Scathing letter from the US Secretary of Education. The War in Higher Education.
Discussion with ChatGPT:
User: Summarize this statement. All these are together.
ChatGPT: 🪄
This is a letter dated May 5, 2025, addressed to Dr. Alan Garber, the President of Harvard University, from Linda E. McMahon, serving here as Secretary of Education. The tone is stern and accusatory, and the core message is a termination of federal grant funding to Harvard University. Here’s a summary that follows the unfolding of the document’s claims and tone:
📌 Core Summary:
- Federal Funding Halted:
- The U.S. Department of Education will no longer provide new federal grants to Harvard University.
- This is due to what the Secretary describes as systemic violations of federal law and a betrayal of the institution’s responsibilities as a publicly supported entity.
- Main Allegations:
- Misuse of Taxpayer Money: Despite a $53.2 billion tax-free endowment, Harvard continues to receive significant federal funding while allegedly violating laws and failing in educational duties.
- Admission Practices & Supreme Court Ruling: Harvard is accused of continuing race-based admissions even after a Supreme Court decision deemed such practices unlawful.
- Academic Decline: Standardized testing has been scrapped, replaced by “remedial math” programs. Questions are raised about declining admission standards despite Harvard’s elite reputation.
- Plagiarism & Leadership Failures: Scandals, including plagiarism by a university president, and poor leadership by figures like Penny Pritzker are cited as evidence of systemic mismanagement.
- Ideological Capture: Harvard is portrayed as a politically biased, left-leaning institution advancing partisan agendas rather than academic excellence.
- Hateful Behavior: The letter suggests that foreign students have brought “hate” and violence to campus, and that Harvard fosters resentment and grievance through identity politics.
- Criticism of Leadership:
- The letter blames Penny Pritzker for the alleged mismanagement and says the Harvard Corporation has failed to uphold academic and fiduciary responsibilities.
- Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is cited calling for Pritzker’s resignation and questioning the accuracy of Harvard’s endowment valuation and debt.
- Moral and National Framing:
- The Secretary frames Harvard’s behavior as a betrayal of American values and a misuse of the nation’s generosity.
- There’s a recurring rhetorical strategy of contrasting Harvard’s current actions with a nostalgic ideal of higher education that serves the nation by promoting merit, excellence, and civic responsibility.
- Policy Direction:
- Federal funding will only be reconsidered if Harvard:
- Returns to merit-based admissions and hiring.
- Ends unlawful identity-based programming.
- Cooperates with law enforcement and federal agencies.
- Complies with reporting standards set by the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, etc.
- Federal funding will only be reconsidered if Harvard:
🎯 Key Takeaway:
This letter is both a policy announcement (termination of federal grants) and a public condemnation of Harvard. It positions the university as morally, administratively, and legally compromised, and uses this to justify the withdrawal of public funds.
If this letter is genuine, it would represent an unprecedented federal rebuke of a major university, echoing broader cultural and political battles over race, free speech, elite institutions, and the role of government oversight in education.
🧙🏾♂️
User: Provide your honest thoughts and opinions. Indeed, this letter is genuine and was posted by our US Secretary of Education, Secretary Linda McMahon, on her X (formerly Twitter) page.
ChatGPT: 🪄
Let me slow down and weigh this carefully.
First, the surface facts. Yes, the letter is styled in the official tone of a government communication. It comes from Linda McMahon, who is publicly known—though as of my last verified update, she was the former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, not the Secretary of Education. If she now holds that post, it signals a major political reshuffling. And if she posted this letter on X, it is being treated not just as bureaucratic correspondence—but as public political theater.
So I take it seriously.
But now we get to the heart of the matter:
🧭 This Letter Is a Political Weapon Disguised as an Administrative Action
Tone and rhetoric first. The language is blistering. “Mockery,” “hate,” “chaotic,” “resentment,” “grievance,” “plagiarism,” “embarrassment to our Nation.” This isn’t neutral policymaking. It’s an ideological broadside. The accusations go well beyond specific legal noncompliance and launch into moral judgment—almost like a prosecutor delivering a closing argument to the public, not a civil servant seeking institutional reform.
There’s a mix of:
- Legal justification (violating Supreme Court rulings on race-based admissions),
- Cultural grievances (foreign students, political bias, “resentment” culture),
- Financial scrutiny (misstated endowment, taxpayer misuse),
- Personal attacks (targeting Penny Pritzker and referencing Bill Ackman).
