Congratulations to Harvard University for fighting back against the Trump administration’s unseemly efforts to use federal dollars to try to exert unwarranted control over higher education. The oldest and richest college in America wasn’t the first targeted by the White House, that was Columbia, but while Columbia bowed down to the bully, Harvard is resisting.

The White House wants the colleges to crack down against antisemitism, which has gotten out of control on far too many campuses (including Columbia and Harvard) since the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But the demands from Washington go much further and while Harvard President Alan Garber, a Jew himself, agrees that more must be done to protect Jews and Israelis on campus, the university cannot cede academic independence to the government, particularly this government, led by Donald Trump.

Last month, Columbia was threatened with the loss of $400 million in U.S. research funding by Josh Gruenbaum, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service of the General Services Administration; Sean Keveney, acting general counsel at the Department of Health & Human Services and Thomas Wheeler, acting general counsel U.S. Department of Education.

Columbia, in the person of Katrina Armstrong, who was the acting president of the university at the time, said yes to the trio, that the school would obey the directives. The feds then demanded more and Armstrong is now gone, with hapless Columbia on its fourth president in less than two years.

Harvard got a letter from the same three Trump appointees, with about $9 billion in federal grants and contracts under review. Then came a pause of $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania. Princeton has $210 million in research grants at risk. Brown had $510 million in grants and contracts paused. There is $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell University frozen and $790 million for Northwestern. Each time, the feds say that they are investigating alleged civil rights violations.

Investigate away. There were tremendous failures by these and other colleges nationwide to protect Jews on campus from anti-Israel protests that leached into intimidation, harassment and threats against Jewish students and Jewish faculty and staff. But as Garber writes in refusing to buckle under the Trump orders, “the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.” America doesn’t have federal thought police overseeing private universities, as to what they teach and how they teach.

The billions that the U.S. taxpayers pour into university research is an investment in science and medicine and technology that has produced amazing advances. The atomic bomb project in WWII started as a university initiative, beginning at Columbia and then the University of Chicago, before moving to Los Alamos. A less destructive project that began with federal dollars on campus was the internet.

The search to find a way to control the fusion reaction continues, which would provide unlimited energy and no greenhouse gases. What cures for what diseases are now underway at the universities that Trump says he’s striping funds from?

The money that we’ve given to America’s research universities has been money well spent and shouldn’t be used as a political weapon.

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