In the case of Columbia, the government cited, among other matters, “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” This referred to demonstrations against what student demonstrators describe as Israeli “genocide” of the Palestinian population in the Gaza strip. While the atmosphere created by the demonstrations is sure to have intimidated some Jewish students at Columbia, the Administration's purpose in this is far more to capture the U.S. Jewish vote away from its traditional choice, the Democrats, in future elections.
Among the changes the Administration requires are to '“complete disciplinary proceedings” for some student protesters, formalize a definition for antisemitism, reform its admissions process and place its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership”.'1 The definition of “antisemitism” will surely need to satisfy the Administration and demonstrating against Israeli actions or organizing boycotts, etc., will surely meet the definition. Columbia will be required to publicly sign onto the new definition as its own.
In the longer view, after this fashion Antisemitism steadily becomes more associated with Progressivism than its long-traditional, and richly deserved, association with Nationalism and other forms of Far-Right politics. Demanding an official redefinition of Antisemitism that suits the Far-Right locks in the effect. Marching with torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” are nowhere in the conversation much less the redefinition.
In the case of Harvard, the ploy to capture the Jewish vote away from the Democratic Party was repeated and much more. The initial financial attack was followed by a letter of April 11, 2025, demanding that the university replace all of its management practices with a regimen provided to it by the Administration. All racial and gender diversity programs were to be ended forthwith and to be replaced by “Viewpoint Diversity Programs”. The university was to “report to federal authorities, including the Department of Homeland Security and State Department” the details of its students' personal lives.
Viewpoint Diversity Programs would assuredly refer to Harvard firing progressive professors and staff and replacing them with others from the MAGA Far-Right until a “balance” was achieved. The personnel office would no longer be permitted expressly to encourage female applicants or applicants of color. Attempts to do so are already being reported to the government for severe “corrective action”.
The original Progressive Era began around 1890 with movements to organize labor into unions and overcome legislative roadblocks, constructed by the new and growing wealth elite, through ballot referenda. Some ten years later, socially conscious journalism — known as “Muckraking” — allowed citizens to look behind the curtain and see how market practices threatened their lives and livelihoods.
It is no coincidence that present-day MAGA Republican state legislatures have been attacking those same ballot referenda, attempting to establish prerequisites impossible to fulfill. Nor that Republicans have long opposed and legislated impediments to unionization of labor. Nor that the far-right has spent recent years building a national media network, dedicated to “alternative truth,” and the Trump Administration has used the executive branch powers to ferociously attack mainstream media.
The Progressive Era accomplished the initial legislation upon which the country has long depended for its health and welfare and largely came to an end around 1920 when highly conservative Republican presidents Warren Harding (1921-3), Calvin Coolidge (1923-9) and Herbert Hoover (1929-33), signaled a reaction to President Woodrow Wilson's vigorous (1913-21) Wilsonian Progressivism, and a hard right turn in the nation's politics. Contemporary Progressives have unwisely rejected Wilson — an absolutely fundamental building block of the movement — for not pushing racial equality issues as part of his program in the early 20th century. The Ultra-Wealthy have despised him during his presidency and since for his success in regulating business for the benefit of the common American citizen — in particular, his passage of the income tax to replace tariffs.
With the end of Wilson, business interests ruled the day once again. At Columbia and Harvard, there had not been a Progressive phase. Business ruled there all along via trusts and endowments.
It might be asked: “Why then is Trump intent to conquer those universities, in particular?” As always, the answers fall along two lines. Donald Trump is not an intellectual in the least. Not even a reader of books. He is a businessman made wealthy — made president — by realizing the importance of brand recognition and media coverage above business savvy. His reason for attacking Harvard and Columbia — his reason for doing anything — is to destroy any threat to his gaining wealth and power and to wreck revenge on those who have made him look bad, even criminal.
Donald Trump knows no more about Wilsonian Progressivism than he does about the pre-income-tax President William McKinley's (1897-1901) tariff policy, that he has taken to lauding, or its overall effects. That is the bailiwick of Stephen Miller, Russell Vought and the rest of the Heritage Foundation. Trump picks up whatever bits and pieces stick from his conversations with them. What sticks is what promises to enhance his wealth and power.
What drives Miller, Vought and company — which have spent decades now doing their homework and analysis — is the knowledge that for all the return of the rule of the Ultra-Wealthy and their Republican servants seemed to put an end to Progressivism it proved to be an illusion. When their greed managed to bring the country to the edge of ruin, beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, they discovered that not all of the Progressive activists that had supposedly been swept away had actually disappeared. A dedicated contingent had carved out niches as professors at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Before Franklin Roosevelt had even become president, their students were advising him as governor of New York. They made up most of Roosevelt's famous “Brain Trust”: the architects of the New Deal.
Felix Frankfurter, the most prominent professor, had already been a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (1920) and taught his Harvard students the lessons of the diaspora of the original Progressives following the Wilson Administration. His student Dean Acheson became a Under Secretary of the Treasury. Another of his students, James Landis, served on the Federal Trade Commission, created under Wilson, and participated in the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. His students Ben Cohen and Thomas Corcoran were the master draftsmen of legislation of the time such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, in 1938, and appeared together on the cover of Time magazine. The list goes to dozens of names — across multiple class-years of Harvard and Columbia graduates.
Miller, Vought and company are fully aware of how the Ultra-Wealthy seemed to have ended Progressivism and recaptured the levers of American power for all time — very much their own present plan — only to be thwarted by a few dozens of pinhead intellectuals from Harvard and Columbia Universities. They have no intention of making the same mistake twice. They are also aware that Trump lives to display unmatched power. They know that such a person is easily manipulated to execute their plans.
1“Columbia University signals it will comply with Trump administration's demands” NBC News, March 19, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/columbia-university-signals-will-comply-trump-administrations-demands-rcna197110
Also from the Virtual Vanaprastha:
- Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. February 17, 2025. "It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation..."
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
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