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Simon Schama: Trump’s war on knowledge

Attacks on Harvard and other universities are not just self-defeating — they are fundamentally un-American

So many enemies: spineless judges, moaners about due process; fake news merchants; the Fed; Canadians (nasty); Europeans, same (except for Italy and Hungary); environmental hoaxers; regulators of shower pressure; cancer-causing windmills; tariff-haters; Venezuelans; the Cheneys. But the worst of the lot? Not even close. Professors! Radical left lunatics, or those soft on them, which is the same thing. Let’s see how they like it when the money tap turns off.

The trigger-happy firing range that is the Trump administration has put America’s universities squarely in the crosshairs. The more liberal the faculty, the heavier the hit: billions in federal grants stripped from Harvard, hundreds of millions from other Ivy Leaguers.

The purported reason for going full Mr Potter on America’s great universities is antisemitism. Has the harassment and abuse of Jewish students been a serious problem, especially since October 7? Yes. Have anti-Zionist chants crossed a line into outright Jew-hatred? Absolutely. Are colleges doing something about it? Yes; grade of B+. But does kneecapping science departments by choking off their research funding persuade River-to-Sea chanters to pipe down? Hardly. Coming to the aid of campus Jews was always a pretext. Forgive us if we doubt that presenting the subjection of higher education’s independence to an ideological purge, labelled “defence of the Jews”, will work as an antidote to antisemitism. 

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