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OPINION

Defunding the Clowns

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
AP Photo/Charles Krupa

For decades, Harvard has stood as the glistening tower on the hill of American academia—an institution families sacrificed generations of sweat and savings to access. To have a child at Harvard was to win a golden ticket: elite credentials, lifetime connections, and intellectual prestige.

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But peel back the ivy, and what lies beneath is nothing short of academic rot—and it stinks to high heaven.

President Trump’s move to put the screws to Harvard’s federal funding isn’t just solid policy. It’s moral clarity. It’s accountability. And it’s long overdue.

This past week, Trump ratcheted up the pressure, citing five damning reasons drawn directly from Harvard’s own internal investigation—an investigation they likely assumed would never see daylight. According to their findings, anti-Semitic harassment was not only tolerated but systemically ignored. Jewish students were stalked, doxxed, and shoved—both literally and ideologically—out of the public square. Meanwhile, DEI bureaucrats and grievance merchants nodded approvingly from behind their tenure-shielded desks.

But as bad as that was, it’s just the start.

In recent days, we learned that Harvard Medical School’s morgue manager pleaded guilty to stealing and selling human body parts from cadavers donated for scientific advancement. While the institution itself did not profit from the gruesome trade, the fact that such an abhorrent scheme could flourish unchecked—inside one of the most respected medical programs in the world—tells you everything about Harvard’s broken culture. The university either didn’t know… or didn’t care to find out.

Then came the news that Harvard’s so-called “Professor of Honesty”—Francesca Gino, no less—had her tenure stripped and was fired after it was discovered she had falsified and manipulated data in multiple studies on dishonesty. The irony? Almost too thick to cut with a scalpel. Gino built a career studying unethical behavior, then was exposed for committing it herself. You couldn’t script it better in Hollywood.

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The problem here isn’t that Harvard has a few bad apples. The problem is that the entire tree is rotting from the roots.

This is an institution so bloated with entitlement and arrogance that when the president of the United States issues a simple ultimatum—clean up your act or lose the public’s money—they don’t reform. They sue. They sue to keep the status quo. To protect the dysfunction. To preserve the ideological monoculture they’ve cultivated like a petri dish full of mold.

That tells you everything you need to know.

While Harvard’s administrators are busy crying foul and hurling accusations of “authoritarian overreach,” let’s review the facts: Harvard raised $1.2 billion—billion with a B—last year alone. And yet they’re still begging the White House for more. For taxpayer funds. For your money.

For what? To fund more antisemitism? More fraudulent research? More scandals they refuse to investigate?

Let’s be clear: what Harvard’s become is not an institution of higher learning. It’s a political think tank dressed in academic robes. It manufactures radical ideologues, not critical thinkers. It trains activists, not analysts. And when confronted with their failures, their crimes, and their abuses—they double down, hire lawyers, and shriek “academic freedom” while continuing to rake in taxpayer dollars.

Defunding Harvard isn’t censorship. It’s common sense.

If a private university wants to turn itself into a woke daycare, fine. But the American people shouldn’t be footing the bill—especially not for a school that churns out professional protestors faster than it graduates engineers.

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Harvard has turned into a parody of itself. The institution that once birthed constitutional scholars, Nobel laureates, and innovators now produces TikTok activists, DEI czars, and self-righteous cowards afraid of intellectual diversity.

President Trump is absolutely right to say: enough.

We do not owe elite universities an endless stream of taxpayer dollars simply because of their name. Prestige is not a blank check. It’s earned. And Harvard hasn’t earned a dime of public funding—not when their culture, their governance, and their academics are all poisoned by agenda-driven rot.

Let the clowns run their circus if they want. But let them do it without our money.

It’s time to defund the clowns.

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