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COMMENTARY NIALL FERGUSON ... MAY 11TH 2025 University of Austin (UATX): Niall Ferguson: Why UATX is the Anti-Harvard PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHA1tyvmtE Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I have enjoyed listening to this presentation by Niall Ferguson ... much of which I am much in agreement with! My background has a lot in common with Niall Ferguson ... we both got a big part of our education and world view in the Oxbridge world. My college at Cambridge had Oliver Cromwell as a student. He did not complete his studies, but migrated into politics at an early age taking issue with the King! My room in college was on the same 'staircase' as Oliver Cromwell's room. During my days at Cambridge, a group existed that had the mandate to break up 'Royalist Meetings' ... a tradition that had existed for multiple centuries! I found this talk by Niall Ferguson absolutely fascinating. While not being 100% in agreement with his assessment of the modern situation, it is a lot more correct than most of the talk that is everywhere at the present time! Peter Burgess
Niall Ferguson: Why UATX is the Anti-Harvard University of Austin (UATX) May 11, 2025 41.5K subscribers ... 59,188 views ... 1.3K likes University of Austin (UATX) co-founder Niall Ferguson on Harvard’s current failures, President Trump’s response, and what a historic Oxford conflict can teach us about today’s battles over academic freedom. This address occurred during UATX's annual First Principles Summit on May 3, 2025. Read Ferguson's essay on the same subject here: https://www.thetimes.com/comment/colu... Transcript 0:00 let me now offer you another instructive lesson from the history of Oxford University This is the presidential transition that went very wrong The president of Mland College Oxford my old college Henry Clark died on March the 24th 1687 Early the following month King James II nominated one Anthony Farmer to be the college's next president Farmer was in multiple ways an unsuitable indeed ineligible candidate As McCauley tells us in his history of England volume two chapter eight this man's life had been a series of shameful acts He had been a member of the University of Cambridge That's just a lovely bit of comic timing from McCauley And had escaped expulsion only by a timely retreat He had then joined the dissenters Then he had gone to Oxford 1:06 had entered himself at Mordland and had soon become notorious there for every kind of vice He generally reeled into his college at night speechless with liquor I hadn't realized that I had a role model so far back He was celebrated for having headed a disgraceful riot at Abington He had been a constant frequencer of noted haunts of libertines At le he had turned pandog you all know means pimp had exceeded even the ordinary vileeness of his vile calling and had received money from dissolute young gentlemen commoners for services such as it is not good that history should record This wret however had pretended to turn papist his apostasy at tone for all his vices and though still a youth he was selected to rule a grave and religious society in which the scandal given by his depravity was still fresh As a Roman 2:07 Catholic he was disqualified for academical office by the general law of the land Never having been a fellow of Mortland College or of New College he was disqualified for the vacant presidency by a special ordinance of William of Wayne 15th century founder of the college William of Wayne had also enjoyed those who parttook of his bounty to have a particular regard to moral character in choosing their head And even if he had left no such injunction a body chiefly composed of divines could not with decency entrust such a man as farmer with the government of a place of education So the fellows petitioned against farmer and on the last statutory day elected John Ho uh who was a Londonborn fellow of the college and the visitor of the college at once admitted ho but the fellows were then cited 3:05 before the court of ecclesiastical commission whose election was enulled on June the 22nd The vice president of Morton was suspended and on August the 14th the fellows were instructed to admit Samuel Parker the bishop of Oxford who although an Anglican and obviously a somewhat less disreputable figure than farmer was also unqualified according to the college statutes A few weeks later the king himself James II and you all understand that he was a Roman Catholic hence the crisis came to Oxford and heranged the fellows of Mlin Here's McCauley again When they appeared before him he treated them with an insolence such as never had been shown to their predecessors by the Puritan visitors 'You have not dealt with me like gentlemen,' he exclaimed You have been unmanly as well as undutiful Sorry I just slipped into 4:04 another character there They You'll see where I'm going by now They fell on their knees and tendered a petition He would not look at it Is this your Church of England loyalty i could not have believed that so many clergymen of the Church of England would have been concerned in such a business Go home Get you gone I am king I will be obeyed Go to your chapel this instant and admit the bishop of Oxford Let those who refuse look to it They shall feel the whole weight of my hand They shall know what it is to incur the displeasure of their sovereign Fellows still kneeling before him again offered their petition He angrily flung it down Get you gone I tell you I will receive nothing from you till you have admitted the bishop McCauley goes on The fellows retired and instantly assembled in their chapel Question was profounded whether they would comply with his majesty's 5:03 command The other fellows who were at the