By: Colin Wright

Published: Apr 17, 2025

A high-stakes confrontation has recently erupted between the Trump administration and Harvard University, often considered America’s most prestigious academic institution. The administration, through the U.S. Department of Education, issued a series of sweeping demands aimed at reshaping Harvard’s governance, admissions, and hiring practices—threatening to freeze over $2.2 billion in federal funding if the university did not comply. These demands were framed as efforts to bring Harvard into compliance Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in institutions receiving federal funds, and Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination on similar grounds. According to the administration, Harvard had failed “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” among other concerns.

The initial list of demands, issued on April 3, called on Harvard to dismantle programs fostering antisemitism, enforce its own student conduct policies, adopt strictly merit-based hiring and admissions practices, eliminate all preferences based on race, sex, religion, or other immutable traits, and shut down its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. A second list, released on April 11, went further—demanding audits of admissions and hiring data, investigations into faculty plagiarism, and the elimination of “ideological litmus tests.” It also required that every department and teaching unit found to lack “viewpoint diversity” be restructured by hiring or admitting a “critical mass” of faculty and students with divergent views.

When Harvard President Alan Garber rejected these demands on April 14, citing violations of academic freedom and First Amendment protections, the administration responded by freezing the university’s federal funds. President Trump escalated the conflict the next day by threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

Garber and others framed these actions as a political power play, portraying Harvard as standing up to an administration wishing to enforce its ideology onto them. But this framing misses the mark. The Trump administration’s initial demands weren’t about imposing a competing ideology—they were, at least on their face, about removing ideology from university policy altogether. Asking Harvard to comply with federal law as a condition of receiving taxpayer dollars is not unreasonable.

However, while the first round of demands focused on removing bias, the second veered into troubling territory. The call to assess and rectify viewpoint disparities introduces a paradox: to achieve ideological balance, Harvard would need to actively recruit individuals based on their political beliefs, a practice that violates the administration’s demand to eliminate “ideological litmus tests” and mirrors the very kind of affirmative action they oppose in racial contexts. This approach is not only impractical, it risks violating the principles of free inquiry the administration claims to defend.

As economist Thomas Sowell has long argued, disparities in outcomes—whether racial, ideological, or otherwise—do not automatically indicate discrimination. While it’s true that Harvard has discriminated on ideological grounds in the past, and likely still does, the appropriate response is to eliminate such discrimination—not to mandate proportional representation of political viewpoints. We rightly condemned Ibram X. Kendi’s assertion that “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Yet that is what the demand for viewpoint equity calls for.

If Harvard were to adopt merit-based hiring and admissions, as I believe it should, then whatever ideological distribution emerges should be accepted as legitimate. Forcing ideological diversity could lead to absurd scenarios, such as a biology department being compelled to hire Young Earth Creationists or Intelligent Design proponents to “balance” its evolutionary focus, even when such views lack scientific credibility. This would not only lower academic standards but risks creating a politicized environment where hiring decisions are driven by ideology rather than expertise, undermining the administration’s own stated goals.

Rather than submitting to either side’s ideological agenda, Harvard should publicly commit to merit-based hiring and admissions, free of both racial and ideological preferences. This would preserve its integrity without caving to external pressures to enforce any particular ideological outcome. Forcing ideological quotas erodes trust in academic institutions, stifles genuine debate by mandating artificial diversity, and invites government intrusion into areas where it truly doesn’t belong. It also risks driving away serious scholars who simply prioritize academic excellence over political signaling.

In short, the Trump administration is right to challenge race-based policies that violate the law and undermine merit. But it oversteps by attempting to micromanage ideological composition on campus. True intellectual diversity can’t be mandated from Washington. It emerges from a culture of open inquiry and fair processes that treat individuals as individuals—not as proxies for their race, sex, or political beliefs.

As Sowell reminds us, equality doesn’t mean equal outcomes; it means equal treatment. That principle should guide both federal policymakers and university leaders. And if we want our institutions to remain credible, we have to be willing to call balls and strikes on both sides.

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You can't cure cancer with more cancer.

You can't solve DEI with more DEI.

Eliminate all race- and sex-based preferencing, eliminate "diversity statements" and all litmus tests. Fire the people responsible for implementing and enforcing these discriminatory policies, as well as anyone with a substantiated history of enforcing - or trying to enforce - their own ideological tenets (e.g. that sexism and racism are some kind of complex intersectional algebra). Make clear the standards and hold everyone to them equally.

