Secretary of Education Linda A. McMahon's letter to Harvard is real.
It was direct from her office over her signature.
The marked-up responses are not real.
At least they are not the official response from Harvard. Other people are posting these, because it is both funny and easy to do.
Versions of the response are circulating. You may have seen this one:
Or this one:
Don't fall for the claim that this is Harvard's official response. It is citizen trolling. Secretary McMahon's letter says the federal government will stop making grants to the university, implying, and perhaps herself believing, that the federal government is essentially providing generalized gifts to Harvard, maybe funding the football team or dining halls. In fact, the federal government contracts with Harvard, especially its medical schools and teaching hospitals, to carry out research on projects of national interest. It is more a matter of paying a contractor to do work of mutual benefit to the mission of Harvard as a center for research and of the National Institutes of Health to fight disease. Or NASA's mission. Or the defense contracting that Harvard does and doesn't talk about.
It isn't clear that Secretary McMahon understands that. Or that she cares.
The mockery brings her letter to public attention for its extraordinary sloppiness, its incorrect capitalizations, its misused words, its skipping around from subject to subject, its slipping into ALL-CAP emphasis. It reads like a Trump "Truth" written with thumbs in the early morning, and sent with minimal proofreading.
More important is what the letter reveals about the real motivation for the attack on Harvard, Columbia, and other universities. It isn't about being offended by pro-Palestinian protests on campus or by the universities ignoring antisemitic language as part of a larger university tradition of allowing free expression of unpopular ideas -- the original complaint.
This is a generalized political attack. Universities are the enemy. They are institutions coded and positioned as liberal, as Democratic, as the source of resistance against Trump's larger populist MAGA project. Trump has an agenda and it is carried out by loyal partisans. It must overcome obstacles, including laws, courts, Congress, respected institutions, and public opinion that might slow the work. Getting it done in this second term of office requires making clear that friends are helped and enemies are attacked from any direction possible. Universities are the enemy, right along with the news media, with lawyers who represent clients that oppose Trump or his allies, with former Trump administration officials who crossed or slow-walked Trump, with businesses that might dare to embarrass Trump by splitting out a surcharge required by a tariff.
Pardon friends. Prosecute enemies. Scare people into compliance or silence.
The points of attack in this letter are ones chosen to create populist resentment. Who is admitted and who is not, the politics of international students, the size of the endowment, the presumed antisemitism. This is a political rally speech designed to get cheers from people who hate the libs.
In that respect, a mocking reply in the form of marked-up errors is a response in kind. It is a fun response, but it isn't useful for Harvard in the great political and culture war that it finds itself. No one likes being mocked, and this is exactly the kind of smarty-pants show of contempt that creates ill-will, as in Hillary Clinton's "deplorables."
It becomes a schoolyard shouting match:
McMahan: You are rich elitists and you aren't as good as you think you are!
Response: You are too stupid to write a coherent letter!
There are more people who write sloppy letters and don't want to be shamed for doing so than there people who notice the rampant errors. This is probably a "win" for Trump.
The McMahon letter needs to be taken seriously for what it is, a formal letter outlining the political case against Harvard and institutions like it, written as a political rant.
Here is the letter as written, taken from screen shots:
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7 comments:
The letter mentions Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, larger than the GDP of 100 countries, presumably to generate populist resentment against those wealthy elites. The lady wrestler Trump put in charge of dismantling the Dept. of Education who wrote, or at least signed, that letter is worth $3.2 billion. The oligarchs in the Trump administration have a cumulative wealth of $428.3 billion, higher than the GDP of 174 countries.
Peter is right. Harvard’s real offense is that it doesn’t embrace MAGA’s white Christian nationalist values.
Evidently, Harvard's lawsuit against the federal government doesn't scare President Trump or the Secretary of Education.
Anon: lawsuits are not designed to “scare”. They are designed to determine legality of an action. Of course if we cease to be a nation of laws and only of personal power of a monarch, then the lawsuits are only delaying the inevitable. Trump’s answer to the question of whether he must follow the Constitution (“I don’t know”) tells it all.
When a hurricane comes ashore, it can do a lot of damage. But it might also reconfigure a lagoon in a way that happens to be beneficial.
Similarly, the Trump administration is doing all kinds of damage. But it is also well along in the process of killing DEI and woke identity politics in higher education, corporations, and the government.
Along with being unhappy about the damage, we might as well also be happy about the positive aspects of what’s happening. It’s a hurricane; it’s not like we have control over it…
That's right, what Trump really objects to is that Harvard in particular and universities in general are too diverse and inclusive. It's an outrage.
I agree that lawsuits are supposed to determine the legality of actions. How persons react when they're sued doesn't always reflect that purpose. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had President Trump indicted for trying to fix (in a bad way) the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Probably, most of us would've wanted to accept responsibility for some crime based on misconduct such as President Trump's alleged criminal misconduct in Georgia; our objective would be to receive leniency in sentencing. On the other hand, President Trump made the case into a side show about Ms. Willis and her boyfriend, and so far he's done well with that strategy. Not being scared helped him turn the tables in Georgia. Maybe Harvard's next in line for a side show, as opposed to carrying the banner for truth and justice; we'll see.
Michael - The English proverb, "It's an ill wind that blows no good!" approach to Trumpism is without merit. The damage to our international reputation and financial system is deep and will take a generation at least to recover. Furthermore, as a nation of immigrants, Trumpism flies in the face of reason and sensibility. Look at the foreign-born graduate students making breakthrough discoveries in science, medicine, and technology, not to mention the arts and music. Trump's words and Musk's deeds are wrecking the alliances and safeguards that were keeping us safe.
Your analogy of Trumpism having the effects of a climatic event or disaster is moot or meant to be tongue-in-cheek; the better analogy is of Nero burning Rome.
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