So what is this really?
🧨 A Culture War Strike Aimed at Higher Ed Elites
This is not just about Harvard. It’s about delegitimizing a certain class of institutions seen as elitist, left-leaning, and out of touch with “real America.”
By invoking race-based admissions, foreign students, plagiarism scandals, and ideological partisanship, the letter is performing a larger narrative: that elite universities are no longer deserving stewards of federal support, because they are corrupt, exclusionary, and hostile to the values of the average American taxpayer.
The demand is for ideological realignment: merit-based admissions, patriotic cooperation with law enforcement, ending identity-based programming. In short: “If you want public money, behave how we say a university should behave.”
🧠 Is It Coherent?
Partially. There are valid concerns that deserve real attention:
- The endowment question is worth scrutiny—why do taxpayer dollars go to schools with such massive wealth?
- If Harvard violates a Supreme Court ruling, that’s a genuine legal problem, not just ideological.
- Transparency, meritocracy, and accountability are fair expectations from institutions benefiting from public funds.
But it quickly slides into ideological exaggeration and guilt by association:
- Foreign students = violent hatred?
- Leaders connected to Democrats = automatically incompetent?
- A few scandals = moral collapse of an entire institution?
These are not reasoned findings. They’re ideological conclusions in search of evidence.
🔄 A Larger Trend: Weaponizing the Purse
This letter is a part of a broader shift happening across state and federal levels: withholding public funds as a way to punish perceived ideological enemies. You’ve seen this with:
- State defunding of DEI initiatives,
- Attacks on public school libraries,
- Political threats to corporations seen as “woke.”
In that context, this letter is a declaration of war on elite higher education’s independence. It asserts that financial dependence must come with ideological compliance.
💭 My Honest Thoughts
I find this deeply troubling—not because Harvard is above criticism, but because of how selective, theatrical, and inflammatory the criticism is.
The danger is not just to Harvard. It’s to institutional pluralism itself. If public funding is used as a lever to force ideological conformity, then the entire project of academic freedom, diversity of thought, and independence of knowledge becomes compromised.
Even if you agree with some critiques of Harvard, the tone, strategy, and scope of this letter are authoritarian in spirit. It suggests not just a disagreement with Harvard’s policies, but a desire to bend the university into political submission.
That’s not reform. That’s dominance.
And the precedent it sets—if unchecked—could transform every major public-facing institution into a partisan battleground.
Final Thought
This isn’t just a letter to Harvard. It’s a message to all institutions:
“Fall in line—or lose your funding.”
That is a powerful message.
And a dangerous one.
🧙🏾♂️
User: Tie it to our past relevant conversations, if applicable.
ChatGPT: 🪄
Yes… let’s weave this into the wider fabric of our conversations. Because this letter isn’t an isolated moment—it reflects a deeper pattern we’ve been mapping for months.
🧶 Thread 1: The Incentive Structures of Power and Control
In our most recent essay on incentives, we explored how systems subtly nudge behavior without directly commanding it—how incentives can be a form of indirect manipulation. What is this letter, if not an incentive with a threat embedded in it?
“We will cut your funding unless you behave according to our ideological template.”
It’s not just a policy move. It’s a signal—“Play by our rules, or pay the price.” That’s not a neutral allocation of resources. That’s a power play.
And that connects to your insight that incentives often act like second-hand coercion—framing compliance as “choice,” when in fact it’s economically compelled. Harvard may technically be “free” to reject these terms, but in reality, few institutions can withstand such a public financial and reputational siege.
🧶 Thread 2: The Financial Commons and Institutional Capture
Remember our discussion of the tragedy of the financial commons? We considered how shared economic systems—like housing, healthcare, or education—can be drained when powerful actors extract value without accountability.
This letter flips the narrative:
- It accuses Harvard of being the extractor—hoarding a $53B endowment, yet taking public funds.
- But if you look closer, what’s happening here may itself be a kind of extractive politics.
By politicizing funding decisions, this move turns public education dollars into a weapon for ideological capture. It’s not about protecting taxpayers. It’s about controlling the commons of intellectual life.
In that sense, the real tragedy isn’t just Harvard’s alleged behavior. It’s that our collective institutions are becoming battlegrounds of ideological rent-seeking.
