'Higher Ed is Fighting Back!'

 

By John F. Di Leo

“Harvard is fighting back.”

There was a time when more colleges had ROTC units, producing soldiers, sailors, and pilots every year, patriotically rallying to the cause in wartime, fighting for their country.

It’s been a long time since that was the norm.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, our nation’s colleges have been identified with pacifism.  The idea that an American college would do any fighting at all sounds more like Ancient History than Current Events.

But now the professors of Harvard Yard are fighting mad.  They’re holding press conferences and firing off op-eds, trying to rally other colleges to their cause.

And what is their “cause”?  Unlimited government funding, free from the limitations of a desperately needed federal austerity program.

The college is willing to fight — against our own virtually bankrupt federal government — to keep the cornucopia of federal taxpayer-funded checks flowing, when President Donald Trump is trying to shut off the spigot.

Since the Executive Branch issues a lot of checks to Harvard — and to most colleges, in fact, to darned near all of them — the Trump administration has put its foot down.  They have determined that since part of their mandate is to bring common sense back to our country, this is no time to fund a bunch of overpaid countercultural Marxist rabble-rousers.  It’s no time to enable their worst inclinations, from race- and sex-based hiring to forcing “girls’ sports” to include boys, from sitting back while student groups abuse their Jewish classmates to actively facilitating the selling out of their country through partnerships with hostile foreign governments.

So yes, the Trump administration is cutting off some of the checks.  And as it turns out, Harvard University doesn’t believe that ferociously biting the hand that feeds it for years beyond count ought to be grounds for ending the gravy train.

What will be the general public’s reaction? I wonder.

For generations, parents have watched their children’s applications be rejected while students with worse preparation, worse grades, and worse test scores have been accepted to elite colleges, causing their own children to have to settle for lesser schools as their punishment for being white or Asian or middle-class or normal.

For generations, parents have stared at their children’s course descriptions and reading lists, horrified at the dreck being assigned for full course credit, the once noble institution of higher education having long ago plummeted to a nadir by offering pretend majors like “Gender Studies” and “Multi-Cultural Inquiry.”

And we’ve seen all this go on, as their prices climbed higher and higher, charging whatever a subsidized market will bear.  Too many colleges brazenly encourage their students to take on outrageous levels of debt — obligations certain to hang over the heads of most of their graduates for decades — as the coursework hardly ever prepares a student for legitimate careers that would actually enable them to pay back these loans.

If you were one of these parents — and you probably are — who’ve watched your children emerge from those ivy-covered dens of iniquity awash in debt, unprepared for life and robbed of their values — are you likely to side with these pompous college spokesmen or with the president you’ve now voted for three times?

If we have this fight in the public eye, then be prepared for everything to be exposed.

• Our nations’ colleges and universities are estimated to have upwards of a trillion dollars in endowments.  Harvard alone has over $50 billion. And still they keep begging their alumni for donations as if they were paupers on a street corner.

• Despite sitting on Midas-level hoards, our most expensive colleges remain prohibitive even during recessions.  While a few institutions — such as Purdue and Hillsdale — stand out for trying to keep tuition increases down, the majority have happily raised their tuition, room, and board far beyond the rate of inflation for decades, enabling those endowments to just grow and grow.

• The more prestigious a school is, the more it values foreign students, because those customers rarely need to be discounted.  The children of Middle Eastern sheiks, communist Chinese apparatchiks, and European Union bureaucrats can pay the full price, so America’s colleges look less and less like America every year.  Why take a normal kid from suburban Cincinnati, rural South Carolina, or the plains of Nebraska, whose FAFSA requires a discounted rate, when you can instead take a kid from Beijing whose father sits on Xi Jinping’s politburo, and whose political connections might help the college develop some big deal?

• And speaking of foreign deals, long gone are the days when colleges were quiet buildings with classrooms devoted to the liberal arts — history, economics, language, literature, etc.  Today’s schools aspire to being known as “research universities” — which require expensive collaborations with private companies involved in the manufacturing, inventing, and improving of products and technologies.  Such fields are usually patent-protected or even export-controlled for national security reasons, but these colleges are notorious for playing fast and loose with both private and public intellectual property concerns, often resulting in the transfer of sensitive knowledge to our nation’s biggest enemies.

• Just as at least a million foreign students attend American colleges each year, the many American public and private universities (at least 77 at last count) with foreign campuses ensure that a similar number of American students spend a semester or more on their colleges’ distant foreign campuses.  These hundreds of foreign campuses cause massive foreign money to pour into the American higher education system, and that money comes with strings, ranging from professor exchanges to situating cultural centers near our campuses, spreading philosophies such as jihad and Marxism even in the communities outside the colleges themselves.

• Since October 7, 2023, we have watched with shock as our universities spawned huge anti-Israel and anti-Jewish protests, clearly “astroturfed” with outside money but populated by both current foreign students and huge numbers of former students who have been overstaying their visas. These protests showed not only how our lax immigration policy has caused us to lose track of these former students when their visas expired, but also how mistaken the liberal theory is that welcoming foreigners here en masse for college would “civilize and democratize” them.  Many of these protesters were as hateful and violent in Chicago or New York as they would have been back home in Syria or Saudi Arabia.

• And even the colleges that were once religious institutions, with boys-only and girls-only dorms to protect our youth from the dangers of sex, drink, and drugs, are now at the forefront of a libertine lifestyle that would horrify their colleges’ founding ministers and seminarians — the dorms rampant with STDs, pregnancies and abortions, and the girls’ sports teams forced to give their awards to men in drag.

That’s what this federal money has been propping up all these years.  The colleges demand more joint research projects to give away to our enemies, more foreign elites’ children to corrupt our own, more opportunities to practice such bigotry as DIE and BDS, free rein to depress the once-high standards of academia even more than they have already done.

For generations now, far too many of our colleges and universities have been funding an increasingly hostile tumor in the body politic.  We want to value them for the good work they do in producing great engineers, scientists, doctors, and inventors, but the balance between these positives and their plethora of societal negatives is off kilter.

It’s time to end the gravy train.

And if our colleges really want to fight this out in the public square, as if the above sample of the case against them weren’t enough, let’s have at it.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/higher_ed_is_fighting_back.html