The Trump administration’s ongoing battle with Harvard University has a new target: the LGBTQ community.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News last week to gin up support for the president’s plan to punish the elite Ivy League school. In doing so, she contrasted career paths with a dig at queer students.
Leavitt said taxpayer money should go to “vocational and trade schools that train electricians and plumbers, and not LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard.”
The Harvard controversy reached a crescendo when the Department of Homeland Security revoked the school’s Student Visitor and Exchange Program certification. That move — which would ban the enrollment of international students — was blocked by a federal judge on May 29.
These ploys are all part of a larger scheme to slash billions in federal grants to Harvard, the bulk of which are used in medical research. Trump said the university’s resistance will be costly.
“All they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” he said. “They’ve got to behave themselves.”
Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary and a frequent subject of the president’s off-script criticism, warned of consequences when dissent is crushed in higher education.
“America cannot be free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don’t align politically with the current head of the government,” Buttigieg said.
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