WELL, HE HOLDS ALL THE CARDS, AND THE MONEY: Trump Is Likely to Win His Fight with Universities. “Critics of higher education over recent decades will not have much sympathy for Harvard and similarly situated universities in this contest. Beginning in the 1970s, liberal activists discovered that they could use the threat of withdrawn federal funds to induce colleges to reform their faculties by hiring feminists, blacks, environmental activists, and others associated with progressive causes—all for the purpose of promoting “diversity” on campus. Trump has now turned the tables by using these same tactics against them in a campaign to reform the universities from a different direction. As to Trump’s wish to lift Harvard’s tax exemption, he is merely citing a Supreme Court precedent (Bob Jones University v. United States, 1983) created by civil rights activists when they sought to withdraw that school’s tax status because of its racially discriminatory policies. Large research universities are vulnerable to these threats because they are highly dependent on federal funding to sustain their complex scientific and medical establishments. All told, the federal government sent more than $60 billion to colleges and universities in 2023 for research and development alone, most of it in grants and contracts from the National Institutes for Health, the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”