By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday,
December 22, 2023
At
CNN, Stephen Collinson reluctantly reports on the Claudine Gay situation at
Harvard. I write “reluctantly,” because, upon reading it, it becomes clear that
Collinson has been told both to relate the details of the story and to
convey to his audience that the whole thing is really about the boundless
treachery of the Republican Party. “Elite academia,” Collinson explains at the
beginning, “appears to be playing directly into the hands of ex-President
Donald Trump’s populist Republicans.” And from there, that’s his pattern. Fact,
followed by dismissal, followed by fact, followed by dismissal, and so forth
This combination of paragraphs serves as a nice example of the trick:
The twin controversies are highlighting a
moment in which Republicans, including Trump, view universities – in common
with the courts, the professional bureaucracy in Washington and the media – as
elite institutions that they can denigrate for political gain. The narrative is
playing an important role in the GOP’s populist anti-establishment messaging as
Trump eyes a return to the White House after the 2024 election.
While there are clear political motivations
at play in the right’s assault on the country’s most storied universities, the
controversies are also unfolding at a fraught moment in higher education. Elite
universities are also being buffeted by claims that they are tainted by the
political doctrines of the left and that colleges are becoming less a place to
prepare new generations and more an incubator of radical ideology.
“Republicans,”
“Trump,” “the GOP,” “Trump,” “the right,” “higher education.” That’s a ratio of
5:1. What a mystery it is that “the media” is being “denigrated”!
Anyhow,
I’m picking on this particular offering because it contained this passage, which jumped out and smacked me in the
forehead:
Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill called
the investigation “shocking and dangerous” on Thursday and questioned why
members of Congress are spending their time probing Harvard rather than passing
a border bill or aid to Ukraine. “When you challenge the independence of
private institutions, you are challenging a core element of our democracy. We
should be on alert,” Ifill told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “The Source.”
“If Harvard wants to do its own
investigation, it is free to do so. But for members of Congress to decide that
they want to meddle into the private affairs of a private institution in order
to score political points and to target a Black president is incredibly
dangerous,” added Ifill, the former president and director-counsel of the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund.
This
is absurd on every level. Why are members of Congress “probing Harvard”?
Because Harvard receives hundreds of millions of dollars from
Congress, that’s why. Per Harvard’s own financial reports, the college was
given $625 million by the federal government in 2021 — a number that “accounted for approximately
67 percent of total sponsored revenue.” Between 2018 and 2022, records show,
Harvard was handed more than three billion federal
dollars. If Harvard wishes to be completely “independent” of Congress — as,
say, Hillsdale
is — then it must also become completely independent of Congress’s
wallet. It cannot pick and choose. With subsidy comes oversight. That isn’t a
threat to “our democracy”; that is our democracy.
Are
we really to believe that Ifill, who used to work for the NAACP, wishes to
abolish the current rules that come along with the federal funding of
universities? As PEN America records, “private institutions that receive federal funding
must also adhere to federal anti-discrimination laws, such as those applicable
under Title IX.” Is that “meddling”? Or does that term only apply when Congress
asks questions that Ifill doesn’t like? Where’s her limiting principle? It is
interesting that Ifill mentions “aid to Ukraine” in her list of things that
Congress should be doing instead. Does she think that Congress should write a
blank check in that realm, too? Do questions asked of those beneficiaries
represent a challenge to the “core element of our democracy,” or, perhaps to
Ukraine’s sovereignty? Or do these standards apply to Harvard alone?
From
my vantage point, Ifill seems emblematic of the enormous number of people
within the contemporary American progressive movement who believe that the role
of the voting public is to hand over money to a certain group of institutions,
and then to go away. We see this in the rejection of the claim that the
bureaucracy ought to be under the control of the elected executive; we see it in
the way that bodies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are
deliberately structured to avoid democratic accountability; we see it
in the debate over public education, in which school boards,
parents, taxpayers and others — that is, the people who are forced to pay for
and use the schools — are cast as busybodies, irritants, and interferers who
are getting in the way of the process; and we see it here with Sherrilyn Ifill,
for whom it seems the only “shocking and dangerous” uses of Congress’s powers
are the ones that its members are indisputably within their rights to perform.
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