In the widening conflict between President Donald Trump and Harvard University, the president has been crystal-clear while Harvard has made statements that are palpably false. When an institution like Harvard makes statements that are false on their face, it is a sign of deep trouble.
The root of Trump’s war against Harvard can be found in a little-known incident four years ago. In January 2021, the university removed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a distinguished Harvard alumna and a Trump ally, from an advisory committee at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School, explained the firing as follows:
“In my assessment, Elise has made public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect. Moreover, these assertions and statements do not reflect policy disagreements but bear on the foundations of the electoral process through which this country’s leaders are chosen.”
Elmendorf, it appears, then asked Stefanik to resign. Stefanik refused, rightly shifting the agency in this matter back to where it belonged. Via social media she answered the charges against her, stating that “the decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke Left will continue to erode diversity of thought.” Given Harvard’s brusque dismissal of Stefanik, it was an accurate and well-mannered response.
Very few people outside Harvard paid attention to this matter. In the crush of larger events—Trump kicked out of office, the furor over January 6—a Republican congressperson removed from a university advisory committee was not likely to draw attention. But I myself, as a Harvard alumnus, did take notice. And then, so did Forbes magazine. That influential medium seized the opportunity to pile onto the New York legislator, praising Harvard’s move as “an unambiguous leadership lesson” to be summed up in four words: “Don’t be a Stefanik.” That childish phrase became the title of the Forbes piece.
In journalism, you cannot do more in the direction of artless than saying “Don’t be” and adding a name. Among other things, it corrals the reader who becomes a party to the insult. Writers who play that kind of trick are not really journalists. For the sake of accuracy, we do better to call them “media workers.” And then we can say without personal abuse: Do not be like them.
What lay beneath this tabloid play? In a word, Harvard had violated Stefanik’s right to free speech. None of her statements had been salacious, threatening, or remotely subversive. The dean had accused her of saying things that were false. But again, it was not as if Stefanik had said that two plus two equals five. More to the point—even if Stefanik had committed an error of fact, free speech also protects the right to be inaccurate. After all the shouting, Stefanik had been punished purely and simply for saying what she thought.
In early 2021 the common wisdom at Harvard was that Donald Trump did not belong in the presidency. It remains the collective view at Harvard today. The practice of banning unpopular opinions by asserting that “everyone knows it is wrong” is the rule in today’s academy, which has become a slaughterhouse of political correctness. Every employee, right up to tenured staff, can lose everything for a single harmless statement, or even just a rumor, that questions a prevailing orthodoxy.
With freedom of expression gone from our universities and grade-schools, Americans are progressively losing their right to speak freely. But in many other American environments freedom of speech is still practiced—and it is practiced wherever the memory of freedom is alive and strong.
Throughout much of academia, free speech does not exist because most people know it is dangerous to say what they think. The consciousness of freedom has been surrendered to well-organized bullies who pretend they are more entitled to run things than the rest of us. But beyond the walls of ivy, or wherever people remember that America is supposed to be free, the feeling of freedom is still more important than whatever actual freedom is under attack.
It is always useful to remember what nearly all of America’s leaders have told us at times of grave danger. JFK, in his October 1962 speech at the height of the missile crisis, said it beautifully. The cost of freedom is always high—but Americans have always paid it.
This article is copyrighted. It first appeared on David Landau’s substack, and we have republished it with his permission.
