Trump Administration’s Harvard Funding Cuts Reversed 

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When I heard about the Trump Administration trying to eliminate billions in funding to Harvard University, it seemed the attempt wasn’t what it appeared to be about on the surface.  There was some kind of online information floating around  that it was apparently about antisemitism, though this rationale made little sense.

First Amendment Watch posted an AP article on its website recently about the September reversal of the Trump Administration’s Harvard University funding cuts. In it, US District Court Allison Burroughs is referenced, “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that (the government) used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote.

Cutting well over $2 billion dollars in research funding for antisemitism seems misaligned. Instead, the ‘smokescreen’ as the judge noted, might be a way to get rid of funding for important scientific research. “Proportionally, the climate cuts may reach deeper: For example, most graduate students and postdocs in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, which organized the April 30 panel, are supported by federal grants. And whereas private industry supports some biomedical research, the funding cuts and sacking of government scientists are systematically eliminating the infrastructure of climate research in the U.S., destroying systems built over generations — systems that private foundations are in no position to replace.”

Initially, what got my attention was potential cuts to tuberculosis research at Harvard, because tuberculosis obviously is not related to the alleged antisemitism: “Sarah Fortune’s groundbreaking tuberculosis (TB) research program, based at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is among a number of research enterprises under threat of losing federal funding as the Trump administration reviews $9 billion in federal funding to the University and affiliated hospitals.”

Tuberculosis kills over one million people per year, according to the World Health Organization. How would cutting funding to tuberculosis research help stop alleged discrimination?

Could it be more about the fact Harvard is a leading climate change research organization? “Harvard has a distinguished history of research in climate and climate-related fields. Harvard faculty helped to develop a fundamental understanding of the chemistry, physics, and biology of our planet’s climate system. Their work has changed the way we think about interactions among the atmosphere, the land, and the ocean, and how these shape Earth’s climate. That work continues, with ongoing discoveries in wide-ranging areas, such as atmospheric chemistry climate dynamics, geophysics, solar geoengineering, and climate-related data science.”

Remember Al Gore and the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth? Well, where do you think he first learned about climate change? Yep, it was at Harvard. “As told in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s interest in climate change was first sparked at Harvard University, where Gore took a population studies class taught by the Roger Revelle, a climate scientist who had played a pivotal role in setting up experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was the 1960s, a decade in which the American public first started learning about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. Gore was stunned by the evidence Revelle presented, but “never imagined for a second that it would take over my life.”

Harvard also has a plan to be fossil-fuel free by 2050.

The judge’s September funding cuts reversal may be appealed, and if Mr. Hanley is correct, as he wrote about various court issues much more in depth than I could, the appeal may win. Hopefully, it will not.

A reasonable person might think claiming antisemitism would be done from the perspective of someone or an administration that has no connection to allegedly perpetrating or spreading it. Apparently, the situation is just the opposite.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America recently wrote on its website, 

The Trump administration has cut vital funding for combating antisemitism, including:

– Freezing the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps keep synagogues, day schools, Jewish community centers, and other places of worship safe from attacks.

– Canceling funding for efforts to avert hate crimes against Jewish Americans.

– Cutting funding to agencies that work to prevent antisemitism, including on college campuses.

– Planning to eliminate the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, the most senior administration official focused on the threat of antisemitism.

– Ending DHS programs designed to thwart lone-wolf terrorist attacks like those carried out at the Capitol Jewish Museum and in Boulder, Colorado.

There are also enough documented alleged antisemitic comments and conduct from Trump that it has been written about on Wikipedia.

So far, it has been reported the funds have not yet been returned to the university.