Harvard Rejects Trump Admin’s Demands, Going to Court

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:CNN
—
The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.

The mega-churches will be next, right? Right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

Sounds like you skipped the letter with the Trump admin’s demands. In the second link.

I literally quoted from the article.

No one is forcing Harvard to do anything.

Harvard is throwing a hissy fit because it wants to do certain things AND get taxpayer funds.

Doesn’t work like that.

Their funding like every other school that gets federal funding is for the good of the country. The funding goes into researching diseases and cures. They are affiliated with some of the best teaching hospitals in the country. They do research on advancing technology and much more.

Their endowment is money donated to them usually with instructions on how to use it.

Enough with the tax money. Every school gets some type of funding, it’s what helps make a civilized country.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

Sounds like you skipped the letter with the Trump admin’s demands. In the second link.

I literally quoted from the article.

No one is forcing Harvard to do anything.

Harvard is throwing a hissy fit because it wants to do certain things AND get taxpayer funds.

Doesn’t work like that.

Their funding like every other school that gets federal funding is for the good of the country. The funding goes into researching diseases and cures. They are affiliated with some of the best teaching hospitals in the country. They do research on advancing technology and much more.

Their endowment is money donated to them usually with instructions on how to use it.

Enough with the tax money. Every school gets some type of funding, it’s what helps make a civilized country.

Please dont waste your time trying to explain this. MAGA is anti elite universities and so are those here who ENVY the elite universities that rejected their kids….

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

I'm not even in favor of race-based affirmative action, though I can understand why others argue for it. However, it is one thing to be in favor of race-blind admissions, and an entirely different thing to get behind a dictator-wanna-be who wants to clamp down on free speech, defund science, start tariff wars, alienate us from former world allies, and impose various other ill-informed and anti-intellectual policies to ruin this country. You have to be delusional to believe that what MAGA is doing is in the interest of Asian Americans, or in the interests of the country at large. Moreover, you have to be immoral to support an administration who deports an innocent man without cause and sends him to a brutal foreign prison. And then even, though it was clearly done in error, said administration doubles down and refuse to bring him back. Are you really so fixated on the fact that it was harder for Asians to get into Harvard that you are willing to approve of what this guy is doing to ruin a democracy?

So you don't really like racial discrimination but you can understand the argument for it?

OK, is that any different from saying I don't really support trump but I can understand why they support him.

Similarly, I don't like defunding research and I wish he had simply moved the research from harvard to some flagship state schools but I didn't get elected president. If you don't like it, try not losing so many goddam elections.

If you can tolerate racial discrimination against asians for decades and understand why others argue for it, perhaps you can tolerate the persecution for an institution as privileged as harvard for a few years and bring yourself to understand why people are arguing for their reformation.

In the end, this particular move is not really hurting trump with the constituency he cares about. The working class voters from Minnesota to Pennsylvania do not have a lot of love for harvard. They think of harvard and the liberal elites as part of the problem. And as long as trump can keep the voters, he will control the republican party whether he is president or not.

I can certainly understand the possible good intention of boosting minority applicants in a pool to encourage underrepresented groups as well as low income groups, which is not the same as malice towards Asian people or white people or Jewish people. Just like trying to balance gender ratio at liberal arts colleges is not the same as being anti-female, or trying to balance gender ratio at Caltech is not the same as being anti-male. You can disagree with practice, but instead of just campaigning for admissions reform, you're content to see the best research institutions razed to the ground, and willing to see a whole lot of Asian scientists lose their funding. I also hope you realize that a significant portion of his stakeholders want to stop the "Asian invasion" of tech, medicine, and higher ed.

Politics make strange bedfellows. I don't think trump is my friend over the long run any more than FDR thought Stalin was his friend over the long run, but Hitler presented the greater threat. Trump will get defanged in 2 years when democrats take the house and then in 2 more years democrats will take the presidency and possibly the senate as well. But as long as democrats adhere to race identity politics and create a racial hierarchy where it is not only acceptable to discriminate against asians, it is virtuous to do so, it is hard to see them as a long term ally.

Harvard wasn't merely boosting minority applicants, they were discriminating against asians. White applicants with the same application profile were getting in at significantly higher rates than asians. You are downplaying their racism to make the reaction to that racism seem too severe, if this happened to blacks or hispanics, there would be protests and democratic lawmakers would be lining up to cosponsor a bill to end it. And it wasn't some tie breaker boost to URM, the difference between accepted asian applicants and accepted black applicants was enormous.

I don't think caltech serves the nation well by engaging in social engineering when so much our national defense technology comes out of those labs. Unless the absence of female colleagues is reducing the quality of the applicant pool generally (e.g. stuyvesant high school used to be ranked lower than bronx science when it was an all boys school and quickly became the top ranked school after girls started attending, it wasn't just because stuyvesant now had access to smart girls it was also because it had access to smart boys that wanted female classmates).

