Harvard

Trump’s support is largely from flyover country, people who believe that the coastal elites look down at them, literally when flying between the east and west coasts, metaphorically in the form best exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of deplorables.”

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. (Wiki)

Harvard is the quintessence of the coastal elites, so it is not surprising that Trump is attacking it in any way he thinks he can get away with.

Conservatives, including those who are not Trump fans, have a better reason to be unhappy with Harvard. For decades the Civil Right Act was enforced against firms on a basis close to guilty until proven innocent, with a racial pattern in employment that did not match the relevant population treated as establishing a presumption of discrimination, tests that yielded such a pattern dubiously legal unless the firm could provide evidence, evidence sufficient to convince skeptical regulators, that the test selected for relevant characteristics. Often the easiest solution for the firm was to deliberately discriminate in favor of blacks or women in order to push the employment pattern in the desired direction. Throughout that period, increasingly as time passed, universities engaged in blatant discriminationin favor of blacks and women, sometimes gays, in both admissions and employment, on the implicit theory that discriminating in favor of disadvantaged minorities, didn’t count. The rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and the plain text of both the Civil Rights Act and the 14^th Amendment was for equal treatment, a color blind society, but that was not how the law was being enforced.

Discrimination in admissions was permitted, theoretically in only a limited fashion, by two Supreme Court cases, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). But in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard the Supreme Court, faced with evidence of substantial discrimination by Harvard against Asian applicants and in favor of Blacks, found that what they were doing was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and so of the Equal Protection clause of the 14^th Amendment and ordered Harvard to stop doing it.

Admissions statistics the year after that verdict, only slightly different from the previous year’s, strongly suggest that they were still discriminating. Data for the year after that is not yet public but I interview Silicon Valley applicants as an alumnus volunteer, have been doing it for some years, and the contrast of this year’s admissions results for students I interviewed with those from previous years suggests that Harvard has become much more willing to admit Asians.

The Solicitor General of the Biden administration supported Harvard in his testimony to the Supreme Court. My interpretation of the pattern of admissions is that as long as there was a Democratic administration in Washington the people running Harvard believed that nothing serious would be done to enforce a verdict that the administration disapproved of. When Trump won Harvard changed its admissions policy.

If they are no longer discriminating in employment by race, at least not by enough to be obvious, they are no longer in violation of that part of the relevant law but there may still be consequences for past violations. Bob Jones University lost its tax exempt status due to its ban on interracial dating, announced in 2000 that they had dropped the policy, in 2017 that they got their tax exemption. Suspending Harvard’s tax exemption for seventeen years seems excessive, given that until two years ago they could plausibly claim that what they were doing was legal, but if Trump wants to do it he can claim a precedent.

If Harvard wants to continue its past admission policy, it could stop accepting federal funds. As best I can tell from the 2024 financial overview, federal money goes for research not education. The two activities are related, since the research may be done by Harvard professors, graduate students, even undergraduates, but it might be possible to organizationally separate them, to have multiple Cambridge research institutes that hire Harvard faculty and students to do research with funding that does not go through Harvard. Trump could, very possibly would, use his control over the executive branch to send research funding elsewhere but he would no longer have the excuse of Title VI to do so and his successor would have no legal case against Harvard.

Employment

The Court’s verdict was on admissions, not employment, but it is reasonably clear that Harvard discriminates there as well, with their recently ex president an example discussed in a previous post.

Chris Bray on Tell Me How This Ends compares her cv to those of two previous Harvard Presidents, each of whom had published five or six books and dozens of articles. Claudine Gay has published no books and eleven peer reviewed articles. Bray then offers another comparison, relevant to her initial hiring by Harvard:

Claudine Gay was a professor at Stanford when Harvard desperately worked to lure her away because of her amazingly brilliant performance as a scholar, so let’s choose the very first associate professor listed in the poli sci department there and look at his academic c.v. for comparison.

Adam Bonica, a young associate professor who completed his PhD in 2011 — not quite twenty years after Claudine Gay finished hers — has published a book, 28 peer-reviewed articles and a couple of student-editor-reviewed law review articles, and a handful of book chapters. Weirdly, he does not seem to be considered a shockingly distinguished professor who should be running Harvard.

There are currently a number of law suits against universities alleging past employment discrimination. Some may succeed since they are against universities that made no attempt to conceal what they were doing. Harvard, however, has mostly avoided public actions that provide unambiguous evidence of employment discrimination. Reading Harvard’s Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches it is reasonably obvious that they are designed to increase “faculty diversity” but put in language that can be read as merely suggesting ways to identify a wider range of qualified candidates.

The EEOC is currently investigating Harvard for employment discrimination and may be able to make a case based on internal documents¹ or other evidence. Whether or not they can be shown to have discriminated in hiring in the past they should be able, with reasonable care, to do so in the future without generating evidence sufficient to convict them of doing it. Proving a pattern of discrimination in employment would be harder than it was for admissions, since the numbers are smaller and the relevant qualifications harder to quantify.

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“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.” (Harvard President Alan Garber)

Under the Civil Rights Act, the government has a legal right to some control over who a private university hires. I am in favor of repealing it but I doubt that Garber is.

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1. An article by critics of Harvard’s employment policy offers one, how obtained is not clear.