A liberal court in Massachusetts came in for Harvard. And the sun rose in the east.
A famous story from the Torah has Moses standing in judgment of the Israelites from morning until night. It did not matter if it was a capital case or a question of ownership of a pair of shoes, everything had to come before Moses. His father-in-law, Yitro, saw thousands standing daily to get Moses’ judgment and said to his son-in-law that this arrangement would not work as it was too hard on him and on the people. He told Moses to set up a hierarchy of courts, which is the basis of our own district/appellate/Supreme Court system today. In possibly the last time that a Jewish man listened to his father-in-law, Moses set up courts “for the tens, for the hundreds, and for the thousands.”
I was reminded of this story when Harvard’s Inspector Clouseau president, Alan Garber, wrote to the alumni. He was proud to announce that a district court had determined that the Trump administration had acted illegally in withholding $2.2 billion of federal funds due to Harvard being more antisemitic than Hamas. He claimed that the ruling “affirmed Harvard’s First Amendment and procedural rights” and the outcome was a great victory. The president failed to note that the case was heard in a very liberal locale and that there are still many steps to the final word, most likely from the Supreme Court.
The president finished his short note with some ramblings about “our principles.” Harvard has no principles. Garber and Half-Penny Pritzker destroyed what Harvard once was, the unquestioned leader in academic excellence in the U.S. and possibly the world. Even far older schools like Oxford and Cambridge generally were considered less impressive than Harvard. Not anymore. The question before the court had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Every company—and Harvard is the oldest corporation in the land—has rules of conduct and speech that are legal and oftentimes the opposite of free speech. The United States government cannot limit my speech when I say that trans is nonsense and that people who think that they are trans suffer from mental illness. Harvard can prevent me from expressing such an opinion if I was a student or professor on campus. Twitter of old would have locked my account had I written the same on the social media site. Harvard pretends that its First Amendment rights were violated by those mean old Trump folks. Harvard is lying.
The problem that caused Harvard’s gravy to stop flowing is not free speech but civil rights. The Department of Education demands that each student’s civil rights be upheld by any university receiving federal largess. Harvard has taken care of the civil rights of women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, trans, and everyone else except Jews and white males. Jews locked themselves in their dorm rooms. During my four years at Harvard in the mid-1980s only one guy locked himself in his room. He was a Canadian fellow who did not like his haircut and refused to come out. He used his time alone to call the hair salon and demand that the stylist who did his hair be fired. After more than an hour of our pleading, he left his room with a large paper bag over his head. Jewish students of late on campus have been spit on, threatened with death, and demeaned by their no longer objective professors. One such “scholar” in philosophy put up every day the number of killed in Gaza according to the Hamas Ministry of Health. He did not list the number of Israelis killed, wounded and taken prisoner to start the war. Jews were chased on campus and physically accosted. That is Harvard’s problem and that is the source of the funding hold. Pritzker and Garber are a disgrace to Harvard as they, along with Claudine Gay of unpleasant memory, have turned the school into a laughingstock worldwide. They are a disgrace to the Jewish people as they have sacrificed their coreligionists on the altar of intersectionality and political correctness. They are a disgrace to America as they have let the premier educational institution become an antisemitic bastion of Jew and Israel hatred. Both should resign but in the custom of scoundrels throughout the ages, they will not. It’s Trump’s fault! It’s those racist MAGA rubes! It’s those Israelis for always causing trouble!
The lower court has done what many other district courts have done of late: play politics. From preventing the U.S. government from removing dangerous illegal aliens to demanding the removal of National guardsmen that keep American cities safe, the lower courts play a political game that generally demands redress by the Supreme Court. I imagine that the DOJ will appeal the pro-Harvard ruling and in the end, the highest court in the land will determine if the feds have the right to hold recipients of aid responsible for actually following the relevant civil rights statutes. Harvard won a short-term victory and Garber ran to his computer to declare victory. Tell the man that a boxing match is 15 rounds and not just one.
Not all things Harvard are necessarily gloom and doom. Israel, like most outposts in the galaxy, has a local Harvard club. I generally have little to do with it as their activities are not very interesting and take place mostly in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is less than an hour driving, but it feels like it’s on the other side of the country, which it is. I used to interview prospective students until so many good ones were not accepted that I got depressed and stopped. Next week I am going with two of our sons to see Bill Ackman speak to the local club. He has been a lion in fighting for both Harvard and Israel. As a major donor to the university, he has pushed for change to get Harvard pointed back in the right direction. He has also stood by Israel since the October 7, 2023, attack. I want to shake his hand and thank him. I would also not be averse should he want to sink some shekels into my company…
The idea of having different levels of courts is a winner. The problems today are twofold. Firstly, many lower courts use their power to push political agendas through the sophistry of legal opinions. The result is that the lower courts are becoming nearly irrelevant. Everything finds its way to the Supreme Court, which like Moses will become overburdened with petitioners who refuse to accept the opinions of lower courts. An appellate court threw out the New York district court's $464 million judgment against Donald Trump in his “business fraud” case. The only thing they left intact was the judge’s first and last name. Unlike Yitro, I do not have a suggestion for a better system. That said, I know that Harvard’s victory will be short-lived as the feds have no obligation to fund a university that would have made Josef Goebbels a professor of communication. Harvard is broken and it won’t be fixed from the inside. The Feds or the alumni will have to take it apart and build a better Harvard where even Jewish students get treated as well as blacks and gays and do not have to fear the bigotry of their peers and their co-conspirators from outside the campus.
