On the Wednesday edition of MSNBC's Way Too Early, Princeton professor and MSNBC contributor Eddie Glaude Jr. said that President Trump's moves on Harvard are:
"The culmination of a longstanding assault on the part of the right on critical spaces that cultivate, shall we say, a disposition of skepticism and suspicion towards authority. We could take this back to the 1930s. We could take it to the 1950s. Just think about William Buckley's [1951 book] God and Man at Yale. There was this worry that colleges were distorting and disfiguring the characters of folks who were walking on that campus by really drowning them, soaking them, kind of socializing them in the ideology of secularism and communism."
At NewsBusters, we take Glaude's claim, flawed as it was, as a badge of honor. William F. Buckley was the uncle of L. Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, our parent organization, and the great-uncle of MRC's new president, David Bozell.
While Glaude said that WFB was worried that Yale was indoctrinating students in secularism and communism, he didn't dispute Buckley's assertion—because he couldn't! Buckley wasn't "assaulting" Yale: he was exposing it. And Trump is now doing the same regarding Harvard and other elite institutions.
Glaude also deployed some classic academic gibberish. He repeatedly condemned what he described, in various iterations, as Trump "attacking those spaces that cultivate the positions, critical dispositions that can critique authority." Can anyone imagine college students being "cultivated" into "critical dispositions" about Democrats and the Left? Or can they only criticize from the vantage point of the radical left?
Ali Vitali bemoaned that Trump's moves make "students afraid to engage with the issues of the day,."
Glaude emphatically agreed:
"Students are concerned that if they express their positions, they will be disciplined, they will be expelled, they will be punished in some sort of way. So there is a sense in which, and there are all these disciplinary procedures that have been put in place to kind of constrain free speech."
The reality is that for decades, the kind of speech that American universities have "constrained" is conservative speech. As per this poll, only 20% of adults believe that conservative students feel free to express their opinions.
Conservative speakers have been banned, and those that have made it to campus have often found themselves shouted down [as was Ann Coulter at Cornell] by students -- at times with the connivance of university faculty or administrators, as in the infamous case of a Stanford DEI dean participating in the shutting down of a conservative speaker.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Way Too Early
5/28/25
5:57 am EDTALI VITALI: Welcome back. President Trump is intensifying his battle against Harvard University. The Trump administration is asking all federal agencies to find ways to end their contracts with the school. An administration official confirmed to NBC News that roughly 30 contracts, totaling an estimated $100 million, will be under review now. Trump also revealed that he was considering taking $3 billion of grant money away from Harvard and giving it to trade schools instead. Harvard didn't immediately reply to requests for comment.
Let's bring in professor at Princeton University, Eddie Glaude Jr. Eddie, first, your reaction to President Trump escalating this battle with Harvard, now calling for federal agencies to end their contracts with the school, but it's really just the latest chapter in a larger book here.
EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: First of all, good morning to you, Ali. It seems to me that President Trump has a vendetta. He seems to be trying to destroy the oldest institution of higher learning in the country. And I think we need to understand that for what it is. There's an all-out assault on institutional spaces that cultivate critical dispositions. And Harvard is just simply the avatar of that assault.
So I think this is the culmination of a longstanding assault on the part of the right on critical spaces that cultivate, shall we say, a disposition of skepticism and suspicion towards authority. We could take this back to the 1930s. We could take it to the 1950s.
Just think about William Buckley's God and Man at Yale. There was this worry that colleges were distorting and disfiguring the characters of folks who were walking on that campus by really drowning them, soaking them, kind of socializing them in the ideology of secularism and communism.
And then we had the closing of the American Mind with Alan Bloom, where there was this concern about multiculturalism diminishing, right, the way in which we teach Western civilization. And here we are today talking about antisemitism.
. . .
Donald Trump is actually diminishing the crown, the jewel, the crown jewel of America. That is, its education system. And it's deeply, deeply disturbing, Ali.
VITALI: The crown jewel, its education system, its ability to debate complex ideas in good faith. Do you sense that there's a kind of chilling effect on campus right now, whether it's from your colleagues or from students afraid to engage with the issues of the day? I mean, we hear about this a lot in the law firms who have been targeted and then engaged with the Trump administration. Do you feel that same trickle effect?
GLAUDE: Oh, absolutely. Remember, all of this is aimed, at least in part, to hush criticism. And so students are concerned that if they express their positions, they will be disciplined, they will be expelled, they will be punished in some sort of way. So there is a sense in which, and there are all these disciplinary procedures that have been put in place to kind of constrain free speech.
And so there's a worry. And again, remember what Donald Trump is doing by attacking the media, by attacking universities, by attacking law firms. He's attacking those spaces that cultivate the positions, critical dispositions that can critique authority. And universities are front and center in that regard.