I am willing to see harvard destroyed to serve as a cautionary tale against racism, why aren't you? I'd like to see their tax exempt status revoked and all federal funding withdrawn and reallocated to flagship state schools. There is nothing unique about harvard's labs (or any of the ivy league labs) that the research cannot be done elsewhere. If the grants move to UNC, UVA and U of Florida, so will the researchers. I am not happy that they are using a wrecking ball but just like people thought for decades that a little asian discrimination was a small price to pay for racial justice, this temporary disruption in research is a small price to pay for eliminating left wing racial discrimination.

A beautifully worded post that is utterly naive. You are still a pawn here. Trump destroying Harvard will not rid the world of racial preference. All it will do is destroy one of the few institutions willing to stand up our new dictator. That’s what this is about - destroying institutions that don’t bend the knee. It’s not about leveling the racial and gender playing field.

Trite, inaccurate parroting of DNC talking points. Why don’t you add that the border was closed & we are the only country using tariffs?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No one can explain to me what merit means? Is it just SAT scores? If so we’d need a lottery system to make it completely fair or else everyone will whine about something

Every other country in the world has figured out that standardized tests are how you select college students but it's a mystyery to us.

And every year, thousands of foreign students come to the US to study and to begin their careers. Why? Why not stay in their own countries where standardized test scores are apparently all that matter?

Reasonable question 🤔

[Anonymous]

Most of these flagrant violations of the Constitution are being architected by Stephen Miller, but this particular one is personal because he’s harbored searing resentment toward Harvard since he was 17 years old and they denied him what he had convinced himself was his right to a seat at their table.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

The govt-university partnership for research was put in place post WW2 and is the basis of the innovation ecosystem of the United States. It has been extremely productive for America. If the govt wants to break that partnership by imposing limitations on the college, they are free to do so.

If the country doesn’t want premier research universities, we won’t have premier research universities. No university can afford to fund this on their own for the good of the United States.

What we won’t have is premier research universities where free expression is stifled. Those two things don’t work together. If you want creativity and big ideas out of people, you can’t tell them what to think like the govt is trying to do right now.

Free expression at Harvard is at 0%
They shouldn't get any taxpayer money with their multi-billion dollar endowment.

This.

[Anonymous]

Defund racist and anti Semitic Harvard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

I'm not even in favor of race-based affirmative action, though I can understand why others argue for it. However, it is one thing to be in favor of race-blind admissions, and an entirely different thing to get behind a dictator-wanna-be who wants to clamp down on free speech, defund science, start tariff wars, alienate us from former world allies, and impose various other ill-informed and anti-intellectual policies to ruin this country. You have to be delusional to believe that what MAGA is doing is in the interest of Asian Americans, or in the interests of the country at large. Moreover, you have to be immoral to support an administration who deports an innocent man without cause and sends him to a brutal foreign prison. And then even, though it was clearly done in error, said administration doubles down and refuse to bring him back. Are you really so fixated on the fact that it was harder for Asians to get into Harvard that you are willing to approve of what this guy is doing to ruin a democracy?

So you don't really like racial discrimination but you can understand the argument for it?

OK, is that any different from saying I don't really support trump but I can understand why they support him.

Similarly, I don't like defunding research and I wish he had simply moved the research from harvard to some flagship state schools but I didn't get elected president. If you don't like it, try not losing so many goddam elections.

If you can tolerate racial discrimination against asians for decades and understand why others argue for it, perhaps you can tolerate the persecution for an institution as privileged as harvard for a few years and bring yourself to understand why people are arguing for their reformation.

In the end, this particular move is not really hurting trump with the constituency he cares about. The working class voters from Minnesota to Pennsylvania do not have a lot of love for harvard. They think of harvard and the liberal elites as part of the problem. And as long as trump can keep the voters, he will control the republican party whether he is president or not.

I can certainly understand the possible good intention of boosting minority applicants in a pool to encourage underrepresented groups as well as low income groups, which is not the same as malice towards Asian people or white people or Jewish people. Just like trying to balance gender ratio at liberal arts colleges is not the same as being anti-female, or trying to balance gender ratio at Caltech is not the same as being anti-male. You can disagree with practice, but instead of just campaigning for admissions reform, you're content to see the best research institutions razed to the ground, and willing to see a whole lot of Asian scientists lose their funding. I also hope you realize that a significant portion of his stakeholders want to stop the "Asian invasion" of tech, medicine, and higher ed.

Politics make strange bedfellows. I don't think trump is my friend over the long run any more than FDR thought Stalin was his friend over the long run, but Hitler presented the greater threat. Trump will get defanged in 2 years when democrats take the house and then in 2 more years democrats will take the presidency and possibly the senate as well. But as long as democrats adhere to race identity politics and create a racial hierarchy where it is not only acceptable to discriminate against asians, it is virtuous to do so, it is hard to see them as a long term ally.

Harvard wasn't merely boosting minority applicants, they were discriminating against asians. White applicants with the same application profile were getting in at significantly higher rates than asians. You are downplaying their racism to make the reaction to that racism seem too severe, if this happened to blacks or hispanics, there would be protests and democratic lawmakers would be lining up to cosponsor a bill to end it. And it wasn't some tie breaker boost to URM, the difference between accepted asian applicants and accepted black applicants was enormous.

