Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.
Earlier this month, Campus Reform reported that the Trump administration was threatening to withhold almost $9 billion in federal funding from Harvard University due to what it deemed violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, mostly stemming from the university’s failure to curb antisemitism on campus.
The administration has since begun to follow through on those threats, announcing this week it would freeze $2.2 billion effective immediately. The IRS is also looking at revoking the university’s tax-exempt status.
Initially, Harvard’s leadership indicated it would comply with the administration’s requested policy changes in order to avoid the funding cuts. However, after the faculty rejected that idea and sued the White House, university president Alan Garber issued the following statement on X and elsewhere.
“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.”
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I found this statement rather perplexing, coming from Harvard. In 2023, I wrote a two-part series for The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (here and here), along with a follow-up piece for Campus Reform, about the Biden administration’s systematic persecution of private religious universities.
Several such institutions, including Yeshiva, Seattle Pacific, Liberty, Azusa Pacific, Colorado Christian, and Brigham Young, were subjected to years-long investigations by the Department of Education over supposed violations of Title IX—specifically, alleged discrimination against “LGBTQ+” students and faculty.
As far as I know, all those investigations have either been resolved or simply closed, thanks partly to a provision in Title IX that exempts private institutions from certain requirements of the law based on their deeply-help religious beliefs. However, in these cases, as in so many others involving government overreach, the investigations themselves WERE the punishment, requiring many man-hours and costing the universities millions of dollars.
Moreover, at the time, the Biden administration’s proposed revisions to Title IX, which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of protected traits, had not yet kicked in. Thankfully, those changes have since been overridden by the Trump administration, but had they gone into effect—as they certainly would have under Kamala Harris—religious institutions would have found it nearly impossible to defend themselves.
Even though the revised law retained the original “exemption” for religious institutions, the new language meant they would have been subjected to continual investigations by the federal government along with a slew of potentially ruinous lawsuits from “LGBTQ+” faculty and students.
Indeed, as Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) pointed out in regard to another piece of Biden-era legislation, the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act,” that was precisely the point: to make it as difficult as possible for religious individuals and institutions to practice their faith in public if it conflicted with left-wing orthodoxy—and punish them if they tried.
“Once same-sex marriage is recognized nationwide,” wrote Senator Lee in 2022, “many colleges, universities, and other non-profits could lose their tax-exempt status based on their refusal, rooted in religious belief, to recognize same-sex marriage.”
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That brings us back to Harvard University, which obviously feels that it is now being persecuted for holding beliefs that contradict those of the current administration. The difference, of course, is that Harvard’s refusal to protect Jewish students, along with its continued embrace of DEI, clearly violate long-standing civil rights laws—not some new “interpretation” of those laws based on the political flavor of the month.
Moreover, I don’t recall Harvard, or any of the nation’s other self-styled “elite” institutions, coming to the defense of Yeshiva, Liberty, BYU, et al. back in 2023. Apparently, their conviction that the government shouldn’t dictate policy to private universities is a recent development.
Now that the wingtip is on the other foot, it’s hard to feel sorry for Harvard or any of the other elite institutions that face losing federal funding. Leftists seem to believe they will always be in charge and can therefore use the law as a cudgel against those they deem unworthy without ever finding themselves on the receiving end. Their hubris and shortsightedness may prove to be their ruin.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