meeting declared that in all things lawful they were ready to obey the king but that they would not violate their statutes and their oaths Will you submit said the bishop of Chester to our visitation I submit to it said John Hoe with greatsterity so far as it is consistent with the laws and no further My lords said he you have this day deprived me of my freehold I hereby protest against all your proceedings as illegal unjust and null and I appeal from you to our sovereign lord the king in his courts of justice So I'm just now going to take you to the moment of the expulsion of the fellows and demise A demi was a particular category of scholar It still exists which is half a fellow I was once a 6:01 demi And this is a painting done much later in 1884 of the expulsion of the fellows Here's what happened This is a classic moment when the power of the executive collides with the independence of an academic institution On October the 20th three royal commissioners with three troops of horse arrived to visit the college After declaring hero no longer president they struck his name out of the buttery book I'll show you the buttery book in a minute When the court of ecclesiastical commission met again on the 25th it installed Parker by proxy and broke into the president's lodgings On November the 15th this is the scene here 25 fellows were expelled and they were also declared incapable of receiving any other preferment any other employment A handful submitted and 7:01 remained And then plot twist Parker the guy they forced upon the college died It was the 17th century People were always dying And then it gets worse The king insisted on installing as president Bonaventure Gford Bonaventur is a name we don't hear nearly often enough Anybody thinking of a name for a child bonaventure He was a Catholic priest and James had already made him vicar apostolic of the Midland district of England This led to a further rebellion uh by the fellows Seven more revolted and were deprived of their fellowships Only two of the original fellowship remained Here's McCauley again The college was turned into a popish seminary The Roman Catholic service was performed in the chapel in one day 12 Roman Catholics were admitted fellows But I I wonder if 8:05 this story reminds you of anything To refresh your memories on April 3rd just a month ago Harvard University received a letter from the federal government signed by representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services Department of Education which is I believe represented here and the General Services Administration And the letter stated that Harvard had quote fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from anti-Semitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of title six and title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 In particular the university had permitted a hostile environment for Jewish students in violation of title six Before I go on I just want to make it clear to you how important in the history of Oxford the expulsion of the 9:01 fellows of Mlin was and remains They actually reenacted the events of 1687 uh in 1907 Here's a photograph I found of the reenactment in the college in Mland just by the uh by the bridge When I was a kid I used to read a very nerdy magazine called Look and Learn Now if you want to see where your child is going if the child collects a magazine like look and learn and arranges the uh back numbers chronologically but also creates an index for use you will know that that child will become a professor That was me This is the the buttery book uh which is one of the surviving documents that records on a weekly basis 10:02 which fellows and scholars are in residence by the fact that they're being fed And on this page I know it's not very clear u but it's the best I can do You can see that the fellows and and demise names had been scratched out These were the fellows imposed the Catholic fellows imposed uh on the college and subsequently I'll come to what happened later um subsequently when they were expelled you can see that the the buttery book was amended So th this is the these are the protagonists Here's James II looking down his regal nose as you do when you're king And and there's John Hoe on the other side the president who refused to submit And here are their contemporary 11:00 counterparts Uh as you know Harvard received another letter uh from the federal government just over a week after the first one which required that the university take a whole list of actions as a condition of receiving continued federal funding And I'll just give you a few highlights in case you haven't read the letter Uh Greg Luciano did a good summary I'm sad Greg's not here because what I'm going to say will will make him tremendously cross But here's a Greg's summary Harvard has to hire a third party to audit certain programs identify faculty members who contributed to anti-semitism on campus and sanction them quote within the bounds of academic freedom in the First Amendment It has to carry out meaningful discipline for conduct violations since 2023 It has to implement merit-based hiring and admissions reforms to be audited by a third party It has to report immediately any conduct violation 12:02 by an international student to the federal government Uh it has to shutter all DEI programs and offices It has to ban masks I like that little twist It has to reform governance quote to reduce the power held by faculty whether tenured or untenured and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship and it has to ensure through a series of audits hires and transfers that quote each department field or teaching unit is individually viewpoint diverse Not long after issuing these demands the government suspended $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in contracts claiming that Harvard had rejected its uh demands on anti-semitism and racial discrimination And that wasn't all Yesterday as you perhaps noticed President Trump published one of his regular truths and I do enjoy calling them 13:03 truths We are going to be taking away Harvard's taxexempt status he wrote on his social media platform It's what they deserve I don't need to tell an audience as well informed as this that Harvard has a 501c3 taxexempt status as an educational institution which means it doesn't pay income taxes on its net earnings and its donors get income tax deductions You know all that but the point is that that status could be revoked if say an audit found that it had violated the relevant rules Now one possibility and it's a serious one is that Harvard's admissions policies or its tolerance of anti-semitism violate public policy And that's the standard that the Supreme Court set in 1982 when it upheld an IRS decision to revoke the taxexempt status of Bob Jones University in Green Hill South Carolina over the school's 14:03 racially discriminatory policies which included at that time rules against interracial dating and marriage rules that I personally have violated That would have been the end of my time at BJU You you may not know I discovered today um that BJU regained its tax exempt status in 2017 having abandoned the interracial dating rule in 2000 The key point there is the time that elapsed between the Supreme Court ruling and the restoration of taxexempt status Now we all know that Harvard is tremendously rich Endowment is massive beyond the dreams of creases $50 billion or something But as my dear friend Jim Henkins pointed out in the Wall Street 15:00 Journal uh just the other day most of the diamonds tied up in donor restricted funds In any case it only covers about 37% of the university's annual operating costs And for the rest the university has to rely on tuition federal grants that's 11% plus current gifts plus borrowing of which it is having to do rather a lot right now So in other words the Trump administration's actions are not trivial threats to Harvard's financial stability Now like the fellows of Mlin back in 1687 Harvard has resisted the government's encroachment on its traditional privileges On April the 21st the university filed a lawsuit against the administration The suit argues that the government has quote violated its constitutional rights and imperiled its academic independence Alan Garber the 16:02 university's president who's the John Ho figure in the analogy that's him on the right someone I've known for many years has said that the threat to revoke the school's taxexempt status is quote highly illegal and destructive to Harvard quote 'Tax exempt status is granted to educational institutions to enable them to successfully carry out their mission of education and for research universities of research.' This was Alan Garber talking to the Wall Street Journal last week Quote obviously that would be severely impaired if we were to lose our tax exempt status The message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dar one that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be an existential threat to so many educational institutions And the issue has of course become political just as the case of the 17:02 presidency of Mlin did back in the 1680s Yesterday Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asked the inland uh the Internal Revenue Service Inspector General to investigate whether Trump has violated the law and if the IRS has begun auditing nonprofits based on White House requests Now as McCauley tells us James II made a mistake in taking on the fellows of Mordland unlikely heroes though those gentlemen were Here's what McCauley tells us The nature of the academical system of England is such that no event which seriously affects the interests and honor of either university in those days there really were only Oxford and Cambridge can fail to excite a strong feeling throughout the country Every successive blow 18:02 therefore which fell on Mlin College was felt to the extremities of the kingdom In the coffee houses of London Indians of court in the closes of all the cathedral towns in parsonages and mana houses scattered over the remotest shires Pity for the sufferers and indignation against the government went on growing And those of you who have immersed yourselves in the study of the glorious revolution will know that James II's time on the throne of England was rapidly running out And to this day histories of the fall of James will tell you that one of his major blunders was this attack this brazen assertion of royal authority and of his Catholic uh religion on Mlin College one of the wealthiest colleges of Oxford When you 19:01 next go to Oxford make sure you see Mlin Tower the most splendid architectural edifice of the university Think of this moment a critical historical moment one of those rare occasions when the fellows of an Oxford college really matter So the obvious question arises the one you're waiting for me to get to Do we now have to defend Harvard against the American equivalent of James II in the same way that the wider English public rallied to the side of the fellows of Mlin greg our old friend Greg Luciano says that we do quote on principle and here I'm going to quote on his from his recent essay on the subject When the federal government is exceeding its power or claiming new powers that it never previously had we 20:01 have to step in We have to defend against it Its demands of Harvard would catastrophically undermine academic freedom free speech and institutional independence on campus The federal government dictating the hiring admissions and academic freedom of college is no solution to