I don't think caltech serves the nation well by engaging in social engineering when so much our national defense technology comes out of those labs. Unless the absence of female colleagues is reducing the quality of the applicant pool generally (e.g. stuyvesant high school used to be ranked lower than bronx science when it was an all boys school and quickly became the top ranked school after girls started attending, it wasn't just because stuyvesant now had access to smart girls it was also because it had access to smart boys that wanted female classmates).

I am willing to see harvard destroyed to serve as a cautionary tale against racism, why aren't you? I'd like to see their tax exempt status revoked and all federal funding withdrawn and reallocated to flagship state schools. There is nothing unique about harvard's labs (or any of the ivy league labs) that the research cannot be done elsewhere. If the grants move to UNC, UVA and U of Florida, so will the researchers. I am not happy that they are using a wrecking ball but just like people thought for decades that a little asian discrimination was a small price to pay for racial justice, this temporary disruption in research is a small price to pay for eliminating left wing racial discrimination.

A beautifully worded post that is utterly naive. You are still a pawn here. Trump destroying Harvard will not rid the world of racial preference. All it will do is destroy one of the few institutions willing to stand up our new dictator. That’s what this is about - destroying institutions that don’t bend the knee. It’s not about leveling the racial and gender playing field.

Trite, inaccurate parroting of DNC talking points. Why don’t you add that the border was closed & we are the only country using tariffs?

Is that what MAGA calls reality and facts now? "DNC talking points"?

You are just doing what MAGA always does in the face of inconvenient truths...yell "liar". You think if you yell "liar" louder than the people around you telling the truth, somehow your lies will win. We see through your lies loser. Thank God someone is standing up to Trump's tyranny.

If you support Trump at this moment, you support dictatorship and are a threat to America. You are a traitor.

This is the simple, inconvenient (for you) truth.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most of these flagrant violations of the Constitution are being architected by Stephen Miller, but this particular one is personal because he’s harbored searing resentment toward Harvard since he was 17 years old and they denied him what he had convinced himself was his right to a seat at their table.

Everything that is being torn down right now is about Trump, Musk, Miller or one of their cronies seeking revenge for perceived slights. That or getting rid of any body/regulators/regulations that might oppose one of their business dealings.

It's all BS. The horror that so many of our citizens cheer this nonsense from a bunch of psychotic narcissists is unbelievable.

[Anonymous]

I think this is an important point, when you say it is all BS. It actually is not all BS. I do feel bad for Harvard, because the Trump Administration is not negotiating in good faith and is overreaching. And certainly the threat of pulling Harvard’s tax exemption is grossly unfair and illegal. But it is not all BS. The race politics and race identity focus of Harvard is actually harming the people it is intended to help. The DEI programming was terribly misguided.
It is a tough situation. Trump is a bad person and a poor President, no doubt. But when a large number of your fellow Americans say something is wrong, I suggest you not dismiss it as BS coming from ignorant people. Instead, maybe you should think harder about why some of these people are upset and what solutions might be acceptable to both sides.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

Sounds like you skipped the letter with the Trump admin’s demands. In the second link.

I literally quoted from the article.

No one is forcing Harvard to do anything.

Harvard is throwing a hissy fit because it wants to do certain things AND get taxpayer funds.

Doesn’t work like that.

+1. It’s Harvard that is making the decision to abandon funding for medical and other important research. Obviously their commitment to DEI ideology is more important to them than real work that can benefit society. So be it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think this is an important point, when you say it is all BS. It actually is not all BS. I do feel bad for Harvard, because the Trump Administration is not negotiating in good faith and is overreaching. And certainly the threat of pulling Harvard’s tax exemption is grossly unfair and illegal. But it is not all BS. The race politics and race identity focus of Harvard is actually harming the people it is intended to help. The DEI programming was terribly misguided.
It is a tough situation. Trump is a bad person and a poor President, no doubt. But when a large number of your fellow Americans say something is wrong, I suggest you not dismiss it as BS coming from ignorant people. Instead, maybe you should think harder about why some of these people are upset and what solutions might be acceptable to both sides.

DP. It’s sorta BS though, cause the most commonly cited, consequential area of DEI was affirmative action, which was around for ~60 years during 6 different Republican presidencies. So, using outrage over DEI under Biden to justify the current nonsense is a big reach.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

Sounds like you skipped the letter with the Trump admin’s demands. In the second link.

I literally quoted from the article.

No one is forcing Harvard to do anything.

Harvard is throwing a hissy fit because it wants to do certain things AND get taxpayer funds.

Doesn’t work like that.

+1. It’s Harvard that is making the decision to abandon funding for medical and other important research. Obviously their commitment to DEI ideology is more important to them than real work that can benefit society. So be it.

I think they have a much bigger issue with the gov demand to impose its own ideological DEI on hiring and student admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Defund racist and anti Semitic Harvard.

Exactly. They are wealthy enough without my hard earned tax dollars.

Better to stop poisoning people, then to endlessly steal from us.

We’ve been sucked into a massive racket.