Victor Davis Hanson

Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on antisemitism.

The task force wants to persuade Harvard to ensure Jewish students on its campus are no longer harassed, or else lose its federal funding. Harvard retorts that it won’t be bullied by Washington.

Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring, and promotion, contrary to law.

And it also directed the campus to ban the use of masks that, in the post-COVID era of protests, have emboldened violent demonstrators with anonymity.

The administration’s order to stop race-based bias was in accordance with civil rights statutes, and a recent Supreme Court decision specifically banning affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.

No matter. Harvard claimed that the Trump administration infringed upon its First Amendment rights.

So, it has temporarily rejected the administration’s orders. At least for now, Harvard has lost its annual $2.2 billion grant of federal funds.

(Note, Harvard announced Monday that it has filed suit to halt a federal freeze on the grants after the institution said it would defy the Trump administration’s demands to limit activism on campus.)

Former President Barack Obama, among others, lauded Harvard’s rejection of the demands of the administration’s antisemitism task force. He claimed the Trump administration’s efforts were ham-handed.

But what academic freedom are Harvard and Obama talking about? The freedom to discriminate and segregate by race in hiring, admissions, dorms, and graduations?

The freedom of 500 Harvard students to crash the classes of others, shut down traffic, and harass students on the basis of their religion or views on Israel?

Despite all of Harvard’s platitudes, its classrooms are still being disrupted. Jewish students remain fearful.

And what would Obama say if, for example, African-American students at Harvard were harassed on campus by masked disrupters?

Or Black studies classes were crashed by students wearing scarves over their faces as they vented their hatred? Would he press the Trump administration to force Harvard to honor federal civil rights protections?

Remember, Harvard is a private university with a largely untaxed endowment of over $50.2 billion. Yet again, it still receives some $2.2 billion — now suspended– in federal funds.

The administration task force is not forcing Harvard to run its university according to its version of federal dictates.

Instead, the Trump commission is simply warning Harvard that if, in addition to its huge sources of private funding, it still wishes continuance of some $2.2 billion in public money from the federal government, then it must comply with existing laws and executive orders.

Does Harvard remember the embarrassing testimony of its former president, Claudine Gay?

She failed to assure a congressional committee that Harvard had taken action against openly hostile antisemitic student protestors during its growing protest movements.

Does Harvard understand why the Supreme Court ruled it had violated the “Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment and was culpable of prejudice against Asian-Americans?

Does Harvard have any clue why it has lost some $150 million per annum of donor giving?

Does Harvard realize that no one believes its pretenses anymore that it “cannot and will not tolerate disruption” of classes — given that it still happens all the time at its various professional schools and undergraduate courses?

Perhaps Harvard should follow the strategy of independent Hillsdale College, which long ago wished to be free of federal dictates.

So, unlike Harvard, the college put its proverbial money where its mouth was and agreed unilaterally to give up all federal funding to be free of Washington’s octopus tentacles.

Yet, there is one critical distinction between Hillsdale and Harvard.

Hillsdale does not take federal money, period — whether doled out by either a Democratic or Republican administration.

It sincerely believes that too often the federal government itself does not follow the Constitution, impinges on freedom, and forces colleges to violate equality under the law when discriminating by race and gender.

Harvard has no such principles.

Its beef is not with the notion of an overweening federal government, eager to coerce private colleges to follow particular protocols.

Instead, it is at war only with the Trump commission or, in theory, any other similar conservative administration that might wish it to adhere to the law as a condition of being federally funded.

Otherwise, Harvard has no problem with an activist federal government, as long as it is a liberal one forcing all sorts of Title IX or DEI initiatives on private and Christian colleges that apparently lost their autonomy by accepting federal money. It has said nothing when state and federal governments in the past gratuitously hounded Hillsdale.

So, Harvard loudly can set itself free by permanently pursuing its agenda on its own $50 billion, in the same manner Hillsdale does quietly with its $1 billion — without the taxpayer’s dime, whether Democratic or Republican.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

Sherry Robinson

Few subjects inspire as much fuzzy math and fuzzier thinking as taxes. It was just one reason New Mexico’s governor not only vetoed House Bill 14 but stomped all over it and lambasted

Democrats in a smoking veto message:

“In a session where the Legislature found time to pass three separate license plate bills and designate an official state bread, it is deeply disappointing that they waited until the final days — indeed, the final hours — of the 2025 legislative session to take up a tax package. Even more troubling is the fact that what ultimately emerged lacked both strategic coherence and fiscal credibility. There was no plan and no preparation for how to pay for the tax relief in this bill. As a result, the Legislature had to delay any meaningful tax relief for working families until Fiscal Year 2027, despite the state sitting on more than $3 billion in one-time revenues and over 30% in reserves. That is not prudence — it is paralysis.”

HB 14 was actually 16 previously tabled bills that Dems stitched together into a crazy quilt. Its sponsors were House Speaker Javier Martinez and Taxation and Revenue Committee Chairman Derrick Lente. It had something for everyone, but the major component was a tax credit that would have effectively eliminated income taxes for some working families.

The challenge, as usual, was how to pay for it. They seized on a new 0.28% oil surtax.

That idea met strenuous objections from the industry and the business community. As Dems would learn, the president’s trade war has injured the state’s golden goose by driving down oil prices and driving up the cost of equipment and supplies. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil was $71 a barrel when the bill was introduced, $67 when it passed the House and $61 when the bill was vetoed.

That wasn’t the only hurdle. The oil tax would have raised $130 million. House Dems needed $72 million for their income tax proposal. The Senate’s tax committee added $70 million of its own tax breaks. You can see this doesn’t add up. And the Senate stripped out the oil tax.

House and Senate were at loggerheads until the day before adjournment. During last minute meetings, the Senate refused to budge on the oil tax. The final compromise involved paring down tax breaks and pushing them into fiscal 2027, so lawmakers next year would have to figure out how to pay for them. It’s no way to run a railroad, although Dems said they could use the bill as a template for action next year.

Fuzzy thinking also afflicted Republicans, who introduced HB 275 to do away entirely with personal income taxes. This would have cost $1.8 billion in fiscal 2026, according to legislative analysis. Their reasoning, backed by no studies whatsoever, seemed to be that with this big budget surplus, surely we can get rid of income taxes. Trouble is, the surplus is one-time money, not recurring money. The bill was never heard in committee.

The governor accused HB 14 sponsors of “decision-making driven more by political self- interest than public good.” Seeing machinations in Congress to justify tax breaks for the rich, Martinez and Lente referred to their legislation as “the tax fairness bill,” one of many on a list of Democratic bills to help low-income and middle class people.

“Fundamentally, this tax package is about fairness and putting our values into action,” said Lente in a news release. “We are cutting or fully eliminating income taxes for 300,000 hardworking New Mexicans who power our economy, while also making sure that the prosperous multi-billion-dollar industry that profits from the extraction of our natural resources pays its fair share.”

Its “fair share” is a third of the state budget.

Lente insisted the tax would fall on Big Oil despite Republican arguments that it would also hit Small Oil. Not everybody here is Exxon. When the Rs argued that the tax would hurt the oil industry, Dems countered that the president’s tariffs, layoffs and mass deportations were hurting everybody. That’s all true, but it’s not the basis of tax policy.

If either party was serious about meaningful tax change, they would have started long before the session in the interim tax committee. Then they could think and deliberate. They could make a plan, hear testimony and draft bills. Instead, HB 14 seemed to come out of nowhere and spring to life, like an accidental collision of cells in a petri dish.

Sherry Robinson is a long-time New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.