either the problem of Harvard in particular or anti-semitism on campus in general And he goes on to analyze the ways in which on principle we should support Harvard against the administration Atal Gawande has a an essay in the New Yorker pointing out that more than 90% of the nine billion federal dollars uh that Harvard receives uh that are now in danger supports life sciences primarily through the National Institutes of Health and 3/4 of it goes to five independent Boston hospitals including Bighgam and Women's Hospital and as one of my children was born by an emergency C-section at Brighamman Women's I would 21:04 surely be a hypocrite if I just shrugged my shoulders at this point and said 'Too bad.' And yet I believe we all and especially those of us who've devoted time energy and money to founding a new and politically independent university must really think twice before we uncritically embrace FIR's narrative FAR is Greg's foundation uh for individual rights uh of inquiry embrace that narrative that Trump is the villain like James II and the professors of Harvard are the heroes like the fellows of Mlin Just last week the Harvard presidential task force on combating anti-semitism and anti-Israel bias published its report it makes for shocking reading Let me quote from it A 22:05 Harvard faculty member who works closely with students reported to us that some Jewish students choose to hide their identities on campus which was something the faculty member could not have imagined would ever be the case at Harvard We have heard from many dozens of non-Jewish students faculty and staff who were profoundly troubled at what they described as an intolerance that has crept into higher education and it is also on display at Harvard Many people saw Harvard as a place where over time many students politics became more radical and where students became less tolerant of people who disagree with them According to the report and I quote again student activists attempt to drive Israeli students and Jewish students who feel connected to Israel out of student life This often takes the form of quote shunning and American Jewish students told us they felt pressure to condemn Israel to prove they were quote one of the good ones meaning an anti-Zionist 23:01 Jew and face social consequences when they refused Moreover Jewish students told us stories of Harvard run quote privilege trainings where they were told that they were deemed to be privileged not only by dent of being identified as white but also because of their Jewishness Now there's a gem from the report that caught the eye of my fellow trustee Joe Londale yesterday and it is on page 150 of the report of the presidential task force quote 'A session in four sections out of 28 of a required course a required course for all Harvard Graduate School of Education students included the following graphic about white supremacy The graphic labels opposition to the boycott divestment sanctions movement as coded genocide placing it alongside the 24:04 Anti-Defamation League Both are positioned merely one step removed from overt genocide which includes examples like lynching and the KKK The instructor displayed the graphic on screen for an extended period of time without addressing its problematic characterization of Jewish organizations and perspectives I don't think there can therefore be any doubt that Harvard once not so long ago notable for the high proportion of Jewish faculty and students has a serious anti-semitism problem Here's some fire research Nationally 55% of students said it would be difficult to have an open and honest conversation about the Israeli Palestinian conflict At Harvard it's 67% Among faculty nationwide 70% have a 25:00 hard time talking openly and honestly about the conflict At Harvard it's 84% And that's not Harvard's only problem It has an anti-conservatism problem too Let me show you a few illustrations of this problem According to the Crimsons the Harvard Crimson's 2023 survey only 2.5% of faculty respondents identified as conservatives 2.5% with more than 3/4 identifying as liberal If you look at the class of 2027 which the Crimson surveyed and analyzed in detail just uh less than two years ago more than half in fact 65% nearly 2/3 identified as progressive or very progressive You can see the chart here While only 8.4% identified as conservative or very conservative 26:07 You can see that from the point of view of of partisan allegiance Harvard is a democratic institution And uh what is really striking to me is the extreme hostility of the class of 2027 to President Donald Trump 87% have an unfavorable view of him Not surprisingly while 41% of liberal students report feeling comfortable discussing controversial topics only 25% of moderates and 17% of conservative Harvard students feel similarly And let's not forget Harvard's systematic anti-Asianism in its admissions policy first exposed years ago now by Ron Uns 27:01 and culminating in the 2023 Students for Fair Administrations case which led the Supreme Court ultimately to rule that college affirmative action programs were unconstitution Has that led to reform well don't ask me Ask liberal commentator Matthew Iglacius quote 'It is of course difficult to know exactly what happens in the black box of college admissions,' he wrote recently 'but Harvard and most other elite schools do not appear in practice to have dramatically altered their admissions practices.' And that shouldn't surprise us when according to the Harvard Crimson 86% nearly of the class of 2027 agree that quote Harvard should strive to create a diverse student body and twothirds exactly support affirmative action Harvard has a free speech problem too Here's the Harvard Crimson from February of this year Only onethird of 28:02 Harvard's last