The Trump Way

Bull In a China Shop

Had dinner with a new friend last night. He has run a business in China for many, many years and exports a lot of stuff. He is a US Citizen, but has been there for a long time. When I mentioned Trump’s tariffs, he just put his head in his hands.

This guy said that if they switched countries, they’d lose lots of production from learning curve effects. They aren’t going to be able to move employees. We didn’t chat long about it, but one point he made was that China does want to buy stuff from the US. But the US doesn’t want to sell it to China for national security reasons.

There is a rub there, so don’t look for China to open its doors to American products anytime soon, with or without tariffs. Trump shouldn’t have been a bull in a China shop regarding tariffs. What he needed to do was begin to negotiate, then become the bull if they didn’t take him seriously. Additionally, he needs to deregulate the US at the same time. By deregulating, other countries will know he is serious. His way makes the stock market and debt markets too bumpy.

Trump is attacking education. This is where the bull in the China shop attitude works very very well. There is no alternative. Why?

Because the people in the power positions inside higher education want to practice discrimination based on race, sex, creed, religion, and all the rest. It’s not as if Harvard never discriminated against Jews before. Ask someone who tried to get in prior to 1970. Harvard has kept the radical Claudine Gay employed after her terrible testimony in front of Congress. They fire professors who have a more traditional conservative approach.

Professors sit in ivory towers. They project opinion and get paid to do research. Sometimes the research is beneficial, and a lot of the time it is not. Professors are basically untouchable people.

But, truth be told, maybe it is high time to take research dollars away from universities and have them compete in the open market for them. Maybe better research will be done by for-profit companies.

My friend Jeff has a nice summation of Trump versus Harvard, which actually translates into Trump versus higher education in America. To be clear, Trump is on very solid ground in the way he is using his power to effect change at Harvard and higher education. My acquaintance Prof John McGinnis wrote a great piece at Law and Liberty which will show you why Trump is on firm ground.

I have had experiences with fringes of higher education, and of course, have read about things over the past years. It doesn’t surprise me that there is discrimination. I have seen professors advocate for discrimination, but in the name of serving a protected class. They project the feeling that you will be “guilty” of discrimination if you buck their system.

Here is the germane part of the article.

Modern universities receive substantial federal funds. Virtually every university relies significantly on federal student aid. Research universities like my own receive substantial additional federal funding, particularly in biomedical research and in defense contracting.

And Democratic administrations made aggressive use of this leverage to change practices at college campuses in heavy-handed ways. The Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 effectively mandated that universities overhaul their procedures for sexual abuse and harassment cases or face total loss of federal funding. For instance, the letter asked that guilt be determined by a bare preponderance of the evidence standard, despite the heavy costs to a student from a guilty verdict and expulsion. It also undermined due process by discouraging cross-examination and mandating training in which investigators were encouraged to believe the accusers. The government was deploying its enormous power to dictate processes to universities and regulate their relations with their students and, by extension, students with each other.

The Obama administration did not limit itself to regulating conduct; it aggressively extended its authority to police campus speech. It argued that speech that listeners thought was of a sexual nature could lead to a finding of a hostile environment actionable under Title VI, even if that conclusion were not based on objective facts, but on subjective feelings. Such interventions encouraged speech codes and chilled debate.

In 2016, the Obama administration issued guidance interpreting Title IX to cover gender identity, advising schools that transgender students must be allowed to use facilities and participate in programs consistent with their gender identity or else be in violation of federal law.​ This requirement included access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams corresponding to their identity. Again, this interpretation represented an aggressive and expansive reinterpretation of Title IX. It seems plainly inconsistent with this language, which prevents discrimination based on sex—a concept that at the time of Title IX was passed—referred to biological sex. But colleges did not want to risk their federal funding by flouting such government ukases.

While many on the left decry the Trump’s administration’s attempt to use its power under the Civil Rights law to reform higher education to its liking, they did not lodge similar complaints against the Obama or Biden administrations’ exertion of power under the same authority.

If the judges who rule on the case talked about in Jeff’s blog on the facts, and objectively, Harvard’s goose is cooked. The cake is baked.