“Veritas.” That Latin word meaning “Truth” has been the motto of Harvard University since 1643, so here are some hard truths about our nation’s most famous institution of higher learning.
Harvard has a history of condoning antisemitism.
Harvard seeks to silence speech with which it does not agree.
Harvard is openly hostile to conservative ideas, principles, and moral beliefs that combat the strictest liberal orthodoxy.
I know all of these things because I attended and graduated from Harvard along with a small group of like-minded conservative classmates that included Vivek Ramaswamy, who brainstormed the Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk.
Eager to attend the famous institution after my hard academic work and my parents’ financial sacrifice allowed me to enter its doors, it became readily apparent that as a hard-right, conservative Republican, I was a flag-waving patriot standing on enemy soil.
It is impossible to read today’s headlines or watch news television coverage without running across stories that make it apparent a permanent Woke-a-palooza festival is taking place on the Harvard campus.
While the university has always had a reputation as a leftist stronghold, it began to hit redline levels on the extremism meter with the permissive partisan policies of the Biden administration and the unconscionable and unprovoked attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists and Palestinian militants that resulted in 1,200 deaths, roughly 5,500 wounded, and 250 hostages being taken.
Mass protests broke out on Harvard Yard as hundreds of students gathered, but they were not holding prayer vigils or memorials for the Israeli victims — they were organizing solidarity rallies for the Palestinians who executed them.
Despite reports by Jewish students of an alarming uptick in antisemitic threats, violence, and hostility, Harvard President Claudine Gay soon after refused to say “Yes” during congressional testimony when New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, also an alum, asked if calls by students for Jewish genocide violated the university’s policies.
Harvard eventually took action, but not in the manner that any rational person would assume.
The university sponsored “privilege training” for Jewish students that taught them they should feel guilt and provide atonement not only for their traditional “white privilege” — a bogus and divisive phrase that is prevalent in today’s woke lexicon — but also for the even higher degree of “privilege” that their religious faith affords them. Apparently being both white and Jewish is a mortal sin in the eyes of the Harvard intelligentsia.
While the cancer of antisemitism was allowed to metastasize at Harvard during the Biden administration, President Donald Trump took decisive steps to eradicate the disease upon taking office earlier this year.
As a result of executive orders issued to end political, religious, and racial bias that exists on college campuses across the county, the Trump administration informed Harvard that it was freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants until solid and concrete changes were implemented to meet the new requirements. A total of $9 billion in contracts and grants are at stake for non-compliance.
Among the necessary actions outlined in the letter were reforming Harvard’s schools, programs, and groups that have a history of antisemitic bias or politicization; auditing faculty members who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to participate in anti-Jewish rallies; ending hiring practices that are based upon “ideological litmus tests” or require compliance with a specific political philosophy; toughening student discipline policies and prohibiting campus groups that advocate criminal activity, violence, and harassment; and others.
Student groups specifically highlighted by the Trump administration included the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduates Students 4 Palestine, Law Students 4Palestine, and Students for Justice in Palestine, all of which were accused of promoting vehement antisemitic activity.
With an endowment totaling more than $50 billion and an army of liberal lawyers at his disposal, current Harvard University President Alan Garber pledged his refusal to comply and vowed to protect the hateful, leftist, socialistic Nirvana that has been built on his campus.
While I think President Trump’s pressure campaign can begin to tame the Woke Wild West at Harvard and other colleges, we must begin fighting a two-front war with conservative alumni placing pressure from the inside by withholding financial contributions, capital campaign funding, and other gifts until changes are made.
Colleges, especially private ones, operate on a steady diet of cold, hard cash, so perhaps a bit of economic starvation and deprivation from conservatives can force a change of course.
Unless Harvard quells its rampant antisemitism, ends violence and threats against Jewish students and faculty, bans support for terrorist groups, and demands equal respect, protection, and treatment for all who attend, it should change its motto from “Veritas” to “Odium.”
That is the Latin word for “Hate.”
