Spectator Life

President Trump has already dropped the first hammer on Harvard. He’s ready to drop the whole tool chest on a whole slew of universities – and it won’t be pretty. Outraged Democrats will call the punishing sanctions authoritarian, even fascist, and well beyond the authority of a constitutional officer. Republicans will back the president, saying universities had plenty of chances to correct their serious problems and did nothing.  Some threatened sanctions are readily defensible, such as demanding better protection for Jewish students and eliminating discrimination in admissions, hiring and promotion. Some are not, such as demanding intrusive federal oversight of course content and departmental hiring. All Trump’s actions will be challenged in court.

This is drumming season.  That’s the time of year when the woodpeckers stake out their territories by tapping out tattoos on hollow trees.  Road signs or “no trespassing” edicts make an even more impressive racket.  I come to Vermont to get away from Midtown Manhattan’s horns and sirens – but this time of year, it’s just a visit to the percussion section.  But the real racket isn’t from the birds declaring their sovereignty over the woods.  It is from Harvard declaring its sovereignty over American higher education. In a letter dated April 14, the principals of two Washington law firms wrote a brief letter to three officials in the Trump administration telling them they need not worry about antisemitism at Harvard.

In his first public remarks since leaving office, Joe Biden recalled – without a hint of self-awareness – the moment from his childhood he first saw “colored kids” on a bus going by.” It was, in his telling, a pivotal experience, one that sparked his youthful sense of outrage growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.Let’s stop right there.At best, the speech – billed as his first major intervention since Donald Trump took office – reveals how deeply stuck in the past Biden’s racial worldview really is. At worst, it’s an embarrassing reminder that the Democratic Party continues to view black voters, especially black men, not as equals or thinkers, but as props in white liberal moral storytelling.As a black conservative, I've heard this record before.

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West. At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages. Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.

The Statue of Liberty was given as a gift by France, the United States’s oldest ally, to celebrate our centennial anniversary as an independent state. Now, as the US moves toward its quarter-millennial anniversary, Member of the European Parliament Raphaël Glucksmann is asking for it back. Glucksmann said to supporters he would tell Americans that, “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home.”  The statue was originally called La liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World).

Since the US Department of Education’s inception in 1980, the agency has proven itself to be incompetent at its principal task: teaching American children. Adding insult to injury, the agency has also earned a big, fat F when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Despite this reality, headlines announcing the Trump administration’s newly streamlined Department of Education cast a somber tone. Layoffs “gutted” the Education Department, reports the AP. Democratic attorneys general are suing over “gutting of Education Department,” echoes the New York Times. The cuts will “decimate” the agency that “compiles ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and measures student performance,” laments ABC News. Cutting, gutting, decimating.

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump promised to safeguard the First Amendment. “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an Executive Order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he said. This was music to my ears — but with the recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green-card holder who organized student protests at Columbia University, the administration is demonstrating that First Amendment protections don’t apply when it comes to criticizing Israel’s conduct in the Gaza conflict. I support the deportation of foreign nationals who are in the country illegally or have committed crimes.

Yesterday, with growing sadness, I read a wonderful book about teaching and learning, written by one of the great teachers of the past century. Why the sadness? Because the author, Gilbert Highet, was a revered professor at Columbia in the Fifties and Sixties. It is impossible to read his paean to learning, written a half-century ago, without weeping for what his university has become. When Highet wrote of learning, he meant absorbing from history’s greatest minds, from Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, and teaching their lessons to students who wished to learn from them. Reading Highet’s words a half century later, we realize he was speaking of another time and place — virtually another university.