Hahvahd University is a private school, over which President Donald Trump, the hopefully soon-to-be-closed Department of Education, and the federal government in general have no direct authority. With an endowment of $50.7 billion as of the end of its 2023 fiscal year. Founded October 28, 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, as well as the wealthiest.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Harvard Says It Will Fight Trump Administration Demands

The government has threatened to withhold nearly $9 billion in grants and contracts

By Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo | Monday, April 14, 2025 | 5:02 PM EDT

Harvard University said Monday it will resist the Trump administration’s demands to change its governance structure over campus antisemitism concerns, saying the government is overstepping its authority.

The response is likely to set up a fight between the nation’s wealthiest university and the federal government, which has threatened to withhold nearly $9 billion in grants and contracts to the school and its affiliated hospitals.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in a letter to the school’s community.

Harvard’s response is the most significant pushback against the government since it began making demands on universities earlier this year.

The Trump administration task force on antisemitism wrote the school earlier this month asking it to take nine actions that “we regard as necessary for Harvard University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”

Harvard came under fire following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and the subsequent pro-‘Palestinian’ and pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses across the country. We previously noted the turd-in-the-punchbowl performances of then-Harvard University President Claudine Gay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, then the President of the University of Pennsylvania, in testimony in Congress. The three university presidents, intelligent and highly educated woman all, managed to all flub the answer to an obvious question, all in the same manner, and all of which reeked of collusion. When put under pressure, they all proved to be as dumb as a box of rocks.

Most of the demands concern how the university operates. The government is asking for a comprehensive mask ban as well as changes to governance, leadership and admissions and an end to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs.

Notably the government also is seeking to reach into the classroom, demanding “necessary changes” be made “to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture,” which fuel antisemitic harassment, the task force’s letter said.

I admit to being somewhat less than impressed with how Harvard is educating its students these days. The Editorial Board of the Harvard Crimson seemed to think that Dylan Roof, the South Carolina mass murderer, was coddled due to his white privilege because the police brought him food after his arrest, when he said he was hungry. Not feeding Mr Roof, who told the police he hadn’t eaten for a couple of days, would have been a civil rights violation which could have tainted his arrest. It took me, with my baccalaureate degree from the not-so-selective University of Kentucky, about three seconds to find that information.

DEI? Havard has already lost when the Supreme Court declared Affirmative Action programs which discriminate against non-favored racial and ethnic — read: white and Asian — groups to be illegal in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, declaring what we all knew, that the equal protection clause in the 14^th Amendment prohibited Affirmative Action using racial preferences in collegiate admissions, so ‘DEI’ programs were always legally suspect.

Why, I have to ask, does Harvard want to defend racial discrimination and anti-Semitism? Harvard has a fairly large number of Jewish Americans among its alumni, and some of those wealthier alumni have been saying that they will simply not consider applicants from colleges which have tolerated and defended anti-Semitism on campus. It would seem that the elites’ hatred for President Donald Trump is leading them to defend the indefensible.

Hahvahd can, of course, afford defunding by the federal government, due to its huge endowment, and they have every right to refuse the President’s demands. But the University, in the end, is an institution by and of Western civilization, and not supporting Western civilization against the forces of barbarism — and supporting the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas is most certainly supporting barbarism — is a prescription for suicide.