graduating class felt comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics during their time at the college A a 13% decrease from the class of 2023 More than a quarter of the class of 2024 respondents said they only like to engage socially with people who share their political beliefs Only 29% disagreed or strongly disagreed with that statement A third of students are unconcerned about free speech as an issue on the campus and about the same proportion and neither concerned nor unconcerned It's less than a fifth who think there's a problem So Harvard students are pretty woke clearly but they're not complete outliers On the contrary as surveys by Hetradox Academy and FIRE show they're pretty representative I drilled down into this for example to see if Chicago 29:06 students had radically different ideas or views on these issues They don't There's very little difference in practice on these campuses Let's just take the issue of Israel Israel and the Palestinians and look at the national data So according to Pew a third of Americans under 30 say their sympathies lie either entirely or mostly with the Palestinian people while just 14% say their sympathies lie entirely or mostly with the Israeli people For adults as a whole the shares are 16% pro Palestinian 31% pro-Israel For over 64s it's 9% and 47% respectively Americans aged 18 to 29 have the lowest approval of Trump of any generation 34% approval versus 66% 30:01 disapproval compared to 4755% for all ages Young Americans also the least proud to be American 46% versus 62% for all ages And they're the most opposed to Trump's handling of DEI Twothirds of the under30s disapprove of it compared with just over half of all ages And these are findings from a new poll that just came out from NBC on April 27th Now as has long been obvious there's a fairly seamless continuum that leads from illiberalism to outright authoritarianism So we should not be surprised that generation Z is also turning away from democracy There's a new more in common survey which shows reassuringly that 3/4ers of Americans 80% of Democrats 85% of Republicans say the Constitution should be quote widely respected because it has provided 31:04 stability 63% of Americans say democracy is quote definitely the best form of government for America But nearly half of Gen Z Americans agree that quote sometimes it's okay for leaders to set aside democratic principles eg constitutional checks and balances to fix the economy compared with 29% of all Americans A quarter of Gen Z 25% say they quote don't really care about the Constitution Only four in 10 42% say democracy is quote definitely the best form of government for America Ladies and gentlemen all this is what the higher education establishment has wrought No doubt with some help as John hate would say if he were here from social media apps and smartphones Harvard merely epitomizes the rot that permeates the 32:05 entire system Now in a recent interview Mark Andre described quote the government supported and funded cartel that doesn't allow new entrance to get access to federal money and said quote they must be allowed to fail And he talked about the way the system works federal student loan program federal research funding tax exemption tax exemption for endowments Here's what he went on to say The folks at University of Austin are mounting a very valiant effort and I hope that they succeed and I'm sure I'm cheering for them If you could be paying for them too Mark that would be great I mean cheering is good checks better But the problem is he said suppose you and I want to start a new 33:01 university Just suppose suppose we were so crazy and we want to hire all the freethinking professors Imagine somebody would do something so crazy and we want to have the place that fixes all this Practically speaking we can't do it because we can't get access to that money The most direct reason we can't get access to that money we can't get access to federal student funding because of accreditation which is of course an aspect of the system that the Trump administration also has rightly in its sites I'm nearly done but here's the kicker One way to think about the University of Austin it's just very simple We are the anti-H Harvard Whenever I'm trying to solve a problem here which is often I ask myself a really simple question Does Harvard do this and if the answer is yes then we should just as a 34:00 rule of thumb do the exact opposite Does Harvard admissions look like a black box then ours should be completely transparent as it now is since we introduced our merit-based system whereby candidates with strong SATs strong test scores are highly likely to be admitted Does Harvard assess students in opaque ways that lead to plagiarism and grade inflation then we should insist on assessment under strict exam conditions and as far as possible a separation of instruction from assessment Does Harvard discriminate in favor of certain racial or other groups and against others then we should as far as as we do under our con constitution prohibit ourselves from doing that Is there a culture of fear and selfcensorship in Harvard classrooms then we should have an atmosphere of freedom and indeed daring in our classrooms And I can assure 35:00 you that is what we have I know that because I have been teaching classes in this room and the atmosphere in our classrooms is the difference between day and night as compared with the atmosphere in classrooms at Harvard and indeed at Stanford I did something just a few weeks ago I would never have dared to do at Stanford I taught a short class on Billy Connley the Glasgow comedian's extraordinary monologue on the crucifixion from 1972 A highly blasphemous account of the passion which is at the same time profoundly moving and insightful as well