Friday morning, President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account to announce he was revoking Harvard University's tax-exempt status.
The administration has already withheld $2.2 billion in federal money from the Ivy League school.
The move comes after the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded federal grants to the school after it refused to comply with the administration’s demands to reform student activities and programs they claim have “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias.”
In turn, the university announced that it filed a suit against the Trump administration, claiming that the administration was violating the school’s First Amendment rights.
This will almost certainly prompt yet another tiresome lawsuit from Harvard. Harvard, and indeed all of the Ivy League, seem to have an arrogant sense of entitlement to the endless flow of federal dollars.
What's really interesting about all this financial wrangling is that Harvard has an endowment of $50.7 billion, as of the end of their fiscal year 2023. That's "billion," with a "B" followed by an "illion." And they have plenty of company in the "massive endowment" listing:
Harvard, $50.7 billion
Yale, $40.7 billion
Stanford, $37.6 billion
Princeton, $34.0 billion
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $24.6 billion
Harvard and Yale's endowments are larger than the GDP of Iceland, for crying out loud, and when the Trump administration yanked their taxpayer funding, they screamed like stuck pigs.
See Also: What's in a Name? Harvard Renames Its DEI Office in Obvious Move to Appease Trump
Once again, we have a wonderful argument for taking the federal government, or indeed any level of government, out of the financing of education altogether. Our higher education systems have become far too casual about accepting federal largesse while working at cross purposes to the American public, and we are expected to pay for it.
For decades, the federal government has been backing long lines of dump trucks full of taxpayer cash up to the Ivy League universities and dumping them out, and those universities responded by looking the other way as antisemitic agitators took over their campuses, as the curricula swelled with idiotic Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies courses and even degree programs, and the faculty spent more time inculcating young skulls full of mush with Marxist claptrap than with instilling in those skulls knowledge and marketable skills.
Cutting that cash-green string is the right idea - in fact, it's the right idea regardless of the university's DEI policies or lack thereof, regardless of the school's curricula, regardless of the political affiliations of their faculty. Let the parents pay for their kids' education, or let the kids get part-time jobs or find some other way to pay. If they need to borrow money, let them present themselves to a private lending institution and make their case based on their academic record to date and their prospects for employment. Do all this, and the ridiculous classes and programs would disappear in a trice - as would a lot of the Marxist professors.
Enough is enough. President Trump would be justified in cutting all of them off, in removing all federal funding, and seeing how long they can last on their massive endowments.
Help RedState continue to tell the truth about the Trump administration's accomplishments as we continue to usher in the Golden Era of America. Join RedState’s VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership today.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member