After years of fomenting campus cultures where the virulent threat of antisemitism has been willfully dismissed and disregarded, Ivy League leadership has now reached an inflection point punctuated by the Trump administration’s recent high-pressure campaign to strip these schools of their federal funding. Is the executive branch justified in its reaction to Ivy League missteps in the fight against antisemitism, or is it throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

Let’s review the case studies presented by Columbia University and Harvard University, which have drawn national attention for their responses to the Trump administration’s demands.

The Case of Columbia: Capitulation Was Necessary After Years of Sweeping Antisemitism Under the Rug

Even before President Trump came back into power, Columbia was in hot water with its Jewish community, which it repeatedly turned its back on by caving to the demands of student and faculty activists. Columbia leadership had many opportunities to do the right thing. But, hey, this is the school that once invited former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a known Holocaust denier among other things, to its campus to speak. From former Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s bungled testimony in front of a Congressional task force investigating antisemitism to the many repeated instances of violent threats against Jewish students on the part of protestors, Columbia has fostered a hostile environment to Jews since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

This widespread negligence has come at a heavy cost. The Columbia presidency has turned into a revolving door of administrators (three and counting over the last eighteen or so months!), while applications were down and acceptance rates were up for the Class of 2029 in direct response to these controversies. However, the Trump administration’s demands will perhaps prove to be among the most lasting adverse reactions to this campaign of apathy.

On March 7th of this year, Trump canceled roughly $400 million in grants and contracts “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Columbia had this retribution coming, and the government would have been more than justified if their demands had ended there. However, a few days later, it also announced the cancellation of around 400 grants related to biomedical research, a move that we at Ivy Coach cannot help but take issue with as red-blooded patriots ourselves. But more on that soon!

The Case of Harvard: President Trump’s Oversteps May Be His Downfall

When it comes to campus antisemitism, Harvard hasn’t been that much better than Columbia. Just like its Ivy League counterpart, Harvard leadership also bungled a congressional testimony on antisemitism that, coupled with getting caught with her hand in the cookie jar for egregious plagiarism, led to the ouster of then-President Claudine Gay. The nation’s oldest and arguably most prestigious university failed to reel in the many antisemitic protests that took the campus by storm in the wake of October 7th, and it’s still in hot water with many Jewish students and community members. However, this dangerous campus culture does not appear at the top of the Trump administration’s list of grievances.

Starting in April of this year, the government sent Harvard a series of letters outlining demands, some of which addressed Harvard’s antisemitic track record, but the bulk of which covered federal audits of admissions, hiring, and related data. Our ears naturally perked up as college admissions experts when President Trump took up this new subject matter. Does President Trump appear poised to take Harvard to task for perpetuating the legacy admissions boost and the recruited athlete pipeline, aspects of the college admissions process that Ivy Coach has long called to be phased out? In short, no.

SCOTUS already curbed Harvard’s use of race-based Affirmative Action during its landmark decision in 2023, in which Harvard tried to defend its admissions process and lost. As a result of this ruling, all colleges (not just Harvard) were forced to stop collecting racial and ethnic demographic information during their admissions process. Such schools must collect this data once their admits arrive on campus in the fall. So imagine our surprise when we read that chief among the Trump administration’s demands is that Harvard must begin reporting the racial breakdown of incoming classes. According to the same federal government, doing so would be in direct violation of the law! It’s nonsensical!

Harvard Fights Back: Why Harvard is the Ideal Leader of the Trump Resistance

On April 14th, Harvard President Alan Garber responded to Trump’s demands with an unequivocal refusal to capitulate. Well done Harvard! Garber’s strong words against President Trump’s demands stipulate that maintaining the university’s academic freedom will not come at the expense of fighting antisemitism, which, as he puts it, will “not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate.”

But lying behind Harvard’s words isn’t just a bunch of empty posturing. Harvard has the largest endowment in all of higher education to support its resistance! True, much of this endowment (which most recently clocked in at $53.2 billion last year, making Harvard second only to the Vatican for the wealthiest non-governmental institution in the world) is earmarked by donors for specific purposes, and it can’t all automatically be liquidated in the face of adversity. But Harvard does have roughly $10 billion in no-strings-attached funds that it can and must dip into to lighten the blow in federal funding losses. These funds weren’t supposed to be for a rainy day but rather for retirement (i.e., institutional longevity). But alas, a torrential downpour is imminent, and Harvard has to keep itself dry.

This story is still unfolding, however. In retaliation to Harvard’s defiance, President Trump has asked the IRS to illegally revoke the nearly four-hundred-year-old school’s tax-exempt status. If this authoritarian move is allowed to go forward, Harvard will certainly mount a legal challenge.

What President Trump Got Right: The Ivy League Must Change

The Trump Administration’s reckless attacks on one of America’s most enduring educational, cultural, and innovative institutions are primarily the result of unchecked animus and irrationality. Particularly deplorable have been its attacks on the University of Pennsylvania’s funding due to the school’s supposed tolerance of transgender student-athletes. But a broken clock is right twice a day. If the Ivy League had actually reckoned with its troubling and much too cozy relationship with antisemitism (both past and present), perhaps these schools wouldn’t have drawn national scrutiny in the first place. 

Moreover, one of the Trump administration’s rallying calls — that academia does not value political diversity of viewpoints — is unequivocally true. Just take a look at this headline from The Crimson: “More than 80 Percent of Surveyed Harvard Faculty Identify as Liberal.” That’s not exactly ideological diversity, is it? Now, don’t get us wrong. Conservative students are not discriminated against in the college admissions process. In fact, the opposite is true: they can be at an advantage because they round out the ideological diversity of incoming classes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean these students walk onto campuses where faculty members share their viewpoints!

It’s a complicated situation, to be sure. The Ivy League must stand firm and united against illegal authoritarian crackdowns. But without acknowledging the very real skeletons these schools have in their closets, it is bound to stir up controversies and government interventions. Until places like Harvard and Columbia can acknowledge that yes, they have fomented antisemitism on their campuses, they should be able to sleep in the beds that their actions in recent years have made for them!

With that being said, under no circumstances do we at Ivy Coach support cuts to essential biomedical research, including cancer treatments. No one benefits from such self-destructive moves that stymie the forward march of human progress!

Dartmouth and Vanderbilt Have Set Examples that Harvard and Columbia Should Follow

Two elite universities, one of them an Ivy League school, have set the tone for their courageous responses to campus antisemitism: Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University. These two schools, under the remarkable leadership of President Sian Beilock and Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, also happen to have sidestepped President Trump’s attack on federal funding (as of the publication of this article!).

Dartmouth, unlike many of its peer institutions, took the road less traveled in the wake of October 7th by bringing students and Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies faculty together to teach and learn from one another about one of history’s most intractable conflicts. The dialogues were not only enlightening, but they reminded the Dartmouth community that we are all more alike than we are different

Vanderbilt has also done a superb job of reeling in the students who were turned off by the Ivy League’s mistakes. This past year, the private research university in Nashville, Tennessee reported a record-breaking admissions cycle with an all-time high number of applicants and the university’s lowest-ever acceptance rate. It just goes to show that in the game of elite college admissions, there will always be a school gunning for the top students in the world when places like Columbia, because of such significant missteps, begin to lose their appeal.