Harrop: Trump’s war against elite universities is a smokescreen

By Froma Harrop / Creators.com

Let’s cut to the chase. Most of Donald Trump’s threats against Ivy League colleges are an attempt to divert attention away from an economy heading into crisis.

The trade war is producing economic and foreign policy nightmares. Despite the DOGE show, budget deficits are projected to rise further under Republican rule. The stock market is traumatized. Investors are starting to bail out of U.S. Treasury debt. Recession and possibly stagflation are both forecast.

Even Trump’s beloved oil drillers are suffering. The stock of the fracking company once run by Energy Secretary Chris Wright has fallen 43% this year. The U.S. already had “energy dominance” under Joe Biden. Now it faces oversupply.

And so Trump has chosen a target associated with the elitism that his MAGA base has come to resent. Better that MAGA fume over those Ivy leftists than plans to cut the Medicaid that so many of the base rely on.

Trump is also helped by the cowardice some of the fancy schools have shown against outrageous student behavior. Letting protesters hide behind masks as they take over public spaces was pathetic. And some charges that elite universities were tolerating abuse of Jewish students were justified. But weakness more than antisemitism probably explains the administrations’ fear of calling police or even expelling students who erected tents on the quads against school rules and then refused to leave without concessions.

Harvard University did America a great service by rejecting Trump’s latest efforts at extortion; his threats to cut over $2 billion in federal money and withdraw the school’s tax-exempt status. The Ivies and the elite non-Ivies (Stanford University, MIT, University of Chicago) are private institutions. The government has no right to take over the hiring of staff or assign auditors to examine what is taught.

These institutions can take credit for much of this country’s economic and political might. Foreigners fight to get into them. And so do the parents of right-wingers currently pulling the strings in Washington. They want the prestige and the opportunity to pair their children with children of the rich.

Three of Trump’s kids attended one of the Ivies, the University of Pennsylvania, as did Trump. The president has frequently boasted of his attendance at UPenn’s Wharton School of Finance, referring to his education there as “super genius stuff.”

Elon Musk has tweeted that the level of propaganda at elite universities “would make North Korea jealous.” He hasn’t disclosed the schools his college-age children have attended, but at least one of them currently goes to Brown University, famed as perhaps the most fashionably left of the bunch.

Then there are the wildly expensive and hard-to-get-into private high schools prized for their reputations as feeders for the Ivies. The politically connected and extremely rich fight to get their kids into these launching pads for the ruling class.

Regardless of the political bent of the teachers at the “top” universities, what the best of them offer is critical thinking, and critical thinking often goes in conservative directions. Conservative Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all attended Yale Law School. John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch went to Harvard Law. Four of the conservatives went to Ivy schools as undergraduates.

As noted at the open, this drama about Harvard attempting “to cross” the great and powerful Donald Trump is a sideshow. It’s a colorful, easy-to-sell controversy for media of all political persuasions.

Nonetheless, the monumentally big story is what’s happening in the financial markets; to inflation, to the dollar and to America’s reputation as a stable place in which to invest. The war against the Ivies is nearly all smokescreen.