Making Sense of Linda McMahon's Harvard Letter

What it says about the administration's war on higher education

Spoiler Alert: I can’t make sense of the letter because it is nonsensical. But I will explore its claims and share my reactions.

Disputes between the Trump Administration and Harvard continue. To recap, the administration froze Harvard grant funding and issued a number of outrageous demands for compliance. Harvard said “no thanks” and filed suit. Trump said he wanted to revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status even though he lacks cause or means ot do so.

This week, the stakes were raised again. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released a letter she was sending to Harvard. It’s a truly remarkable piece of propaganda and seems to be written by whomever writes the president’s Truth Social posts. While I love the fact that critics quickly did a full red-pen edit on the letter, I’m going to take the letter at face value.

Dr. Garber,

The Federal Government has a sacred rcsponsibizlily to be a wise and important steward of American taxpayer dollars. Harvard University, despite amassing a largely tax-free S53.2 billion dollar endowment (larger than the GOP or I00 countries), receives billions of dollars of taxpayer largess each year. Receiving such taxpayer funds is a privilege not a right. Yet instead of using these funds to advance the cducution of its students. Harvard is engaging in a systematic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these “students'' come from, who arc 1hey, how do they get into Harvard. or even into our country- and why is there so much HATE'! These arc questions tht must be answered. among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answcrs to the American public?

Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students. who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the Uni1cd States of America, to its campus. In every way. Harvard has failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties~ its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of acadcmic rigor. It had scrapped standardized testing requirements and a normalized grading system. This year Harvard was forced to adopt an embarrassing “remedial math" program for undergraduates. Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics when it is supposedly so hard to get into this “acclaimed university"? Who is getting in under such a low standard when others, with fabulous grades and a great understanding of the highest levels of mathematics, are being rejected?

Where do I even begin? Yes, Harvard’s endowment is incredibly large. Years ago I pointed out that Harvard could tremendously enhance small liberal arts colleges by sharing a fraction of the annual growth of the endowment. But it’s not illegal or nefarious for a school to have a large endowment.

Hillsdale has just under 1600 students and an endowment of $900 million (2021). It’s not quite a selective as Harvard’s 5% acceptance rate, but at 21% acceptance of its applications, it’s the 79th lowest rate in the US. I know that they go without direct federal money, but if having a large endowment is to become problematic, Harvard isn’t alone.

The federal grants that Harvard receives are not “largesse”. They support the scientific and medical research that goes on there. Two-thirds of Harvard’s 21,000 students are postgraduates, so that research is directly related to their educational goals.

Does Harvard “invite” foreign students who hate America and engage in violent behavior? What is the violence she’s referring to? What percentage of Harvard’s sizable international student population engaged in even peaceful protests, to say nothing of violence?

Harvard, like many universities, did go without standardized testing as a response to Covid. But they restored SAT/ACT scores for students who have applied to start this fall. (You’d think someone on McMahon’s staff could have googled that.) And what about teaching “simple and basic mathematics?” Again, this was a response to the impacts of Covid with current students missing a couple of years of in-person classes. Rather than simply fail students out of the regular math coursework, they created a pathway to provide impacted students with additional supports.

That’s only two paragraphs and I’m already exhausted. I’m skipping the useless comments about the president’s plagiarism scandal and complaints about university leadership.

Perhaps most alarmingly. Harvard has failed to abide by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing, and continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools and even within the Harvard Law Review itself. Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence ond achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans.

The above concerns are only a fraction of the long list of Harvard's consistent violations of its own legal duties. Given these and other concerning allegations. this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution. and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on it’s colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni. You have an approximately $53 Billion head start, much of which was made possible by the fact that you are living within the walls of, and benefiting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of Amcrica and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.

The Administration had previously been willing to maintain federal funding to Harvard. so long as Harvard committed to complying with long-settled Federal Law, including to protect and promote student welfare and the landmark decision of our Supreme Court against racial preferencing. The proposed common-sense reforms - which 1he Administration remains committed to - include a return to merit-based admissions and hiring. an end to unlawful programs that promote crude identity stereotypes., disciplinary reform and consistent accountability, including for student groups, cooperation with Law Enforcement. and reporting compliance with the Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, and other Fedcral Agencies. The Administration’s priorities have not changed and today's letter marks the end of new grants for the University.

These requests will advance the best interests of Harvard University. so it can reclaim its status as a respected educational institution for the future leaders of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

As someone in the Department of Education must know, the 2023 Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College was a decision about differential admission. The plaintiffs successfully argued that the differential admission standards violated their fourteenth amendment protections (I guess we like that amendment back then!). It does not deal with broadly defined “racial preferencing” like determining who is on the Law School Review.

It’s remarkable that Harvard is accused of stoking the resentments of our “wonderful young Americans”. Has Secretary McMahon and her team looked at X lately or listened to the grievance podcasts? And then we’re back to the endowment and the fact that — in spite of Harvard’s major role in perpetuating networked social inequality in America — its students hate the free-enterprise system. Don’t tell the recent graduates who are not Wall Street guys trying to be Leonardo DiCaprio.

All Harvard has to do in order to make things right is prohibit stereotyping, submit to demands of law enforcement and Homeland Security, and any other federal agencies that come along.

Others have observed that there is a standard process for an institution that has violated federal statutes. A complaint is made to the Office of Civil Rights, an investigation follows, and the institution is presented with the results with an opportunity to correct the matter going forward. That is not what’s going on here. Instead, there are unfounded and illogical claims accompanied by threats. In fact, ProPublica reported today that due to the administration’s attention to places like Harvard, Columbia, and those called before Congress today, actual OCR cases are not being investigated.

In The Atlantic today, Rose Horowitz observes that McMahon’s letter makes clear that the administration used their anti-semitism focus as a hedge to attack schools like Harvard for the crime of being liberal.

What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Harvard will not be complying with the administration’s demands. In part, it’s impossible because the goal posts keep shifting — ask Columbia how things are going. These unfounded assertions of wrongdoing on behalf of Harvard, vague and inaccurate as they are, are designed to further weaken the institution in the eyes of the public.

They are meant as a show of strength on behalf of the administration, to let everyone know just how tough they are. You know, like they do in WWE.