What's the Difference Between Diversity Inclusion and Equity (Meg Bolger)

Developing and Writing a Diversity Statement (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching)

The Promise of Diversity Statements: Insights and an Initial Framework Developed from a Faculty Search Process

Diversity Workshop Handout (Ohio State University Writing Center)

By: John Sailer

Published: Sep 9, 2023

What happens in California usually doesn’t stay in California — and that’s bad news for higher education. 

In his latest piece for the New York Times, Michael Powell catalogs just how extensively the Golden State’s universities have embraced mandatory diversity statements when hiring faculty. From junior college to prestigious research university, scientists and scholars throughout the state must demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to remain in good standing.

By now, this should come as no surprise, but it is striking to see some of the most egregious ways the policy plays out. In 2016, the piece notes, at least five University of California (UC) campuses decided to initially screen faculty job applicants based only on diversity statements. For one large hiring initiative at UC Berkeley — the Life Sciences Initiative — the faculty search committee eliminated three-fourths of the applicant pool on the basis of diversity statements alone. Berkeley’s rubric for assessing diversity statements, moreover, dictates a low score for candidates who speak positively about diversity but in vague terms. Even more remarkably, it gives a low score to candidates who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.” 

All of this is especially notable because of what California represents to American public higher education. Out of any state, California best embodies the American vision of universal higher education — its promises and perils.

In 1960, UC System President Clark Kerr spearheaded the “California Master Plan for Higher Education,” an attempt to modernise the state’s system of higher education. The Master Plan institutionalised a rigidly tiered system for California’s colleges and universities, reserving the UC system for the top 12.5% of the state’s graduating high school students, the California State system for the top 33.3%, and the California Community Colleges system for everyone else.

The plan captured the country’s strong faith in higher education, its aspiration to send virtually every young person to college. Kerr once jokingly quipped that the mission of the university is “to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty” — an amusing, and functionally accurate, description. 

No doubt, California set the example. Today, it remains a powerhouse; according to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the UC system includes six out of the top 10 American public universities.

California still sets the tone for American higher education. And for that reason, we might add one more item to Kerr’s tongue-in-cheek summary of the university’s mission: “DEI initiatives for the administrators.” The trend Powell describes — whereby enthusiasm for DEI, whatever that might mean in practice, has become a virtual job requirement for scientists and scholars —has trickled down. 

Berkeley’s Life Sciences Initiative, for example, was designed to test whether universities could use a method known as “cluster hiring” to advance the goal of diversity. Basically, the approach involves hiring multiple faculty at once with a heavy emphasis on DEI. In a forthcoming National Association of Scholars report, I describe how DEI-focused cluster hiring has boomed since Berkeley undertook its Life Sciences Initiative.

In 2020, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center carried out a cluster hire — hiring researchers in cancer, infectious disease, and basic biology — which heavily weighed DEI contributions. In 2021, Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology undertook a cluster hire; it eliminated approximately 85% of its candidates based solely on diversity statements. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $241 million in grant money for cluster hires at universities around the country — with the condition that every search committee must require and heavily weigh diversity statements.

Berkeley’s rubric — the one that gives a low score to anyone who espouses race-neutrality — is likewise ubiquitous. Two of the universities receiving NIH money for cluster hires are the University of New Mexico and the University of South Carolina. Through a public records request, I acquired both universities’ rubric for assessing diversity statements, which was published earlier this year. Both universities use the Berkeley rubric verbatim.

As a consequence of these measures, trust in higher education will likely continue to fall, owing in part to a sense that some views are simply not tolerated. But DEI litmus tests do not merely diminish the public’s trust in higher education. They degrade higher education itself. Clark Kerr knew that the mission of the university isn’t sex, sports, or parking. It isn’t social justice, either. It’s the pursuit of truth, which, following California’s example, all too many universities seem to forget.

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There are still some people who say stupid things like, "how can you be against equality and diversity?" Except, we all know at this point that these are ideologically-charged words. The rubrics themselves tell you that liberal principles of equality are unacceptable; rather, contested and ideological notions about the world. This makes "DIE statements" ideological loyalty oaths.