The Conservative Case for Drone Strikes on Harvard

Progressives should hope that the libertarians win this argument.

The first revelation of my political awakening was, “Huh, I think I’m a libertarian.” The second was, “Wow, progressives hate libertarians even more than they hate conservatives, they just don’t express it as often.”¹ But when it comes to the recent Trump-Harvard slap fight, libertarians, classical liberals, and fans of the liberal order across typical partisan divides are solidly on Harvard’s side. The argument is simple: government force is wrong, even when the government is beating the snot out of your enemies.

Special mention goes to the consummately principled

Greg Lukianoff

of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, of which I’m a member. FIRE placed Harvard dead last in its school free speech rankings two years in a row. Nevertheless, FIRE produced a statement agreeing with Harvard that the Trump administration’s actions against them are unlawful. The backlash must have been vigorous; FIRE subsequently posted an FAQ: Responding to common questions about the fight between Harvard and the Trump administration. In summary, the government has to conduct a proper investigation before it pulls funding from an institution. “[W]ithout these rules, nothing prevents the federal government from arbitrarily declaring a university in violation of federal law, yanking federal funding, and demanding fealty and censorship.”

Charles Lane at the Free Press agrees. While he says that Harvard had it coming, “To be legitimate [a federal threat to withhold funding] has to follow the law, and under the relevant civil rights statute—Title VI—the government is required to formally document allegations such as those the administration is making against Harvard, and to cut funding only to the specific programs that have been found to discriminate. The Trump administration has yet to do that.”

Heather Mac Donald at City Journal lamented “The White House’s Clumsy Attack on Harvard.” “[A]spects of the administration’s demand letter arguably encroach on academic freedom—however overrated and hypocritically invoked that concept has become. The administration calls for oversight of faculty hiring to ensure ‘viewpoint diversity,’ though the legal basis for such authority is unclear. Its demand for a ‘critical mass’ of intellectually diverse faculty is either a wry joke or unintentionally ironic. After all, the notion of a ‘critical mass’ of ‘diverse’ students was one of the flimsy concepts the Supreme Court used for decades to justify racial admissions preferences.”

Andrew Gleeson at Quillette, which was maligned by an Antifa thug-cum-university professor as part of a Fox News-to-Stormfront pipeline, and whose department was awarded a $350,000 grant from the Biden administration for his efforts, concurs with Mac Donald. “This kind of diversity has often been promoted by critics of the illiberal attitudes and policies concerning race, sex, gender often found in universities. But enforced viewpoint diversity is a confused and potentially sinister remedy. … It is equally unreasonable—absurd, in fact—to demand that a discipline actively promote people from outside the consensus and treat all their ideas as equally deserving of a respectful hearing. This is a recipe for intellectual anarchy.”

Even the editors of National Review have misgivings about the situation. “[T]he overall impact of these demands [from the Trump administration] would be pervasive federal monitoring of how the university is governed. The federal government simply should not have this power. We have no illusion that Trump will be deterred by fear of how the coercive power of the federal executive might be leveraged by a future Democratic administration to further progressive ideology and stifle speech; we have already seen that done, it will be done again, and Trump’s team wants their own turn whacking the piñata. But Congress and the courts should awaken to the menace of the federal camel’s nose in the private university tent — and so, for that matter, should the colleges.”

John O. McGinnis similarly reminds readers of Law & Liberty, “While many on the left decry the Trump’s administration’s attempt to use its power under the Civil Rights law to reform higher education to its liking, they did not lodge similar complaints against the Obama or Biden administrations’ exertion of power under the same authority. … In the long term, the wisest course would be to return more autonomy to civil society, including private universities, by reducing the heavy hand of federal regulation. The Trump administration has demonstrated to progressives that governmental power over education is indeed a double-edged sword. Perhaps, having felt the blade’s sting, the left might now join friends of liberty in sheathing it.”

Perhaps. It would be lovely if they would. But I suspect that many progressives, though certainly not all, view this loss of control of the proverbial sword as a temporary state of affairs. Otherwise, they regard as agreeable the process by which they fund culture war with tax dollars, as the Biden administration did regarding Quillette and many other targets. I suspect as well that the conservatives in question also regard it as temporary; in the meantime, they are trying to damage progressive power as severely as possible while they have the means to do so.

