James Hankins, a self-described conservative professor at Harvard University, said that the institution should seek to take fewer federal funds in order to insulate itself against influence from the government.
“The biggest time-waster at the moment is dealing with the budget cuts and hiring freezes set off by the Trump administration’s withdrawal of federal funding,” Hankins wrote in a guest essay for The Wall Street Journal.
“Many of my colleagues can see clearly enough that this crisis has been triggered by progressive activists, who are predominantly graduate students or members of the university’s vast diversity bureaucracy. Many faculty wish that the fanatics would just shut up and take the target off Harvard’s back,” he continued.
The Trump administration has pulled billions in federal funding from the university and is considering withdrawing further funds amid a battle with Harvard, which boasts a $53.2 billion endowment.
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Hankins said that the irony of the Trump administration’s ire against Harvard is that many of his liberal colleagues actually resent the excesses of campus protests that have placed the school in the news.
“My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism,” he wrote. “As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues. They sidle up and say, sotto voce, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this,” then proceed to unload their disgust with the latest activist outrages. They might have identified as leftists in their college years, but a frequent refrain I hear from them now is ‘this is not what the left used to stand for.’”
“Faculty at Harvard for the most part are serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work,” he continued. “They have books to write and papers to publish. They want to pass on what they have learned to the next generation. They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time.”
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Hankins argued that Harvard and other elite universities need to reduce their “financial dependence on the federal government.”
“Instead, we should strengthen ties with loyal alumni who know and love Harvard,” he wrote. “Alumni are loyal in part because they remember with gratitude the teaching they received as undergraduates. That makes them more closely aligned with the university’s real mission: to teach and to produce high-quality, unpoliticized research. Empowering alumni would carry its own risks, no doubt, but in my experience, they have a much sounder sense than politicians and government bureaucrats of what Harvard should be doing to help the country and itself.”
Harvard has received at least $4.4 billion in federal funding through grants, contracts, sub-grants and subcontracts since the first Trump administration in 2017, according to OpenTheBooks, a fiscal watchdog group.
Harvard University did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News’ Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.
