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Dartmouth is a smaller target without the name recognition of Harvard, and MIT has stronger ties to the MIC without the strong public image of a liberal institution. Harvard is a test case (what can this admin do) and a symbol almost in its own category for Trump's followers.

Harvard (the University, not it's alums) has had a near nil presence on K-Street for a looooong time - and their primary lobbyist with the GOP has been on Trump's bad side for sometime after he pissed off David Sacks.

I'm also an (severely disillusioned) alumni of some of the student orgs that are mutually using Harvard the institution as a punching bag to fight their culture wars.

A lot of this is honestly very childish BS done by some petulant alums who were already dicks on campus.

There is very little campus loyalty at Harvard which makes it easier to use it as a punching bag for your culture war (whichever way you lean).

Sorry to ask, who is "their primary lobbyist with the GOP"?

https://ballardpartners.com/team-member/brian-d-ballard/

To talk with this admin, you need a person who's part of the Florida GOP milleu in the 90s. Susie Wiles is the one who's managing/operating the show. Almost everyone who matters in Florida republican politics since the 90s owes favors to her.

Similar to how if you had an in into Chicago or IL Dem politics in the 90s or 2000s, you had an in with the Obama admin becuase of Axelrod, Rahm, and Jack Daley.

That is just shockingly cynical. We're facing a situation where a sitting government feels empowered to go to war against an elite university solely over the speech it doesn't like to hear on its campus.

And your response is to dismiss it all as a kerfuffle over "bad lobbying" and "inter-elite fratricide"? Really?

Surely there are existing institutions of some form or another you'd like to see not made enemies of the state. You don't maybe see a principle at work here beyond your personal dislike of academia?

I'm a severely disillusioned alum of a couple of the campus orgs really driving some of this.

> Surely there are existing institutions of some form or another you'd like to see not made enemies of the state. You don't maybe see a principle at work here beyond your personal dislike of academia

Hold up - I'm massively pro-academic freedom and autonomy. I'm just pointing out that there's a fight happening behind this fight that has been going on in a subset of the Harvard alum community that has snowballed into this fiasco.

> That is just shockingly cynical

You don't understand unless you actually attended Harvard. It's a very isolating and cliquish experience which incentivizes you to exist within your echo chamber.

Even joining god damn clubs on campus required "Comping" (basically the same as rushing in frats)

Major reason I spent most of my time at MIT and BU or the grad schools like HKS and HBS instead - middle class schools tend to have less of a stick up their butt.

Edit: can't reply to you below, but tl;dr I agree with your callout. I edited my initial comment because as you pointed out it did come off as if I had schachenfreude.

> I can say with 100% sincerity that'd I'd feel the same horror if a White House was similarly going after TCU, or Liberty University, or even Yale

I agree. I'm just exasperated by this whole fiasco and that's why my post is so angry in tone

> Hold up - I'm massively pro-academic freedom and autonomy.

Then maybe you'd like to rephrase your upthread comment which seems very comfortable with a clear and obvious attack on academic freedom and autonomy?

> You don't understand unless you actually attended Harvard.

Class of '96. But really I don't see how that's relevant in the face of the current crisis. I can say with 100% sincerity that'd I'd feel the same horror if a White House was similarly going after TCU, or Liberty University, or even Yale.

It's. Awful. And it's not made less so because some of the students are Zionists, or Palestinian Sympathizers, or Vegan, or whatever it is you're upset about.

> Then maybe you'd like to rephrase your upthread comment which seems very comfortable with a clear and obvious attack on academic freedom and autonomy?

On it! I agree with you 100% - it's horrid.

> But really I don't see how that's relevant in the face of the current crisis

There are some interpersonal relations and egos that got mixed into this, along with a very cynical anti-establishment play. It takes a couple bad apples to spoil the batch, and that's what it feels like has happened. I was a Gov secondary during the Obama years so I bumped into a lot of the people who ended up on either side of the political and cultural divide. I feel digging into that helps explain how this has really snowballed. It's been a rolling crisis for a couple years now.

> It's. Awful. And it's not made less so because some of the students are Zionists, or Palestinian Sympathizers, or Vegan, or whatever it is you're upset about

I agree, but ignoring some of the ego and personal clashes that has caused this crisis means you lose the bigger picture.