As McGinnis and the NR editors recount, Trump is not doing anything to the universities that wasn’t piloted in other forms by the Obama and Biden administrations. In 2011, Obama demanded that universities, on pain of losing federal funding, overhaul sexual harassment investigations to incorporate standards of evidence that would constitute malpractice in a real courtroom. If the state of affairs regarding harassment complaints was intolerable, consider what’s going on at Harvard at the moment. Rabbi David Wolpe just reviewed the 311-page report on antisemitism from Harvard and concluded that Harvard Is Spraying Perfume on a Sewer. That is, a sewer of antisemitism; Harvard was already exposed as a sewer of plagiarism and grade inflation before it was revealed that their commitment to free speech is focused exclusively on the call to murder Jews.

Not only are supporters of the libertarian position regarding Harvard holding the administration to a standard that the administration’s opponents never expected of themselves, but they are doing so regarding an infestation of academic Judenhass that most Americans (and evidently, many dismayed supporters of FIRE) find revolting. This seems, at least, unstrategic. Harvard’s antisemitism is a product of its commitment to DEI. “DEI,” noted Christopher Rufo yesterday in an apparent inversion of Audre Lorde, “is an administrative reality and can only be dismantled with administrative tools.” Legality and reciprocity hardly figured into the formation of the DEI regime; its proponents implemented it by diktat and put the burden on their victims to take them to court. That process became the punishment for defying the regime.

The Trump administration is now doing likewise. This is the reaction of postliberal conservatism to postliberal progressivism that I warned about four years ago. It is not as committed to the rule of law as it is to expression and action. Postliberalism uses politics like an art medium. The Biden administration did not hire Sam Brinton because he was the most capable nuclear engineer available, but because he went about sporting a shaved head, lipstick, and what turned out to be stolen dresses, and the Biden team wanted to project an image of normalized avant-garde sexuality. Trump did not freeze $2 billion of federal funding to Harvard because he has a sound legal case, but to project an image of dominance over the widely loathed synecdoche for higher education. I’m one of McGinnis’s aforementioned friends of liberty, but when Trump threatened last Friday to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, even I had to laugh.

The problem is that no moral limit to postliberal action presents itself. Drone strikes on Harvard may seem self-evidently beyond the pale, but in a world where progressives have formed a political cult around Luigi Mangione, who’s to say? If Mangione’s murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare sends the right message to the right people, as some maintain, why shouldn’t the Trump administration bomb the Cesspit on the Charles? They don’t have to eradicate the whole campus; an air-to-surface missile dropped into one of the offices of student affairs during the night, when no one was there, ought to send the intended message. Remember, in 2020, NPR attempted to soften the image of rioters by interviewing a self-described agitator who holds that property damage is a valid political tactic. Sauce for the goose and all that.

The libertarian case for leaving Harvard alone is principled and morally tenable. But without a renewed and cross-partisan commitment to the liberal order of tolerance, equality, and individual rights, history will render it irrelevant.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscribers keep it coming. They also have access to Dissident Muse Salons, discounts in the print shop, and Friend on the Road consultations. Please consider becoming one yourself and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

1. The progressive narrative regarding libertarians grows increasingly monstrous as the libertarians gain political effectiveness. That economist Noah Smith, a longtime critic of libertarians, recently penned “I owe the libertarians an apology” indicates that, on the national level, libertarians have been sidelined. We have not influenced the Trump administration's policy on any matter except Ross Ulbricht. Indeed, the absurdly progressive-leaning Wired fretted that the Trump administration freed Ross “in part, perhaps, due to its embrace of the libertarian cryptocurrency community.” For them, even that possibility was too much libertarian input.

Here in New Hampshire, where we’ve concentrated, we induce hysterics. Democrat state representative David Luneau recently opined on a senate proposal to expand access to Education Freedom Accounts, the basic mechanism of school choice in New Hampshire, as “a recruiting tool to bring in ‘Free State freeloaders’ into the state of New Hampshire.”

“By dangling free money to people who weren’t going to enroll in public schools to begin with, maybe we get some people who will move into the state that continue to elect people to local and state government positions that will put in place these sorts of draconian policies,” Luneau said. “They seek to, in my opinion, destroy the state that I know and love.”

We’ve learned to regard such utterances as an indicator of our growing local sway.