Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said Tuesday that President Donald Trump threatening Harvard University’s federal funding mirrors how Adolf Hitler and other autocrats have targeted universities.
Harvard sued the Trump administration Monday, accusing it of using the funding threat as “leverage to gain control over academic decision making.” When CNN’s “The Situation Room” host Wolf Blitzer asked Tribe — who is not partaking in the lawsuit — to explain Harvard’s “claim,” the professor compared the Trump administration’s actions to those of Hitler, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
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‘The basic claim is one that really connects what’s going on here to what’s gone on throughout history, when autocrats and tyrants and basically mafia-like leaders decide that they really don’t want universities to be independent,” Tribe said. “‘Nice little university you have there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
“That’s what Hitler basically said — although it sounds different in the original German — when he said it to the university at Frankfurt and then took them over,” he continued. “That’s what Orban has done in Hungary. That’s what Erdoğan has done in Turkey. It’s a standard technique.”
Trump’s Department of Education (ED) announced on March 31 that Harvard was at risk of losing its billions of dollars in federal funding and provided a list of demands for the university to retain its contracts and grants, including reforming and enforcing its disciplinary process for disruptive antisemitic protesters.
Harvard released a public letter defying the demands. The Trump administration then moved to freeze $2.2 billion to the university.
The Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism also stripped over $2 billion in grants to Harvard University on April 14 after the university rejected the administration’s demands to tackle antisemitism.
“And in this case, Harvard has filed a very detailed, and I think irrefutable complaint, making clear that all of the laws Congress has passed that impose conditions on universities as recipients of Congress’ money, all of those laws, rather than supporting the Trump administration, support Harvard,” Tribe said. “The laws establish that the university has to go through a number of procedural steps in order to meet the requirements of the federal government. But the federal government is not allowed to say, ‘We don’t agree with your way of thinking. We don’t agree with the kinds of ideas that your students have. We don’t think that you should allow that much peaceful protest.’”
“This complaint makes it clear that when the Trump administration confronted Harvard with a series of demands that amounted to a claim basically to take over the educational process, it had crossed the line, both in terms of the laws that Congress had passed, and in terms of basic precepts in the U.S. Constitution,” he continued. “And if we allow the government to take over private institutions that are centers of innovation, of medical advances, of advances in philosophy, of better understanding of history, we will play into the dictator’s handbook, because that is what dictators want. They want to shut down independent thought and centers of potential opposition.”
Former President Joe Biden reportedly directed his staff in 2021 to consult Tribe on whether it was legal for his administration to impose its eviction moratorium. Before reportedly consulting Tribe, Biden and other White House officials were adamant that they did not have the power to implement an eviction moratorium, but the former president ultimately decided to proceed with one that applied only to areas with “heightened” levels of COVID-19 transmission.
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
