Harvard makes biggest concession to Trump yet after he said Ivy League college was anti-conservative
The Ivy League giant is reviving plans for a 'viewpoint diversity' center, modeled on Stanford's Hoover Institution - a hub for free-market ideas and small-government principles, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Talks that had been happening behind the scenes picked up speed after pro-Palestinian unrest hit campus in late 2023 and the Trump administration ramped up attacks on what it brands Harvard's 'Marxist' ideology.
The Journal reported that Harvard is courting deep-pocketed donors to fund the initiative, which insiders say could carry a price tag of $500 million to $1 billion.
A Harvard spokesperson said the center wouldn't take sides politically but would 'model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.'
The effort unfolds as Harvard remains locked in a fierce clash with the Trump administration, which has accused the university of allowing antisemitism and enforcing what it calls biased DEI policies.
In response, the government has slashed its federal funding, challenged its tax-exempt status, and taken aim at its international student programs.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said this week that talks with Harvard and fellow Ivy League college Columbia are still underway, noting, 'We're getting close... it's just not moving as fast as I'd like.'
Some members of the Harvard Corporation view the initiative as a reasonable way to encourage viewpoint diversity while maintaining the university's independence, a person familiar with their thinking to the Journal.
But a source close to the Trump administration dismissed it as 'window-dressing.'
Harvard President Alan Garber has pushed back against external influence, even as he promotes a broader campaign for 'intellectual vitality' on campus. Internal surveys show growing concerns over self-censorship - and a 2023 poll found only 3 percent of Harvard College faculty identify as conservative, the Journal reported.
Former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria floated the idea to donors back in 2020, according to the Journal - and now Provost John Manning is leading the charge to bring it to life.
If the initiative moves ahead, Harvard would be the latest elite school to join a growing wave of universities launching centers dedicated to civics, classical education, and Western political thought - a trend already embraced by Arizona State, the University of Florida, and Yale.
'This is a national reform movement,' Paul Carrese, founding director of one such center at Arizona State, told the Journal.
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The National
an hour ago
- The National
Is ICE the first harbinger of a ‘secret police' in the US?
The Iceman Cometh, the 1939 drama by American writer Eugene O'Neill, has at various times been described by reviewers as set in a stark, ruthless world and a play that 'blisters with intensity'. In the eyes of some, such observations could just as easily apply to today's America, a country where, under the presidency of Donald Trump, there is an almost palpable sense of unease and potency. Today's America too is a country where that phrase 'The Iceman Cometh' has taken on an all too real and equally menacing connotation. For the ICE men of today's America – agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have become the calling card of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. US president Donald Trump has in effect created a personal army, experts warnThough ICE now occupies a 'noble' place in Trump's hierarchy of law enforcement, its detractors view it very differently. A modern-day 'Gestapo' or 'domestic stormtroopers for the MAGA agenda', say some. 'Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state and a threat to democracy', say others. What's certainly in no doubt is that Trump has propelled ICE into America's best-funded law enforcement agency. As the Financial Times (FT) US national editor Edward Luce, recently highlighted, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB) signed into law by the president on July 4, lifted ICE's budget to an estimated $37.5 billion a year, a sum higher than Italy's entire defence budget and just below Canada's. Writing a message of 'THANK YOU!' to the ICE workforce over the Independence Day holiday, Trump made clear that the BBB spending commitment would give the agency 'ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History'. The money set aside for ICE is eyewatering. The $37.5bn a year for operations aside, the spending bill includes a $170bn package for Trump's border-and-immigration crackdown, which includes $45bn for new detention facilities, including hiring thousands more officers and agents. READ MORE: Mhairi Black: Criticising Israel is not religious intolerance. Orange marches are In the eyes of Trump, ICE officers can do no wrong. 'The toughest people you'll ever meet,' he insists. His gushing reverence for ICE is also reflected in what Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, described as 'well-deserved bonuses'. Trump officials have said they'll provide $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE personnel as well as Border Patrol agents, along with $10,000 for new hires. As Nick Miroff, staff writer at The Atlantic magazine who covers immigration issues, recently pointed out, as far as Trump sees it, the '20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They're the Untouchables in his (Trump's) MAGA crime drama'. So just what is ICE, what exactly does it do, and perhaps more significantly, to what extent are fears over its growing power and perceived threat to democracy justified? Established in 2003, ICE is one of the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. Initially, the DHS's focus was counterterrorism. But soon, the presence of certain foreign groups began to be framed as a national security issue. DHS encompasses two law enforcement directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO is charged with enforcing US immigration laws and has 6100 deportation officers. HSI has about 6500 special agents who conduct transnational criminal investigations and do not usually participate in domestic immigration operations. ICE was also created alongside Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP