Good morning:
This week, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and federal funding for Harvard University. This was in response to Harvard University President Alan M. Garber’s announcement that the institution would not comply with the administration’s demands for reform.
In a column for City Journal, MI senior fellow Heather Mac Donald lays out the timeline of the effort to hold Harvard accountable, but warns that just because the Trump administration’s demands are warranted, that doesn’t mean they are going to be upheld in court under current legal standards. “The Trump administration is forging full speed ahead into uncharted legal territory,” Mac Donald writes, in its justified crusade against the elite universities responsible for spreading and legitimizing left-wing ideology.
Senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo, in his column for The Free Press, urges the administration to press ahead. The country’s elite universities weaponized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and used the civil rights regime established in the 1960s to carry out divisive and racialist discrimination. Now, supporters of color-blind meritocracy have the winning argument and can ensure that institutions of higher education reject racial discrimination in college admissions and administration.
A good place to start is with the list of courses that satisfy the general education requirements. In the Dallas Morning News, Paulson policy analyst Neetu Arnold sketches out the benefits of a General Education Review Committee for Texas universities. The committee would be tasked with auditing the quality of university-offered courses that fulfill general requirements. Too many existing courses, such as “Diversity and Cultural Competence in the Workplace,” fail to educate and instead intend to indoctrinate.
Perhaps that is part of the explanation for why it seems so many Asian students participate in extremist campus politics and protests. As fellow Renu Mukherjee argues in City Journal, higher education and liberalism’s fixation with racial victimhood may push Asian Americans and Asian immigrants to identify as “people of color” and demonstrate racial solidarity at schools like Columbia by participating in anti-Semitic mobs. After all, as long as our social order rewards victimhood, few people will want to think of themselves as being members of a “model minority.”
On the MI Research side, this newsletter highlights a crucial new report from senior fellow James B. Meigs on how the U.S. is poised to lead the world in a new Space Age, thanks to private-sector innovations in rocketry. But Meigs warns that the U.S. is held back by obsolete and onerous FAA regulations on private space companies, and NASA’s own deep need for reform. Meigs proposes four key changes to maintain and improve American dominance.
Finally, we are pleased to announce that the debut episode of the new City Journal podcast went live this week. Every Monday and Thursday, tune in as a rotating cast of MI scholars and staff, in conversation with CJ senior editor Charles Fain Lehman, discuss public policy, current events, and the news of the day. Get to know our scholars and their work by watching the discussion on YouTube or listening wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new episode coming out this afternoon.
Continue reading for all these insights and more.
Kelsey Bloom
Editorial Director
