Transcript - America This Week, Apr 18, 2025: "Harvard vs. The Trump-Monster"
No story is happier than the breakup of a couple that never should have been married in the first place. Also, "Concerning the Bodyguard," by Donald Barthelme
Matt Taibbi: Okay, welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: First of all, apologies to everybody for Monday. I had an ordeal that lasted about five days that was funny, and someday I’ll tell the story, but it ended on Monday afternoon with my head pounding so severely that I don’t think, doing the show would’ve been a comic exercise. It probably would’ve gone viral for the wrong reasons.
Walter Kirn: Matt, I don’t think it’s fair to give such an abrupt and partial introduction. I mean, we’ve said before that we were going to explain something later and never have.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: I remember a couple of weeks ago we both had some difficulties in our lives and …
Matt Taibbi: We never came back to it.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, we never came back to it. And these aren’t marital difficulties. They aren’t drug problems. They aren’t problems with the law. Well, those were actually kind of in a weird way, but this was dental, and everybody can relate to dental problems, so why not just come out with it, dude?
Matt Taibbi: Okay, so just briefly I’ve got a lot of missing teeth. And at the bottom of my mouth, I’ve got a whole bunch of implants that were put in there over the years. They’re mostly connected. I had to have some surgery done on the underlying teeth in order to keep them in place. But in order to do that, the surgeon had to remove the first set of teeth. That was last week, and they didn’t go quietly, so he had to use a hammer. And as a result when they snap back on, they were a little bit cracked and some fell out in the interim so I had to get another implant quickly put together and snapped into place.
And I thought I was going to be fine on Monday, but when they put that second one into place, and I’m so grateful to the dentist who did this for me, but it was maybe just a little tight at the time so something happened. My entire head felt like there was too much bone and not enough space, and it was like I was receiving pain signals from the universe for about 15 hours there, but it went away so we’re all good.
Walter Kirn: That sounds like a perfect metaphor for DOGE, the attempt to remove waste and adjust the behavior of the federal government. I think it’s a prophetic set of difficulties you’ve had that we’ll experience nationally in the next year or two. So I’m really glad you were that specific.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, just knock them all out I think is probably what they’re going to do the next time, just not even bother trying to put them back in.
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: But yeah, that happened, but it’s over, and I’m happily back talking to you, Walter. And it’s been a fascinating week. Slightly comic, I would say. The big ordeal this week is between Harvard and the Trump administration. And I think for people who have not followed this whole story, which is involved and involves two of the most interesting and intractable-
Walter Kirn: The biggest egos in the history of mankind.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly. It pits Donald Trump, in an article I haven’t published yet, I described it as a Japanese monster movie, right? It’s like Harvard versus the Trump monster, and you couldn’t think of two more galactic opposites than these two. And the confrontation was hilarious, non-existent communication. I think it was Nabokov who once described comedy as a vortex of misunderstandings, and that’s what this is, and boy is it funny to go through. So we’re going to go through that and also get through some of the larger issues about whether this is legal, who’s in the right, who’s in wrong. Is it neither, both, all that kind of stuff. We can try to get into all that.
But first, let’s back up for a second and go back to three weeks ago when it was announced that Columbia had essentially caved to, Columbia University had acceded to demands from the Trump administration to make a series of changes, and we can just watch the beginning of the MSNBC segment about that.
Speaker 1: We have some breaking news coming in right now. Just in the last few minutes we are learning that Columbia University will give into demands from the Trump administration in order to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. It appears that in some way, shape or form Columbia has agreed to pretty much all of the President’s demands, including banning mask wearing, a new definition of anti-Semitism, and reforms to the admissions process, and as well putting the Middle Eastern studies department under so-called academic receivership. It is all in response to last year’s widespread protests at Columbia, massive encampments and demonstrators temporarily seizing a campus building. Those protests sparked complaints from some Jewish students that the school was not protecting them. Tensions have ratcheted back up in recent weeks as the Trump administration...
Matt Taibbi: Columbia caved somewhat surprisingly because it wasn’t a crippling amount of money. Right, Walter?
Walter Kirn: Well, should we call it caved? Because caved implies that they are brutal and unfair demands rather than agreed.
Matt Taibbi: Right. I mean, I was about to say there were many in the faculty, from what I understand, who were sympathetic to the idea of we can probably go without having masked protesters on campus. And then we’ll get into later the fact that there were legitimate Title VI considerations, like lots of them in play at these universities and that the Trump administration’s demands were more about compliance in a lot of cases than they were about stopping-
Walter Kirn: Principles.
Matt Taibbi: Yes, stopping certain kinds of teaching or messaging, which is how it’s been promoted.
Now, I’m not so sure about the academic receivership of African studies and stuff like that, but certainly in some of the other things, including the guarantees about no more occupations, things that are against the First Amendment, we’ll get into some examples from other schools too as well. But Columbia acceded basically to this confrontation between Trump administration and Columbia University.
So fast-forward a few weeks and the administration in its inimitable way has now laid down the law with Harvard. Now it begins by sending a two-page letter to Harvard, and this one is firm but not extensive. This is on April 3rd, so this is almost exactly two weeks ago. And I think it’s from the general counsel of the Department of Education. You have to go down I think first. It’s Thomas Wheeler, the acting general counsel of the Department of Education. Then there’s Sean Keveney, who is also the general counsel from HHS, and then the commissioner from the General Services Administration.
And if you scroll back up, it’s polite. “Please consider this a formal communication with respect to the current situation. Harvard University has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from anti-Semitic violence and harassment. In addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, this letter outlines immediate next steps that we regard as necessary for Harvard’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” And it lists them, “Oversight for an accountability for biased programs that fuel anti-Semitism.” That’s a little vague, “Disciplinary reform, consistent accountability, student group accountability,” so groups that have violated school rules have to be held accountable. “Merit-based admissions reform, merit-based hiring reform.”
And here’s one of the big ones, “Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, all efforts should be made to shutter such programs,” and the university is very specific about why. It says, “DEI programs teach students, faculty, staff, and leadership to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes, which fuels the vision “
So it’s a bunch of things, but the big ones are merit-based hiring, merit-based admissions, and ending DEI, right? And essentially the same formula that gets sent to Columbia.
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