as extremely funny if you can understand the Glaswegian dialect Can you imagine the trigger warnings that would have been required if id proposed to do that with all the blaspheming and foul language 36:02 and crude humor if I'd done that at any established university It would have been a fast track to cancellation The irony of the story I'm telling you is that Harvard once upon a time was the anti- Oxford Oxford in the late 17th century was anything but a stronghold of intellectual adventure On the contrary as Salter and Loel tell us in their 1954 history of the university quote 'When the king had begun to realize the effects of his folly he allowed the visitor to restore Ho and the fellows.' This restoration took place on October the 25th 1688 The names of the intruders were struck out of the books I showed you that the false fellas expelled Quote 'The golden election of demise in 1689 under the victorious hoe all good well for the intellectual 37:02 harvest of the coming century which however even in its better years bore sadly little fruit who lived to the ripe old age of 90 and went on to hold not one not two but three bishop ricks But I doubt many people regularly read the 30 published sermons of his that you can find in the Bodlian library Mlin after all the excitements the expulsions and the restoration remained a grand but stagnant institution The same one where in 1752 to 53 the great historian Edward Gibbons spent 14 months they proved he wrote in his memoirs the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life Let me quote Gibbon here because it's relevant to what we are trying to do In my 16th year he said I was not devoid of 38:08 capacity or application That's Edward Gibbon Tell him we're busy Even my childish reading had displayed an early though blind propensity for books and the shallow flood might have been taught to flow in a deep channel and a clear stream In the discipline of a well-constituted academy under the guidance of skillful and vigilant professors I should gradually have risen from translations to originals from the Latin to the Greek classics from dead languages to living science My hours would be would have been occupied by useful and agreeable studies The wanderings of fancy would have been restrained and I should have escaped the temptations of idleness which finally precipitated my departure from Oxford I wonder ladies and gentlemen how many of today's most gifted Harvard students feel the same way as Gibbon i think I 39:03 detect already the beginning of a flow of talent out of the Ivy League out of the established institutions and I believe that some of it very soon much of it will be heading our way because we are the institution that Gibbon describes there exactly the ideal institution that he could not have we are that institution in fact Jake it's almost the definition that quotation of what you have built with intellectual foundations I read it and I thought that's us That's it That's what we're doing And yet in the days of James II and John Ho Harvard was still a relatively young institution It had just been founded 1636 to cater to the needs of 10,000 or so Puritans who'd migrated to New 40:01 England in search of religious freedom Like UATX Harvard sprang from a rebellion against a suffocating orthodoxy Though unlike us it very swiftly embraced to the extent of witch hunting an even more rigid orthodoxy The original motto you know was Veritas Christo ecclesi Harvard started small People sometimes laugh at the size of our library Harvard's at first had 400 books Harvard today is a vast and bloated a corrupt institution the culture of which makes a mockery of its truncated motto veritas With all due respect to my friends and former colleagues there including those like Larry Summers who have been faithful advisers to us I would not be standing here if I believed Harvard was capable of reforming itself 41:00 But my great fear is that as happened in the case of James II and the fellows of Morland too forceful an external challenge to Harvard's vices will have the unintended consequences of entrenching them One may think here of Harvard as being a little like Canada a country whose chronically woke Liberal Party has just been saved from political oblivion by none other than Donald Trump And we've just seen the same thing happen in Australia My nightmare is that the worst culprits in the downfall of Harvard will now reemerge from their conspicuous silence to pose alongside Alan Garber as the last heroic upholders of academic freedom and integrity And I bet Carol Hovven last night that within two weeks Claudine Gay will publish an op-ed striking precisely this pose despite having been the worst president in Harvard's history and an avowed enemy of 42:01 academic freedom and a debaser of academic standards The conclusion I draw for our own institution is that we must always issue the temptations of government money Alluring though it may be be to take the taxpayers's dollars And we must also remain strictly aloof from partisan politics For there seems no other way to uphold academic freedom and standards than through an absolute independence The fellows of Mland didn't have it nor do the professors of Harvard So I trust then that Carlos as president Pano as chancellor will safeguard our independence I would rather in the end remain smaller and independent than larger and subservient to the vagaries of politics I look forward to a time 43:00 when our most successful graduates the Navy Seals of the Mind as I like to envision them are able to repay us for our intellectual rigor with the kind of generous philanthropic support that their successes equipped with that rigor will enable them to afford Thank you very much [Applause]

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