Deborah McDowell

This letter is something. And once again, outstanding reporting by our students

Trump’s Deal-Making With Other Elite Schools Scrambles Harvard Negotiations

It is not “deal-making.” It is extortion built on Christopher Rufo’s idea of “taking down” one or more elite university.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/u...

Trump’s Texas Gambit Ignites Nationwide Battle for House Control Red states’ plans to redraw district lines prompt Democrats to retaliate with their own gerrymander push.

It's not just the NYT. Here the @wsj.com frames the TX gerrymander issue (which apparently now includes plans for other states including Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Missouri) as "both sides are doing it," instead of Dems reacting to Trump's authoritarian power grab. www.wsj.com/politics/tex...

Not to mention playing into Trump's bogus, self-flattering image of himself as a master "dealmaker."

Pure extortion!

The lie that Trump is a “master deal maker” has long been the core of his persona and is now an embarrassing piece of Republican orthodoxy.

Given his history of business failure and extortion, it’s also an insidious choice call any of his trade policy “deals.”
bsky.app/profile/npr....

Access is more important than truth or justice. Informing the public is not the goal, as much as legitimizing the administration's actions. NYTimes doesn't serve the ppl but rather its owner and Trump.

This is as plain as the ass on a goat!!

Deals are generally reached between two parties who each want something. When one of the parties' desire is "to not be arbitrarily punished by the power of the state" that is not a deal, that is extortion.

The idea that President can negotiate/dictate bilateral “deals” by using the full force of the federal government to punish and humiliate his perceived enemies goes against the whole idea of the rule of law. That should be the story, rather than normalizing this authoritarian behavior.

My thoughts exactly, given that all the evidence in the article shows that the Trump administration is not even pretending to be following legal procedures. The Times never steps back to highlight this fact.
bsky.app/profile/vsla...

“I think there’s still a deal to be had, but from our perspective, at the end of the day, Harvard has a $53 billion endowment,” she said. “They don’t need federal funds. And even if they win a lawsuit, great. But what happens next year? What happens the year after?”

This former Trump administration official, who is still working closely with Miller’s “task force,” is all but saying, “Great university you have there. Shame is anything happened to it.”

But Harvard has a more antagonistic relationship with the Trump admiinistration, as the university has sued the administration to stop its retribution campaign against the school That dynamic has fueled worries at Harvard that the White House is seeking a far higher financial penalty as punishment for fighting, not because the schools troubles alone warrant $500 million.

Trump is acting like a mob boss. The administration cannot legally treat Harvard more harshly “as punishment for fighting.” At no point in this article is a legal predicate for these extortionist schemes mentioned.

Harvard also has much more federal money at stake. The Trump administration has warned that it could ultimately strip $9 billion in funding for Harvard; it threatened $510 million in funding for Brown.

ON WHAT LEGAL BASIS IS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MAKING THESE ‘THREATS’ AND ‘WARNINGS’?
Trump could just as easily demand the John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard for the new White House ballroom.

The Trump administration has repeatedly castigated Harvard for its $53 billion endowment, which is loaded with restrictions that limit how it may be sued, but is has made far less fuss about Brown’s similarly tied-up $7 billion fund.

It is one thing to report on the Trump adminstration’s actions, but it is another to parrot their language in this way. Since when is making “less of a fuss” a term of art in discussions of administration actions. It is very clear that Trump and his team are following no legal guidelines.

But no matter the structure, White House officials have made clear that an extraordinary sum will be required to reach a settlement.

A logical follow-up to the statement that “White House officials have made clear that an extraordinary sum will be required to reach a settlement,” is wtf. Why parrot extortionist language that reflects Trump’s personalist quest for dominance rather than acting on the basis of legal precepts?

It’s very strange that the Times is normalizing the fact that the whims of the president and the far-right ideologues who staff his “crusade against top schools” have become a predicate for “deals.” This is authoritarian behavior and should be covered as such.

i have been thinking a lot about how the entire concept of “the deal” is antithetical to transparency, fair play and rule of law, as larry notes. the deal is necessarily nonstandard, ad hoc and dependent on the whims of the dealmaker

Exactly this. If our university closes the local hospital will likely close. The town might not totally die, it will be a shell.

Those international students truly pay the bills for college/university towns.

Yeah New Haven also has about 6 colleges either within or just outside of city limits. Defunding those institutions defunds the whole city.

The expat grandparents An ever-changing, multi-generational Chinese community has sprung up at the north end of campus.

In New Haven, there's an amazing expat Chinese grandparent community of elders who live mostly in one neighborhood for 3-5 years to help raise their grandkids while their kids focus on graduate/professional school at Yale. Businesses sprang up to support them! yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/400...

Major cities as well will be affected. Greater Boston, for instance, has about 75K international students, ~1.5% of pop. They are on average wealthier & spend more discretionary income than U.S. citizen students. That's a big subsidiary economic hit right there.

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

One thing I'd add here: higher ed is labor intensive work that resists automation (remember MOOCs?), unlike manufacturing. Destroying higher ed is destroying lots of jobs that won't be created elsewhere. It's pain for the sake of pain (which I suppose is the entire point of the Trump admin).

"At Stuyvesant High School [...] eight of the 781 offers this spring went to Black students while 27 went to Hispanic pupils. Asian students were offered 509 spots, and white students were offered 142. (Another 95 seats went to teenagers who identify as multiracial or whose background was unknown.)"

This sounds akin to my dislike of the phrase "It is what it is." Phrase is everywhere. I complain to my partner too much about it—

Two reasons, I think: 1) "what it is" can be different; 2) phrase is atomizing—"It is what it is" maybe for one person alone, but it may be different w. good community

The MAGATs may have painted themselves into a corner. In the past, fed courts struck down partisan, gerrymandered maps for violating the Voting Rights Act by diluting the ballot power of certain group members. Since the VRA is now largely a pleasant memory, any map is good enuf. Deep blue ones too.

💯💯👇👇