controls the borders, while ICE operates inside the country and it's this operation across America that has become the focus of controversy. According to the agency's own website, ICE, along with its ERO officials, are tasked with identifying, arresting, detaining, and removing immigrants without authorisation in the US. Back during his 2024 presidential campaign, when outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants, Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But since entering office, this has rapidly widened to include anyone without legal status, ICE officers, often masked and not wearing uniforms or displaying badges, have now been arresting people outside courtroom hearings, during traffic stops in workplace sweeps, and even from hospitals. The agency's aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout America's immigrant communities, especially in Democrat-run cities. Just these past weeks, Trump ordered ICE to step up its arrests and deportation efforts in Democratic strongholds, doubling down on a politicised anti-immigration drive after major protests against ICE in Los Angeles. 'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,' Trump said on his Truth Social platform. (Image: Win McNamee, Getty Images) 'These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Centre,' Trump claimed, citing debunked right-wing conspiracy theories that undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections in significant numbers. With every week that passes, ICE operation are gathering momentum. For its part, the administration says its moves – which include hundreds of deportation flights, the expansion of third-country removals, and Trump's invocation of the seldom-used 1798 Alien Enemies Act – are necessary to stem unauthorised immigration to the United States. The law is a wartime authority that gives the president sweeping powers to detain or deport noncitizens with little or no due process, and ICE have become its enforcers, much to the disquiet of many Democrat politicians, human rights activists and ordinary citizens. ICE is now arresting four times as many non-criminals as those with criminal convictions each week, according to David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that was cited by the FT. The number of immigrants in detention with no criminal charges or convictions jumped 1300% from January to mid-June, he wrote in an analysis. Numbers matter here, for ICE is under tremendous pressure to make more arrests to meet quotas set by senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown. Miller set an aggressive quota of 3000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal have pushed ICE officers into more communities and businesses. Not everyone within the ranks of ICE are happy with this and other aspects of the policy. According to The Atlantic magazine's immigration writer Nic Miroff, who has interviewed many current and former ICE agents who spoke on condition of anonymity, many described 'a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more'. READ MORE: Patrick Harvie: 'Never again' seems to not apply to Palestinians Some ICE employees according to Miroff 'believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe'. With deportations becoming a top domestic priority for the Trump administration, some Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) officers along with those from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have been put on immigration enforcement duties. It's a shift in duties many do not agree with. One veteran HSI agent complained to Miroff that his division which usually focuses on cartel drug-trafficking operations have had agents moved to immigration-enforcement arrests as part of ICE operations. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' the agent told Miroff. 'It's infuriating,' adding that he is thinking of quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners'. But complain as some ICE agents do, many Americans currently reserve their sympathies for those being targeted by the agents. Stories emerging from detention facilities where those arrested by ICE are being held are only adding to that sympathy as well as a sense of outrage. Earlier this month, Trump held a tour of one facility that's been dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz'. Its name is a reference to both the local reptile population and the former maximum-security Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California. An aerial view of the migrant detention centre dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' (Image: Chandan Khanna/AFP) Constructed in a little over eight days and meant to accommodate up to 3000 detainees, since then accounts and reports from the facility point to appalling conditions. They suggest too that the design of the site is flawed and will compromise the safety of people being held there. Stories relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in the makeshift Florida detention centre for migrants in the Everglades made for grim reading about the conditions detainees endure. 'Toilets that didn't flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys,' were among some of the accounts detailed by the Miami Herald. The newspaper also told of lights being left on inside the facility 24 hours a day, with detainees saying there are no clocks and there is scant sunlight coming through the heavy-duty tents, making it difficult for them to know whether it is day or night. Currently, ICE is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, even though funding until the latest boost was available for only 41,000 detention beds. This means that processing centres are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells. Worrying as such reports are, it's the growth of ICE, its increasingly politicised role and the fact that it appears beyond accountability that concerns many Americans. Earlier this year, ICE's in-house watchdog was scrapped and for the time being, America's lower courts are hamstrung in their efforts to rein it in. As the FT's national editor Edward Luce recently observed, given that the Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping immunity from 'official' acts he takes as president … 'that makes ICE Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state'. Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making, insist some experts on authoritarian regimes. Lee Morgenbesser is an associate professor with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane, and fellow with the Australian Research Council. Having studied historical and contemporary secret police forces, Morgenbesser says they typically meet five criteria. First, they're a police force targeting political opponents and dissidents. Second, they're not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator. Third, the identity of their members and their operations are secret. Fourth, they specialise in political intelligence and surveillance operations. And finally, they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, disappearances and torture. In a recent article in the online platform The Conversation, and using these criteria to assess how close ICE is to becoming a secret police force, Morgenbesser concludes that 'overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria". While ICE has yet to target political opponents, which Morgenbesser defines narrowly as members of the Democratic Party, and it is not directly controlled by Trump, he maintains that ICE's 'current structure provides him with plausible deniability.' In short, he says that while ICE is 'far from resembling history's most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates'. 'When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism,' Morgenbesser warns. As ICE makes its presence felt in a growing number of American communities, the controversy over its role is likewise certain to escalate. While a majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children or who arrived many years ago to stay. Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov in mid-June showed that only 42% viewed ICE favourably – an eight percentage-point drop from February and the start of Trump's term. For now, the ICE men continue to cometh and America, a nation of immigrants, faces an altogether different reckoning over its future democratic credentials.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Ian Murray panned for ‘disgraceful' U-turns as past motions resurface
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The National
an hour ago
- The National
Scottish Tories splash £150k of taxpayer cash on 'media training'
The party spent a total of £154,700 on media training between March 2022 and March 2024, according to the Holyrood expenses register. Gen Comms Limited – which is led by its former director of media between 2000 and 2012, Ramsay Jones – benefitted to the tune of £118,200 in that timeframe from training the 31 Scottish Tory MSPs, including both 'individual' and 'group' broadcast training. Shorthand PR, meanwhile, which is led by the party's former head of media Adam Morris, also received £26,000 for 'written media' and 'social media' training in 2023 and 2024. READ MORE: Octopus Energy to pay £1.5 million for prepayment meter billing errors The funding was raised through contributions from Scottish Tory MSPs' support budgets, which are given to every MSP to help them carry out their official duties. But the Scottish Tory total is far higher than anything claimed by other parties – bolstered by their high media training spend. Using the same mechanism, Scottish Labour notably paid £30,000 in March 2024 to Ebor Political Consultants Limited – a consultancy run by former spin doctor Alan Roden. (Image: PA) MSPs from other parties have also undergone training. For example, Scottish Labour MSP Neil Bibby expenses £459 for video editing training for staff last year. Now SNP minister Angela Constance's staff underwent social media training in 2023 for £199. Scottish Greens co-leader Lorna Slater spent £3000 on 'communication skills' training in 2023. Scottish Tory MSP Edward Mountain also paid Shorthand PR a total of £10,500 in three separate payments spanning January to March 2024 for 'consultancy fees for communications'. The more than £150,000 of taxpayer money spent by the Scottish Tories for media training comes as its leader Russell Findlay has pushed – to much fanfare – for Scotland to have its very own Department for Government Efficiency (Doge). In February this year, Findlay pledged to set up his own version of Elon Musk's powerful cost-cutting US government department. The Scottish Conservative leader said the Scottish version of Doge would be tasked with 'cutting waste, identifying savings and delivering better value for taxpayers'. An SNP source told the Sunday National that this story will be 'raising eyebrows among voters'. They added: 'Anyone watching Tory MSPs media performances will be demanding a refund.' Meanwhile, Scottish LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael said: "The best spin doctors and media training in the world could not make any difference when it comes to the car crash interviews we've seen from Conservative parliamentarians defending Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in recent years." The Scottish Greens have said it "raises ethics questions". '£155,000 is a lot of public funds to spend on media training over just two years, and I don't think anyone would argue they got value for money," MSP Maggie Chapman said. "It's right that elected representatives can get support and training to do their jobs, but it has to be within reason. And handing such large sums of money to former party colleagues raises further ethics questions." She added: 'Nobody will be surprised by the Tories wasting money. We still remember the Tory MPs shamelessly caught claiming for duck houses and moats on expenses. Not to mention the £700 million they spent on the illegal Rwanda scheme, or the £22 billion they cost bill payers by cutting energy efficiency schemes. 'For all their talk, when you actually look at the books, there's nobody better at wasting money than a Tory.' In response, a Scottish Conservative spokesperson said: 'This contract covered the delivery of specialist media training to all Scottish Conservative MSPs throughout the financial year. 'It was financed through pooled contributions drawn from the individual support budgets allocated to each MSP.' Morris from Shorthand PR said: 'We provide media support and training across business and the political spectrum, and were delighted to assist the Scottish Conservatives.' Gen Comms Limited didn't respond to a request for comment.
