Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews suggested on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration was “smart” to target Harvard, and elite universities in general, over antisemitism.
“I have to say that the administration sometimes sets its targets in the right direction. The elite universities in this country are not exactly covered in roses right now in the way that they handled these demonstrations,” Matthews said during MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” referring to anti-Israel protests on campuses across the country in the wake of the October 7, 2023, attack on the Jewish state by Hamas.
The Trump administration announced it would be freezing $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts on Monday after Harvard University president Alan M. Garber announced the same day that the school would not be complying with the Trump administration’s demands to combat antisemitism.
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“I think everybody, whether you’re a Jewish student or not, I think you want to have a right to go to a class when you’re paying $90,000 a year in tuition, you have a right to go to the class and be taught by your professors and to enjoy the rights of a better university, a good university,” Matthews continued.
“And the fact that they had to be told to do this, they had to be told to let students go to school, which is what this is about, that they had to be told to do, that they had a problem in their own heads. So I think the elite universities are taking a beating right now. It’s probably a smart move,” he added.
Matthews also argued that it would not hurt the president politically.
“It’s Trump going after the elites. He knows what he’s doing, politically, it’s not going to hurt him. I think these universities have enough money to cover their legacies. They’ve got a lot of money to handle it. So they’re going to be able to take care of themselves. I don’t want to be loose about this, but I think Trump targeting these universities is probably not the worst move he ever made,” he said.
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Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast pushed back and likened Trump’s move to “thought policing 101.”
“They are using antisemitism as a cloak. If this administration really cared about antisemitism, there’s a lot of stuff they could do. This is not about that, this is about targeting universities, this is about targeting speech, this is right out of an authoritarian playbook,” Fast said.
Jong-Fast went on to argue that it was government overreach “at the highest order,” and had nothing to do with antisemitism.
Matthews responded, saying, “I think there’s a real challenge. I asked my friends who are Jewish. I said, are you worried? And they say yes. And this is a problem. And the treatment of those students, and at Columbia, is a serious problem. You don’t stop a kid from going to school their parents paid for. It’s serious. And it was judged – it was against those students and said, ‘You can’t go to class even to take an exam.’ Well, seriously, if you don’t think that’s a problem, you’ve got a problem yourself.”
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Jong-Fast said that she was Jewish and agreed that there’s a big antisemitism problem in America. However, she added, “I also think that taking over Harvard University’s teaching and academia is not the answer.”
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