VICTOR JOECKS: Defunding shouldn’t stop with Harvard

If America’s elite universities want to racially discriminate, they shouldn’t receive taxpayer money.

On Tuesday, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias released its final report. The 300-plus-page document reveals the depth of the university’s systemic bias against Jewish students.

Many students “described experiences of being bullied or shunned by fellow students, singled out for negative attention by instructors and feeling ignored by administrators,” the report said. It continued, “Fear of encountering hostility has led some Jewish students to conceal their Jewish identity from classmates.”

“(I) count … among my peers many students who regularly posted social media images like ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ (with Jewish blood dripping from the text),” one graduate student said.

Instead of stopping this behavior, many staff and faculty members actively participated. The task force found “politicization of instruction or academic settings that effectively made a specific view on the Israel-Hamas conflict a litmus test for full classroom participation.”

Last May, Sunn M’Cheaux of Harvard’s African Language Program gave the faculty keynote at the Affinity Celebration Honoring Black Graduates. His rantings included an attack on “Zionist overlords.”

These activities run counter to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It prohibits federally funded universities from discriminating on the basis of race or national origin. The penalty for such discrimination is to “terminate or withhold funding to that recipient,” according to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report.

Step back and see the whole picture. Harvard is engaged in widespread racial discrimination. Federally funded institutions are prohibited from doing so. The penalty is a loss of federal funding.

It thus makes sense that President Donald Trump would freeze billions in funding to Harvard. He’s enforcing the law.

But this problem goes beyond Harvard. After the Oct. 7 attacks, incidents of antisemitism exploded on college campuses. Many Jewish students didn’t feel safe walking to class. In many cases, administrators gave tacit approval to antisemitic behavior by kowtowing to anti-Jewish protesters who broke campus rules.

Jewish students aren’t the only ones facing discrimination, either. In a 2020 bid to fight “systemic racism,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber set the goal of hiring substantially more faculty from “underrepresented groups.” As a result, an anonymous Princeton professor told journalist Christopher Rufo, the university was loath to hire white men.

Documents show that Ohio State University judged candidates based on their skin color. A hiring initiative at Vanderbilt University Medical Center sought to hire up to 20 scientists who were “Black, Latinx, American Indian and Pacific Islander.” In its 2021 DEI Strategic Action Plan, the University of Nevada, Reno, sought to “increase number of underrepresented full-time academic faculty.” How elite universities discriminate against Asian and white applicants is well established.

This blatant racial discrimination is the fruit of the left’s embrace of critical race theory, which contends that America was built on white supremacy. Supposedly, it has so permeated society that race-neutral concepts — such as “all men are created equal” — are actually tools of oppression. Diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats put CRT into action, demanding schools judge people on their skin color, not character and qualifications.

Note the irony. The left has spent years decrying systemic racism while institutionalizing it in higher education.

Harvard is far from the only university that needs to be defunded.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.