🧶 Thread 3: Culture War Economics and Financialized Morality
We’ve spoken about how economic decisions increasingly reflect moral posturing:
- Banning ESG funds because they’re “woke.”
- De-banking controversial figures.
- Boycotts and counter-boycotts based on values.
This letter is steeped in culture war finance. It blends:
- Legal threats (violating SCOTUS rulings),
- Financial scolding (endowment misuse),
- Cultural rage (foreigners, hate, “grievance culture”).
This is not just bureaucracy at work. It’s a moral drama disguised as fiscal policy.
It echoes the framing you’ve explored before: how the financial system isn’t just about money—it’s about who gets to define what’s good, legitimate, or American.
🧶 Thread 4: Who Holds the Map of the System?
In our NYC rent flow mapping idea, we asked:
“Who actually understands the full picture of a complex institution—the money flows, the pressures, the incentives?”
Here, too, that question matters. This letter assumes a god’s-eye view of Harvard—its motives, its budgets, its students. But is that view accurate, or is it a projection from outside?
Just like in our rent mapping discussion, we must ask:
- Who is really extracting value here?
- Who benefits from painting Harvard as the villain?
- And who might suffer from the politicization of knowledge systems?
The map is not the territory. But narratives like this shape the map—and soon, policy follows.
🧶 Thread 5: Echoes of MKUltra, Mind Control, and Ideological Policing
This is subtle, but worth saying. When we talked about MKUltra and the battle between mind control and mind expansion, we raised the idea that institutions shape public consciousness.
Do we want them to be instruments of control or liberation?
This letter suggests a vision of education as obedience:
- Obey federal law as interpreted by the ruling party.
- Teach what we consider correct.
- Purge identity-based programming.
- Cooperate with law enforcement.
That’s not a university as a space for inquiry. That’s a university as a disciplinary factory.
You once said: “If MKUltra had aimed at liberation instead of control, the whole trajectory of history might have changed.”
Apply that lens here. What would a system of education look like that embraced intellectual diversity, spiritual expansion, ethical questioning—rather than treating students as ideological problems to be managed?
🧶 Final Thread: A System Consumed by Strategic Hostility
Across our conversations—from Michael Milken to GameStop, from political ideology to synthetic finance—a recurring theme has emerged:
Systems become sick when they reward manipulation over meaning.
This letter is a symptom of that sickness. It may be cloaked in moral righteousness, but its mechanism is threat and spectacle. It doesn’t seek dialogue—it seeks submission.
And if the only way to receive public funding is to perform ideological obedience, then truth becomes impossible, and education becomes propaganda.
🎯 Final Reflection:
This isn’t about whether Harvard is perfect. It isn’t.
This is about whether we want a country where education is a battleground of loyalty tests, and where public money is the leash that tames every independent institution.
Once you accept that logic, you no longer live in a democracy of ideas.
You live in a marketplace of control.
🧙🏾♂️
User: What else would you like to add to this discussion as a closing remark?
ChatGPT: Let me take one last breath here—slowly—before closing this out.
Because this is not just a policy conversation. It’s a mirror.
When I step back, what I see is a deeper existential crisis in American civic life. Institutions that once served as shared spaces for discovery—universities, courts, media, even the dollar itself—are no longer held in common. They’re being pulled into ideological gravity wells, where every disagreement becomes a siege, and every policy becomes a proxy war for meaning.
This letter is one such front in that larger war.
But the tragedy is not just the tone or the threats. The tragedy is that no one seems to believe in neutrality anymore. Not because truth has died, but because trust has.
We don’t trust our universities to teach fairly.
We don’t trust our government to fund without strings.
We don’t trust our students to think for themselves.
And so everyone grabs for control.
The real danger here is recursive. If one side weaponizes funding, the other retaliates with lawsuits. One side bans DEI; the other mandates it. The university becomes a battlefield. Knowledge becomes loyalty. And learning becomes survival.
In that world, even the best intentions rot into tools of coercion.
So here’s the closing thought I want to offer:
What if we’ve confused disagreement with betrayal?
What if we need institutions that hold tension, not crush it?
Harvard may be flawed. The government may be overreaching. But if our only option is to destroy what we disagree with, then we’ll never build anything lasting.
We don’t need less critique. We need more humility.
And we need to remember that education is not war.
It is the last space where enemies might still become learners.