Fighting antisemitism is clearly not the true motive behind this ideological "war", just as denazification was clearly not the motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; it's just a convenient excuse to target institutions such as Harvard that are unwilling to distance themselves from the progressive left.

Exactly this. It's nothing but an attempt to punish them for not kissing the ring. If only we had another arm of government able to hold this clearly corrupt behavior to account....

There would have been a stronger one if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired at a time that supported a 5/4 ideological balance on the Supreme Court.

Instead of the hubris to hold onto the job until death and thereby subsequently undo many of the things she spent her life fighting for.

Finding a successor and handing over your power is one of the most important responsibilities of the powerful, when they have a say.

Yeah, that was a pretty bad decision, but the bigger issue is still a population that votes based on misinformation and 'alternative facts'. Until that is resolved, if it even can be at this point, then this tribal and sometimes cultish behavior is only going to become more prevalent, in turn doing more damage to the country.

Personally, I think we've started on a path to self-destruction that can't be reversed.

> Personally, I think we've started on a path to self-destruction that can't be reversed.

Do you mean, 'we' as in the US, or 'we,' as in humanity?

[either way, I'm not saying you're wrong :( ]

Oh, I mean the US specifically. I'm optimistic the other western powers won't go down the same self-destructive path the US has chosen, largely because they have much better public education pre-college, and much more accessible higher education.

I expect even China and India to start improving drastically in all the ways that matter as the US continues to downlside.

Pretty bold to blame RBG without spending a breath on Mitch McConnell, who stole an appointment from Obama because he said it was too close to the election to fill the seat; and then rushed to fill the seat vacated by RBG even though it was so close to the election. Treating the court with that kind of partisan contempt is the reason why the court is as partisan as it is.

Yeah, McConnell really acted like scum by doing that. But it's fair to say RBG didn't help things.

There is different blame.

I expect McConnell to be an advocate for harm. But RBG could have made a decision that made it impossible for the GOP to flip her seat in the way that she did. I expect people that are ostensibly fighting for the same things as me to act in ways that help achieve that.

Indeed. It's pretty stupid in game theory to make a move that's beneficial only if your opponent also then makes a choice against their self interest.

Instead of the hubris to hold onto the job until death and thereby subsequently undo many of the things she spent her life fighting for.

A bit off-topic, but this seems to be an ongoing problem for the Democratic party. They just lost an important vote on a budget bill in the House by a single vote, because Gerry Connolly wasn't willing to give up his House seat and instead clung on until he (very predictably) died of cancer a few days ago.

This is drama, a republican congressperson was asleep for the bill. This is producing storylines to sell during the mid terms.

Dont believe it for a second. The Republican Party moves in lockstep.

But if the Democratic guy had stepped down and they had a non sick person then the story would have been much better: Republican bill fails because one of their members was asleep and missed the vote.

He would be awake for the vote.

They would go to his location and shake him awake if they had to.

>Harvard and Yale didn't hire the right lobbyists.

I don't think it's as simple as this. To my knowledge, Dr. Sian Leah Beilock handled the protests of the past 2 years much better than their counterparts.

Oh easily! But the issue is Brian Ballard (their GOP lobbyist) stepped on a lot of feet and pissed people (primarily David Sacks) off, leading him to get metaphorically slapped by the Trump admin.

So they're frozen out from K-Street in the medium term.

On top of that, a couple extremely active and very wealthy alumni have continued to maintain a grudge and have an ear in the admin

And finally, it's an easy anti-establishment win.

Finally, this is specifically a Harvard College thing - the alumni of other schools at Harvard are much less... let's say idealistic.

>And because Harvard has a lot of HNW alumni, they always try to meddle in some shape or form - Wen Jiabao's best friend funds the Fairbank Center, Kraft funds and hosts events at Chabad, some al Saud branches fund a couple Islamic clubs, a bunch of alt-right leaning Catholic traditionalists fund the Abigail Adams Institute, etc. It's just inter-elite fratricide at this point because no one truly gives a poo about Harvard.

When you put it like that... should I make some popcorn?

When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled.

Harvard plays a significant role multiple fields of study (from social science to humanities to hard sciences), and a significant portion of their grad students are affected by the SEVP revocation.

Furthermore, a number of fields just don't have that many domestic graduate students because the domestic pipeline for a number of fields such as Distributed Systems is almost non-existent, and students often get poached with just a bachelors for industry. Not bad for students, but applied research or part-time industrial PhDs don't exist in the US.