The Trump administration has also frozen $2.3 billion in funding to Harvard and threatened to strip the university of its tax-exempt status and take away its ability to enrol foreign students…writes Mihir Bose
Donald Trump does not ever accept he is defeated. Even when he is, he cries foul, claiming that he has been cheated as he did after his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Yet there is one contest where it is very important that he is defeated. That is in the battle with Harvard University. This is a battle whose outcome could decide whether we are going to achieve a truly equal world.
The importance of the battle was made very evident to me a few days before it started when my wife and I sat down in front of our television set and searched for a film to watch after dinner, quite by chance, we picked The Great Debaters. When it comes to choosing films, my wife has an iron rule. She will go to Rotten Tomatoes, which shows how viewers rate the film, and if it is over 70 %, it is on. This one was 80 % so it passed muster.
However, there was one problem. The film was released in December 2007. We had never heard about the film. Its subtitle said “Inspired by a True Story” but given that since its release, just a month after Barack Obama had been elected President, the world has changed so much that it was hard to believe that America had elected a man of mixed race, we wondered whether this true story would carry much meaning. We were to be very pleasantly surprised. And this is where Harvard comes in for it features prominently in the film.
The true story is about America’s dark past of the 1930s. Then Jim Crow still existed in the American South, which meant not only did blacks, who were called negroes, not have the right to vote, or enter restaurants, toilets, many public places, or hotels reserved for whites, but they were lynched. Strung up by their neck in a public place with a crowd of whites applauding their fellow white murders who were confident that they would never even be prosecuted. And they were not.
Texas was very much Jim Crow country and blacks could only go to black only universities. But one such college, Wiley College, decided to break barriers. It not only debated other black colleges but also a white Texas college. But the white college would not allow the black students to enter their college, so the debate was held in a park outside the college.
Then it challenged Harvard which as the country’s greatest university also had the greatest university debating team. Harvard accepted the challenge. Wiley’s black debaters went up and in front of an almost all-white audience debated whether non-violent resistance could ever be moral.
The two Harvard debaters, both white, argued it could not. The law had to be obeyed. Wiley’s all black debaters argued that non-violent resistance could be moral and the example they gave was Gandhi’s epic non-violent campaign against the British. They mentioned the infamous Amritsar massacre when a British general ordered the killing of unarmed Indians sitting in a park. They made the important point that if a law is immoral, as British rule in India certainly was, then it was morally right to oppose it.
I must say to realise that Gandhi and the Amritsar killings were being discussed in Harvard in the 1930s was very remarkable for me. However, it was also remarkable that the judges decided that Wiley’s all-black debaters were better than Harvard’s white ones. This being a true story some of the debaters went on to play a major part in bringing racism in the South to an end and opening all-white universities in the South to the blacks, although that took another three decades and came after much bloodshed and a great deal of struggle.
The relevance of this story now is that in the 1930s Harvard had no black students and very few Jewish ones as it also discriminated against Jews. In the near century since then Harvard has changed dramatically with student entry no longer decided by a student’s skin colour or religion and far-reaching programs of diversity, equity and inclusion.
It is these policies, designed to make the world a fairer place, which sticks in the gullet of Trump. He has not been slow to make this clear. The Trump administration began a review of $9 billion in federal funding for Harvard in March and subsequently gave the university a sweeping list of demands, including an end to all diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The Trump administration has also frozen $2.3 billion in funding to Harvard and threatened to strip the university of its tax-exempt status and take away its ability to enrol foreign students. In the words of White House spokesperson Harrison Fields, the “gravy train of federal assistance” to institutions like Harvard was coming to an end. “Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege.”
Since his January inauguration, Trump has said that Harvard and other top US universities mishandled last year’s pro-Palestinian protests and allowed antisemitism to fester on campuses. However, this is contested by the protesters, including some Jewish groups, who say their criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza is wrongly conflated with antisemitism.
Harvard University President Alan Garber has argued that Harvard would continue to fight hate and fully comply with anti-discrimination laws, which Trump accused it of violating in its response to pro-Palestinian protests. Garber went on to say that instead of engaging with Harvard about fighting antisemitism, as civil rights law requires, the government was seeking “to control whom we hire and teach.”
This is where we come to the nub of the issue. It is ironic that Trump in his drive against universities is calling for a mask ban but in reality, he wants to mask the sordid American past. He and his followers, particularly in the South, have never accepted the dark American past portrayed in The Great Debaters. Many do not even accept that the American civil war was about slavery but say it was about state rights. They want the world to forget that the evil of slavery ever existed. They are keen to take the battle to their enemies by portraying their efforts to make up for the centuries of horrible discrimination as racist. For them it is the attempt by Harvard and other American places of learning to construct a more equal world that is fake. The world that has now emerged where discrimination is accepted as wrong is something Trump and many of his followers just cannot abide.
This is where Harvard’s response to use the law with an action in the federal court in Boston to block Trump from freezing billions of dollars in federal funding, in contrast to the supine attitude of some other American universities, is so important.
“This case involves the Government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard,” the Harvard lawsuit said. Harvard in claiming what Trump was doing was arbitrary and unlawful has also invoked First Amendment rights to free speech. It is vital Harvard wins if this principle, much prized by the Americans, is not to become history, like so much of America under Trump might become.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British.
