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June 16, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:01
Alan Dershowitz on the Trump-Harvard Clash
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So there's been a, you know, very significant action taken from this administration against Harvard.
And how do you respond to that?
I don't like untargeted sanctions against universities.
And the Trump administration's sanctions have been too broad.
You can't just cut back all funding for research.
Cancer research has to go forward.
Alzheimer's research has to go forward.
So the defunding should be targeted toward the public health school, toward the Divinity School, toward the Carr Center for Human Rights, which has become a cesspool of anti-Semitism.
The same thing is true with visas.
You shouldn't be denying Harvard the right to have students from any country.
You should try to create a preventive mechanism for trying to anticipate which students are going to come here.
In order to prevent other students from going to class, you can prevent those students from registering at Harvard.
Well, let's talk about students at Harvard, actually, because Harvard has had a lot of Chinese students, especially in the Harvard School government.
There's a lot of Chinese money that's been funding the university.
And of course, we have this problem that we mentioned earlier in the That just means collecting little bits of intelligence and sending them back, which the government absolutely is interested in you doing, right?
You could be leveraged to do that if you're in a position because your family's there.
And that happens again and again and again.
This is just the rule, not the exception, actually.
But so how, you know, in a free society...
In a free society, how do we deal with that reality?
You have students working in very sensitive areas that can easily be leveraged by a regime which doesn't view America as a friend and to steal IP or worse.
And that's just the reality.
How do we deal with that as a free society?
Well, the preventive state would know how to deal with that easily.
They would just cut off all student visas from China.
And that would be an overreaction.
What's needed is a targeted response, and also too much foreign money is coming in.
I also think Harvard admits too many foreign students.
I think having the high percentage that it has...
If it's done on a blind meritocracy, then let every student be Asian.
I don't care if it's done on a pure meritocracy.
But the end of meritocracy coupled with advantage to foreign students who come from countries that pay a lot of money to the university is a potential for disaster.
Well I mean they just have such a complicated system because of course you know they famously lost this case of anti-Asian discrimination which from what I've heard is you know there various approaches which they may be trying to get around.
Let's be very clear.
They're cheating.
And Professor Lawrence Tribe of the Harvard Law School told them to cheat and told them how to cheat.
And they're doing precisely what Southern schools did in the 1950s to get around desegregation orders.
They're cheating.
and they can't be allowed to do that and the federal government There has to be pure meritocracy.
And there has to be the end of any kind of quotas.
And we've had racial quotas at Harvard.
In fact, there's almost never been a time when we haven't had racial and other kinds of quotas at Harvard.
Sometimes they're vague in general.
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