God and Man at Harvard: The Forgotten Constitutional Roots

The hubbub at Harvard is fascinating because of the deafening silence—on all sides—about the most important underlying problem: the US Constitution. President Trump has frozen about $2 billion in federal funds for the university, which has refused to accede to his demands that the university adhere to merit-based hiring (over DEI) and allow federal oversight of the university’s handling of campus anti-semitism. He is threatening more punishment, but Harvard isn’t backing down.

Just a month ago, Columbia University caved to the White House’s threats of suspended funding, and agreed to review its Middle East studies department and its rules on campus protests and student discipline, with an eye to combating anti-semitism amongst the studentry and faculty. Both cases have raised questions of free speech and federal meddling.  Columbia surrendered, whereas Harvard is standing up.  One factor may be that Columbia’s endowment (about $15 billion) pales in comparison to Harvard’s ($53 billion), and Columbia receives about 20% of its budget from the federal government.

Of course, we don’t want the federal government dictating free speech or impeding academic freedom.  However, the problem is deeper, even if it is not talked about.  The federal government is essentially a donor to both Harvard and Columbia, as well as many other institutions of higher learning across the country.  In 2023, the federal government funded $59,679 billion of a total of $108,841 billion (or 55%) of university research expenses.  To that, we can add about $35 billion on Pell Grants and $124 billion on higher education (there is some overlap because federal research funding is channeled through multiple departments, especially the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Health & Human Services).  Most universities receive 10% to 15% of their total operating expenses from the federal government; some receive as much as 50%.

Federal involvement in research is not limited to higher education.  About half of all basic research in the US is funded by the federal government.  Likewise, economist Larry White found that 74% of academic articles on monetary policy published in 2002 by US-based economists appeared in journals published by the US Federal Reserve or were co-authored by a Fed economist.  He generously concluded that “Fed-sponsored research generally adheres to a high level of scholarship, but it does not follow that institutional bias is absent or that the appropriate level of scrutiny is zero.”  Milton Friedman more blatantly referred to “a sort of oligopoly on monetary opinion” by the Fed and its affiliates.  It is a small wonder that the vast majority of the economics profession rarely questions the fundamentals (or particulars) of central banking.

As a donor (of sorts), the federal government gets to determine where its funding is spent.  This is basic donor intent; he who pays the piper calls the tune.  The problem is that federal spending is not neutral.  It is the result of horse-trading, logrolling, political bargaining, compromise, local interests, and lobbying – and that’s only if the system functions properly and Congress controls spending, as defined in Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution.  The situation is further complicated when Congress delegates its legislative authority to the President or independent agencies.  Research and funding priorities can change at the drop of an executive order.  

Government is routinely modeled as a neutral agency that advances the common good—thus ensuring that corporate interests don’t influence research.  For example, eyebrows were raised when Coca-Cola funded research that minimized the links between sugar and obesity.  But the public doesn’t question the neutrality of the food pyramid—even though it’s the product of lobbying and industry influence.  In 2020, the federal National Museum of African American History and Culture infamously published materials declaring that rational linear thinking, politeness, property rights, hard work, and future orientation were merely “aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture.”  And federal environmental funding has led to groupthink on climate change and the punishment of heretics.

All of these examples show the danger of federal funding of research. Not only is the federal government not neutral, but it acts as a “big player“—with size but also armies of regulators, lawyers, and congressional hearings—that can easily distort the pursuit of scientific truth.

The politicization of research is, naturally, only part of the problem—and the Department of Education represents a 4% drop in the federal bucket.  But it does have consequences for freedom of speech and the pursuit of unbiased science.   

We do well to remember the wisdom of H.L. Mencken, who reminds us that the government is not neutral:  

The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Likewise, in his letter To The Youth of France, Frédéric Bastiat explained almost 200 years ago how markets create harmonies, while intervention creates antagonisms, as the state becomes a vast instrument of redistribution: 

If you consider individual self-interest as antagonistic to the general interest, where do you propose to establish the acting principle of coercion? Where will you put its fulcrum? Will it be outside of humanity? It would have to be, in order to escape the consequences of your law. For if you entrust men with arbitrary power, you must first prove that these men are molded of a different clay from the rest of us; that they, unlike us, will never be moved by the inevitable principle of self-interest; and that when they are placed in a situation where there can be no possible restraint upon them or any resistance to them, their minds will be exempt from error, their hands from greed, and their hearts from covetousness.

What makes the various socialist schools (I mean here those schools that look to an artificial social order for the solution of the social problem) radically different from the economist school is not some minor detail in viewpoint or in preferred form of government; it is to be found in their respective points of departure, in their answers to this primary and central question: Are men’s interests, when left to themselves, harmonious or antagonistic?

It is evident that the socialists set out in quest of an artificial social order only because they deemed the natural order to be either bad or inadequate; and they deemed it bad or inadequate only because they felt that men’s interests are fundamentally antagonistic, for otherwise they would not have had recourse to coercion. It is not necessary to force into harmony things that are inherently harmonious.

Therefore they have found fundamental antagonisms everywhere:

Between the property owner and the worker.

Between capital and labor.

Between the common people and the bourgeoisie.

Between agriculture and industry.

Between the farmer and the city-dweller.

Between the native-born and the foreigner.

Between the producer and the consumer.

Between civilization and the social order.

And, to sum it all up in a single phrase:

Between personal liberty and a harmonious social order.

Consider two final points.  First, for every dollar the American economy creates, almost 50 cents are controlled by bureaucrats and politicians rather than by consumers and entrepreneurs (about 25% by the federal government, 15% by state and local governments, and 10% by federal regulatory compliance).  This means 50% of the economy is up for grabs through the process of lobbying and political redistribution.  Second, about 70% of federal spending is not authorized by the Constitution.  The states may not be wise in their spending, but they do enjoy reserved powers.  The federal government—do I really have to repeat it?—is one of delegated and limited powers.

Rather than crying about freedom of speech, Harvard University would do well to review the federal powers in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. And, if any doubt remains, the 10th amendment confirms the limit:  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”  In fact, we would all do well to return to the Constitution every now and then.