The Trump vs. Harvard Brawl is a Necessary Battle for the Salvation of Both Harvard’s and America’s Soul
by Barry Scott Zellen, PhD
On July 9, 2025, the up-and-down settlement talks between the transformative, red-blooded presidential administration of Donald J. Trump and the blue-blooded, atavistic and ossified center of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias (as perceived by the Trump administration), Harvard University, hit a setback, as reported by Harvard Magazine, with the White House once again declaring the Big H unfit for accreditation, warning it would soon subpoena records of its high tuition-paying but dubiously vetted foreign students who now comprise over 27% of this tarnished Ivy League institution’s student body, and threatening to axe all federal funding. Back in May, after the White House sought to block foreign students from attending Harvard, its president, Alan M. Garber, “wrote to members of the Harvard community this morning to ‘condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action…[that] imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams,” as Harvard Magazine reported. But left unmentioned by Garber were all those American futures, 6,793 of them, denied the opportunity to share in this dream so that the chameleon-like Harvard could continue to diversify the complexion of its student body, while pocketing huge tuitions from elite foreign families along the way, who gladly foot the exorbitant bill out-of-pocket, living a dream few others can afford and that their home countries simply cannot offer.
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Barry Scott Zellen, PhD, is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North (IoN). He is the author, most recently, of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (2024). Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 