining now because the shoe is on the other foot.