How the Ivy League earned Donald Trump’s ire

In contrast to how the university handled last year’s student occupation of another building on campus, the police were summoned quickly, arrests were made, and dozens of students were suspended. Still, I’ll hold my applause for now.

Schools can drop charges and quietly reverse disciplinary actions, as they’ve done in the past, which is one reason these disruptions have continued. It’s clear that the troublemakers don’t take the administration’s warnings seriously. According to the Columbia Spectator, at least one of the students who was detained last week and subsequently suspended from school has been suspended twice before.

It’s difficult to fathom such behavior being tolerated in other settings. Could unhappy Costco customers take over a store, intimidate employees and other customers, lock managers in their offices, damage inventory, scribble calls to violence on the walls, and then walk away without paying the consequences? Yet unlawful demonstrations are common on campuses nationwide, even after repeated promises by administrators to crack down on such lawlessness and protect the rights of students who are in school to get an education.

College ought to be about sharpening your critical-thinking skills in the search for knowledge and understanding. At too many elite schools, the priority seems to be providing platforms for trendy social movements. This reality is animating the Trump administration’s dispute with higher education, which continues to escalate.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is now investigating whether Harvard’s hiring practices violated civil-rights statutes that bar discrimination based on race and sex. The Washington Free Beacon reported that since-deleted messages on the school’s website “bragged about increasing the number of ‘women, non-binary, and/or people of color’ on the faculty."

The EEOC is probing whether Harvard discriminated against job applicants who were white, male, Asian or heterosexual. Between 2013 and 2023, the nonwhite share of the university’s tenure-track faculty rose by 11 percentage points, while the share of tenure-track faculty who were white men fell by 14 points. Given that the Supreme Court in 2023 scored Harvard for unconstitutional discrimination in student admissions, this is hardly a fishing expedition.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has accused Harvard of political bias and declared it ineligible for new federal research grants. President Trump has threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, and Harvard could lose $9 billion in federal funds unless it meets a list of demands that includes vetting “all existing and prospective faculty" to ensure “viewpoint diversity" in each department. On Tuesday, the administration canceled $450 million in grants on top of the $2.2 billion the administration already froze.

Harvard is suing the administration to lift the federal freeze on grant money, and it denies any institutional bias. “I must refute your claim that Harvard is a partisan institution," Alan Garber, the university’s president, said in response to Ms. McMahon’s allegation. “It is neither Republican nor Democratic. It is not an arm of any other political party or movement. Nor will it ever be."

Yet empirical studies on the political leanings of academics, particularly in the humanities, tell a different story. A Carnegie Foundation faculty survey in 1999 found that 12% of professors called themselves conservative, down from 27% in 1969. “These vanishing conservative thinkers have not been replaced by moderate ones," according to Jon Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. “Since the late 1960s, self-identified liberal professors have become increasingly common on college campuses."

Conservative representation in the social sciences and humanities has “practically disappeared" from many areas outside of economics, Mr. Shields wrote in a 2018 article for National Affairs. “Nearly every recent survey of the university places the percentage of conservative and Republican professors in these fields in the single digits." For example, “Republicans make up 4% of historians, 3% of sociologists, and a mere 2% of literature professors."

Intellectuals as a group have long leaned to the political left. Given who is attracted to teaching, a true balance of political viewpoints probably isn’t in the cards on most college campuses. What has changed over the decades isn’t so much whether Democrats or Republicans choose academia as a profession. Rather, it’s been the indulgence of instructors who are less interested in teaching and more interested in student indoctrination.

Students who should be taught how to develop their own minds and reach their own conclusions are instead being spoon-fed the conclusions of proselytizing professors. Universities are supposed to be dedicated to the unbiased search for truth. How about more teaching and less preaching?