Another Ivy Capitulates To Trump?

 

As our learned institutions of higher edumacation clearly grasp, extortionists will always go away after the extortion is paid:

Harvard University is open to paying up to half a billion dollars to end its feud with the Trump administration, The New York Times reported Monday.

Citing four anonymous sources, the Times said Harvard was considering acquiescing to the president’s demands and paying as much as $500 million—though university leaders expressed reservations about paying the government directly. The exact terms of the settlement are still being hammered out, the sources said.

The news comes less than a week after Columbia University agreed to pay the Trump administration more than $200 million to get $400 million of grant funding restored.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the Columbia deal “a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit and civil debate.” And Trump said he wanted to make sure that Harvard paid more than Columbia, the Crimson reported.

Harvard has been embroiled in a legal battle with the White House since April, when Trump officials demanded the university submit to a long list of elaborate demands in order to maintain federal funding. President Alan Garber refused, winning plaudits for standing up to the president’s bullying.

But even as Harvard fought back with a series of lawsuits, university leaders have been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration, eager to see more than $2 billion in federal funding restored and Harvard’s ability to enroll international students preserved...

They fought back ... until they didn't.  The rank cowardice and short-sightedness of some of our elite institutions (at least the administrators thereof) is all the more shocking because of the lip service these collaborators have historically paid to standing up for "academic freedom" and the First Amendment.  But, as Masha Gessen famously noted, our institutions won't save us from tyranny (because they can't seem to be able to save themselves).

As LGM's Scott Lemieux puts it:

To make a point that should be obvious to people to whom it apparently isn’t, once you’ve accepted the principle that the government can make you pay half a billion dollars in exchange for charges that have virtually no chance of standing up in court so you can stop them from pulling funding, whether the government has a formal monitoring role is beside the point — they can always take funding away again and/or come back and demand more money. How any halfway intelligent person could believe that agreeing to a shakedown will help “avoid more troubles” is beyond me. 

It's beyond us too.  But then, we didn't get a Harvard edumacation.

So, to reiterate Lemieux's point, Harvard isn't avoiding future troubles with the Malignant Fascist's regime.   It's signalling it's a mark for more extortion. And that's the veritas.