President Donald Trump seeks to remake both the American secondary education system and the global order, and his latest point of contention is how Harvard is sucking in American taxpayer dollars to enlighten and enrich the rest of the world that is not picking up any of that tab – unlike our taxpayers.
"Why isn't Harvard saying that almost 31% of their students are from foreign lands, and yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay nothing toward their student's education, nor do they ever intend to," Trump posted in a scathing early Sunday morning post on Truth Social. "Nobody told us that!
"We want to know who those foreign students are, a reasonable request since we give Harvard billions of dollars, but Harvard isn't exactly forthcoming. We want those names and countries.
"Harvard has $52,000,000, use it, and stop asking for the federal government to continue granting money to you!"
Trump's post is just the latest salvo in the ongoing battle of stripping Harvard of its grants while it charges students sky-high tuition only to reroute it to student loan debt that former President Joe Biden attempted to forgive.
"Billions of dollars has been paid to Harvard," Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. "How ridiculous is that? Billions. They have $52 billion as an endowment.
"This country is paying billions and billions of dollars and then gives student loans. Harvard's gonna have to change its ways."
Harvard Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, agreed Harvard has gotten away with its scheme for too long, particularly with regard to radical left ideology on antisemitism.
"Let's be frank here, there are too many foreign students in American universities; at Harvard 27.5% of the student body is foreign – when I started teaching there it was probably 5%, so every spot that is taken by a foreign student is denying an American student," Dershowitz said this week.
"President Trump is absolutely correct. If these were foreign students coming in from Nazi Germany in 1935 … liberals would have loved if the president had said, No, no, no, we don't want people coming in from Germany.
"Look, this goes too far. It also covers Israeli students and Canadian students and British students. So, what we need is much more focused and targeted sanctions, focused and targeted on which research projects.
"They shouldn't be cutting back on research projects involving Alzheimer's and cancer.
"But they should be cutting back on research that is propagandistic like at the Divinity School and the Public Health school. So, more targeting of which foreign students come in and which don't."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.