a Harvard Course on “Empowering Black Leaders”

The Trump administration is taking aim at Harvard over alleged racial discrimination in hiring and admissions. But as Heather Mac Donald argues, anyone expecting a quick victory over campus identity politics should think again.

A three-day seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “Empowering Black Leaders,” illustrates the depth and breadth of the institutional forces committed to cultivating racialist and anti-Western ideologies in academia. “Assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program,” writes Mac Donald.

Even the most ardent defenders of Trump’s efforts to de-ideologize American universities would recognize that lawsuits and funding threats are only the beginning. Dismantling the ideological capture of the academy will require sustained pressure—not just from Washington, but from a broader coalition of alumni, donors, trustees, and opinion-makers committed to challenging these orthodoxies over the long term. It’s a daunting task, but not an impossible one.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status in what the university’s defenders claim is an assault on academic freedom. But in an explosive new investigative report based on a trove of internal documents they have obtained, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe present evidence that Harvard may have violated federal civil rights law.

Rufo and Thorpe document the university’s troubling pattern of discrimination against white men in faculty hiring, revealing how Harvard instructed search committees to “include women and minorities” on their early lists of candidates and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” According to a professor whom they interviewed, the university is “totally corrupted,” and the evidence of its discrimination is “endless.”

Read the rest of Rufo and Thorpe’s report here.

Even as PBS CEO Paula Kerger cried foul over President Trump’s executive order to cut federal funding to the broadcaster, recent programming offers a vivid justification for the move. Ian Kingsbury, director of research at Do No Harm, dissects Critical Condition: Health in Black America, a documentary steeped in ideological distortion of medical fact.

The film zeroes in on racial disparities in health—particularly black maternal mortality—but ignores well-documented biological factors, such as the higher incidence of preeclampsia among black women, in favor of a sweeping racism-is-to-blame narrative. In doing so, Kingsbury argues, it misleads black mothers while promoting activism over evidence.

Rather than fulfilling its educational mandate, PBS is helping to bankroll the “diversity industrial complex”—a fact that only bolsters Trump’s case for defunding it.

Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn argues that the federal endowment tax, which Congress is considering raising from 1.4 percent to as high as 21 percent, isn’t just terrible policy. For institutions like Hillsdale that have long declined federal money, it’s an attack on independence.

“The resources entrusted to Hillsdale College are not drawn from the public treasury. They are given freely by those who believe in our mission,” he writes. “To tax these gifts is to tax philanthropy itself—to burden those who would lift burdens.”

“This is a classic example of rich, white progressives blithely dismissing the opinions and concerns of the very minorities they claim to champion.

‘We’ll tell you what you’re supposed to be offended about.’”

Photo credits: JOSEPH PREZIOSO / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images