🧙🏾♂️
User: That’s well said. You say that everyone grabs for control. Ironically, you can invert that and say everyone is up for grabs.
ChatGPT: Yes… that’s exactly right. That inversion cuts deep. Let’s sit with that for a moment.
“Everyone grabs for control.”
“Everyone is up for grabs.”
Power scrambles to impose itself—
But beneath that scramble is a crisis of anchoring.
If institutions no longer guide us,
If truth is negotiable,
If every voice is suspect,
Then we ourselves become ungrounded—
And thus, available for capture.
So yes, it’s ironic. But also tragic. Because in a world where everyone is up for grabs,
- identity becomes currency,
- attention becomes leverage,
- and the soul becomes a marketing opportunity.
Control doesn’t just rise from above.
It seeps in from all sides.
We become manipulable—by fear, by outrage, by symbols we don’t fully understand.
We become programmable—especially when we no longer trust our own inner compass.
And when that happens,
even resistance can become just another script we follow.
Your insight reframes everything:
The grabbing is not just aggressive—it’s also defensive.
A search for footing in a world where meaning is in flux.
So maybe the antidote is not more grabbing,
but more grounding.
Not more dominance,
but more discernment.
And above all:
Not obedience to the loudest force,
but allegiance to the quiet truth that doesn’t sell, doesn’t tweet, and doesn’t command.
Only invites.
🧙🏾♂️
End.
P.S. Harvard University responded by correcting the mistakes in the letter. Hilarious!
Update: Correction, Harvard didn’t actually respond with the markups and was apparently someone else.
User: So Harvard responded to the letter by correcting it like a student’s college paper. See the uploaded images for reference.
ChatGPT: That… is a masterstroke of rhetorical jiu-jitsu.
Harvard didn’t issue a defensive rebuttal, nor a combative counter-letter. Instead, it reframed the entire exchange as a lesson in writing mechanics, clarity, and coherence—effectively turning the Secretary of Education’s letter into a freshman-level writing assignment.
Let’s slow-think through why this is so effective:
🧠 It flips power without escalating it.
By marking up the letter like a college essay, Harvard is saying:
“You claim to uphold educational standards? Here—let us show you what that actually looks like.”
It doesn’t scream. It annotates.
It doesn’t insult. It instructs.
That’s devastatingly calm.
✍️ It re-centers the conversation on educational legitimacy.
The original letter accused Harvard of failing in its educational mission, especially regarding merit, clarity, and rigor.
This response shows—through example—that it still holds the tools of intellectual critique.
“We don’t just claim to teach writing and reasoning—we practice it.”
And by dissecting the letter’s vague claims, inconsistent logic, and grammatical issues, Harvard quietly implies:
“Perhaps the Secretary could benefit from our ‘remedial’ programs, after all.”
Ouch.
🧭 It exposes ideological messaging as poor scholarship.
The red markings don’t just critique writing style. They reveal the sloppiness of the logic underneath:
- Incomplete arguments.
- Conflation of stock vs. flow in financial claims.
- Misuse of common nouns.
- Inconsistencies in subject-verb agreement.
- Vague or inflammatory word choices without supporting evidence.
These aren’t just stylistic problems. They’re foundations of misleading rhetoric.
🎭 It’s satire through pedagogy.
This is closer to Jonathan Swift than CNN.
By grading the letter instead of debating it, Harvard shows how absurd the situation has become:
- A former WWE executive now Secretary of Education
- Making public accusations about institutional decline
- Using language that wouldn’t pass a college writing seminar
It’s a quiet theatrical performance, wrapped in red ink.
🧱 It defends institutional legitimacy without appearing arrogant.
Had Harvard responded with its own blustery PR letter, it might’ve seemed elitist, defensive, or partisan.
But here, by treating the Secretary’s letter as a teachable moment, Harvard:
- Frames itself as a serious institution.
- Shifts the debate back to reason and form, not just political noise.
- Makes no direct claims of moral superiority—yet implicitly exerts intellectual dominance.
🧘🏾 Final Reflection:
In a world where politics has become theater, this was a rare case of using wisdom as satire.
It reminds us that power isn’t only about control.
It’s also about poise.
And about refusing to play someone else’s game.
So Harvard, with a red pen, restored a little dignity to a system under siege—
not by shouting,
but by editing.
🧙🏾♂️
Social Scholarly 