Before getting into a fight with President Trump over Federal funding of their university, the folk at Harvard should have read up on Trump’s favourite American President, Andrew Jackson (creator of the Democrat Party).

But I get the impression that history isn’t really their thing any longer, otherwise they wouldn’t have effectively sided with Hamas against the Jews:

A Harvard task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.…We heard similar statements from many other people, including faculty and staff who work closely with students. They saw Harvard as a place where, over time, many students’ politics become more radical and where students become less tolerant of people who disagree with them.

Niether would they have engaged in racial discrimination while selecting their students, or tried to get around the Supreme Court’s ruling on the matter, in a case brought by the parents of Asian kids:

Despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.)

That’s none other than Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority opinion, which later saw the ideologues at Harvard still yapping about how they could allow an applicant to talk in an admission essay about how “race affected his or her life”.

All of this finally led the Trump Administration to announce a freeze on current Federal funding of Harvard (some $2.2 billion) and, when Harvard won that round, announced that they could forget applying for such funding in future, talked of cancelling their tax exempt status (done to Bob Jones university in the 1980’s for racial discrimination), and yanking the F-1 and J-1 visas of their foreign students, who are big source of revenue.

In short, Trump has declared all-out war on Harvard, plus some other universities, clearly sending a message to all such institutions to drop the modern racism crap, however finely it may be robed in modern Leftist theories like Critical Race Theory and Settler-Colonialism.

This is already having a very negative impact on Harvard’s finances, even though their endowments amount to $53 billion:

In the past two months, Harvard has turned to the bond markets twice to quickly raise over $1 billion in cash. This follows a scramble in 2024 to raise $1.5 billion through similar bond offerings, which still fell short of its initial target.
…
As we’re learning now, the situation was even worse than what Mr. Gasparino was hearing. Selling stocks and bonds at least gets you a dollar-for-dollar price on the exchange value of your asset. A desperation sale of an illiquid asset, such as a stake in a private equity investment, is like selling a prized possession to a pawn shop. “Forced liquidation value” of anything means that a big financial haircut is going to be realized.

Losing money on such things is bad enough, but what’s worse is the impact it has on all your other investments. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumni who announced a while ago that he was pulling his funding from them, analysed their new problem:

Ackman estimates that the actual realizable value of Harvard’s endowment might not exceed $40 billion right now. That represents a $13 billion book loss that has already occurred to Harvard’s legendary endowment.

So where does President #7 come into this picture? Well it so happens that almost two centuries ago he got into a similar scrap with a large institution with even more power, prestige and influence than Harvard and its fellow Ivy League schools, the Second Bank of the United States:

The government provided one-fifth of the Bank’s $35 million in capital, and appointed one-fifth of its 25 directors. It was the exclusive depository of the public’s funds, which it could use for its own purposes without paying interest. In exchange the Bank paid the government a $1.5 million “bonus” in its first years of operation and performed the government’s banking services without charge.

From the earliest beginnings of the USA there had been fights about such a bank, and Jackson’s supporters in particular hated it as a place for the “big money men” who regularly cheated and screwed them over because they didn’t understand finance or financial markets. But it also did some good things:

The Bank was responsible for nearly 20 percent of all personal and business loans in the county; it issued 40 percent of all bank notes in circulation. Its capitalization of $35 million was more than double the national government’s annual spending.

At a time when private banks could issue their own notes, which often led to big economic problems at the State level, including the very cheating that small farmers and business men hated, this sort of stability was to be prized. Unfortunately the bank got too big for its boots, not only attacking Jackson in public but providing funds to his political opponents in the 1832 election:

The Bank spent $80,000 printing campaign materials opposed to Jackson, and Biddle himself spent an additional $20,000—as a share of total GDP, that equates to about $2.5 billion today.

By this time the guy running the bank was also very much a product of elite arrogance and he employed all of it in the fight against Jackson, whom he utterly disdained as an ill-educated, low-class barbarian:

The president of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle, fully embodied the abstract grievances that united his enemies. No one could deny Biddle’s prodigious abilities. The son of an old and prominent Philadelphia family, he graduated from Princeton at 15, then served as the private secretary to the American minister in Paris. He practiced law, wrote a history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, edited a distinguished literary journal and served in both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature before becoming President of the Bank at age 37 in 1823.
…
He described the Jackson administration as “a mere gang of banditti” and Jackson himself as a “frontier Cataline.” The nation, he predicted in a speech to Princeton alumni, cannot “long endure the vulgar dominion of ignorance and profligacy. You will live to see the laws re-established—these banditti will be scourged back to their caverns—the penitentiary will reclaim its fugitives in office, and the only remembrance which history will preserve of them, is the energy with which you resisted and defeated them.” 

It all sounds very familiar and it’s a great article to read from the history perspective alone, while being clear in making the comparison to today, particularly the rot of racism and low standards that has develeoped in these modern institutions and the arrogance of the people who lead them, especially in their confidence that they can win this fight with Trump:

The spirit of Nicholas Biddle is very much alive in the attitude of Lawrence Summers, a man as brilliant and perhaps as arrogant as Jackson’s great nemesis. He cites the tremendous power Harvard possesses as the reason it must resist Trump. And he seems to believe that the immense government privileges the university enjoys, amounting to billions of dollars in public funding and tax exemptions, belong to Harvard by some eternal right indistinguishable from the first principles of free government

Thus the article sees no sign of compromise with #47 either, the lessons of history being ignored:

The Bank might have escaped a ruinous political battle by yielding on all of these points, allowing Jackson to claim victory without harming the institution. Instead, its defenders chose an all-or-nothing confrontation on the high plane of principle, where there could be no compromise—and where they were bound to lose.
…
Biddle’s bank, renamed under state charter as the United States Bank of Pennsylvania, went bankrupt in 1841. Biddle died three years later, broke and broken. 

I did laugh at the story of Jackson doing a tour of the nation during this fight, including Harvard, where such a visit from a previous holder of the office had resulted in an honourary Doctor of Laws being awarded to that President. Perhaps having a better understanding of Jackson’s fighting qualities than did Biddle and company, Harvard wisely decided to repeat this honour:

[I]t scandalized Boston’s brahmin community, Harvard’s most distinguished alumnus most of all. John Quincy Adams raged against his institution’s “disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and could hardly spell his own name.” 

The echoes of history are one of the reasons I love it so.