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Reuters ran a story headlined, “Trump suspends entry of international students studying at Harvard.” Not only that, but according to a leaked cable “seen by Reuters,” the State Department ordered all its consular missions to enforce additional vetting of visa applicants looking to travel to Harvard for any reason. ...
Harvard can cry all it wants about the First Amendment and retaliation, but foreign nationals have no constitutional right to enter the U.S., and institutions like Harvard have no constitutional right to demand visas be granted to their applicants. Courts have explicitly ruled this. Not only that, but Harvard is deep underwater right now in the public’s jaded eye: antisemitism scandals, imploding diversity deans, corpse controversies, plagiarism problems, lying ethics professors, remedial math classes, Chinese cash pipelines, and widespread mockery over grade inflation and ideological monoculture.
Harvard’s research patents are its crown jewels. That collection of prized intellectual property is Harvard’s biggest boast and its most financially valuable asset. It also turns out that its patents are its greatest weakness.
The woke Ivy League school can only blame itself. Under a long-standing federal law, 1980’s Bayh-Dole Act, all patents developed using federal grant money are required to be aggressively pursued for U.S. manufacturing, be fully and timely disclosed to the government, and must “maximize public benefit.” If a federally-funded patent holder fails to check Bayh-Dole’s boxes, then the government can confiscate the patent.
On Friday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Harvard a stinker of a letter —also, hilariously, posted to Twitter— announcing an “immediate comprehensive review” of Harvard’s patent portfolio to ensure Bayh-Dole compliance. Lutnick gave the University one month to submit a complete list of patents tied to federal funding, including Bayh-Dole disclosure dates, current use, and full licensing terms.
But it didn’t take a month. Not even close. It only took one weekend.
Just like that, the #Resistance folded. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a resigned story headlined, “Harvard Nears a Deal With the Trump Administration to Restore Funding.” By Monday, Secretary Lutnick’s “comprehensive patents review” had been folded into a “potentially landmark legal settlement” framework between the Academy and the White House.
According to the Times, Harvard is now —suddenly— prepared to commit $500 million dollars over the next few years to agreed-upon “vocational and research programs.” The amount is twice Columbia’s settlement and ten times what Brown University paid in its deal. In exchange, the Administration would restore frozen research funding, end the Bayh-Dole patent probe before it bites, and call off the rest of the school’s many pending federal investigations.
The settlement’s details, obviously, remain fluid. The Times noted that the Administration seeks a painful stipulation in the deal requiring Harvard to cough up detailed admissions data, including on race and gender, grade point averages, and standardized test scores. “It was not clear on Monday,” the Times explained, “how any agreement between the government and Harvard would resolve that demand.”
Trump may have finally found the right leverage. It was only a matter of time.
Until now, Trump’s campaign against the Ivies has relied on tools that schools could posture against, like Title VI discrimination probes, DEI crackdowns, foreign student visa fights, and endowment taxes. All of those sting, but they’re either politically deniable (we’re standing up for academic freedom!) or slow-burning enough to drag out in court and maybe run out the clock.
But meanwhile, for decades behind the scenes, elite universities have treated the Bayh-Dole Act’s patent rules like polite suggestions, confident the government would never actually wield its “march-in” power to seize federally funded inventions. By suddenly threatening Harvard’s crown-jewel patent portfolio, Trump turned that dusty clause into a live grenade that blows straight through endowment walls and PR shields. Now, they’re talking about real money.
Harvard, apparently, can never learn. It has made itself the poster-child for all the failures of contemporary education, including the racketeering around endowments, government grant grifts, race and gender hustles, and intellectual surrender to ideas that would make medieval astrologasters burst out laughing.
Case in point: the university lately announced the hiring of a Boston-area drag-queen to teach a course in the spring semester of 2026 about the TV show known as Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The show features contestants vying for prizes and crowns based on “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent” (C.U.N.T.). Get the picture? Reach into your Jungian psychology tool-bag. ...
Please understand: when you are watching drag-queens, you are not really seeing men posing as women. You are seeing men portraying women as monsters. ...
Harvard’s drag-queen du jour demonstrates all that nicely. Kareem Khubchandani, his legal name, is a professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. He also teaches “Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.” As a drag star, he goes by the stage-name LaWhore Vagistan. This is how he describes himself to the news media: “[M]y preferred pronouns are ‘she’ or ‘aunty.’ I chose ‘LaWhore’ because my family traces its origins to Pakistan: Lahore is an important city in Pakistan, and well, I’m a bit of a whore. And Vagistan because I see the subcontinent as one, big, beautiful Vag … istan.”
Of course, his fascination with female genitalia, of seeing a whole nation in that guise, is a bit odd considering that A) he is a homosexual performer who is ostensibly not attracted to female sexual characteristics and lacks experience with them, and B) he is a male of the species who does not possess such organs himself. Therefore, on what basis would he have gained so much knowledge of female genitalia and developed such a powerful obsession around them as to imagine the whole country of his ancestors that way? Possibly, it has something to do with mommy. . . something that made her appear. . . unforgettably monstrous. ...
Other questions do present, though. For instance, did Harvard’s President Alan Garber know about this hire and sign off on it, and how would he say it fits Harvard’s mission? Or Provost John Manning? Or Hopi E. Hoekstra, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences? Or Harvard’s Board of Governors?
All this underscores an important lesson that America has apparently managed to unlearn, something that we once knew quite well: that marginal behavior belongs on the margins, not in the center of our national life. The celebration of vulgarity for its own sake is arguably not the highest aspirational ideal for the best-and-the-brightest of our society, however amusing it might be in their hours of leisure, when people are free to pursue whatever lights their imaginations.


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