As a longstanding critic of that ancient institution, I want to critique the Trump administration’s letter to Harvard. I want to like the letter. I feel it is almost good.
Almost does not necessarily cut it in this kind of a historical situation, however.

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Consider this condition:

"By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.

"This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate. The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025."

It is almost impossible to imagine any “external party” which could perform this function. It’s as if the conservatives woke up in the middle of the night and imagined they were liberals, who really cared about power and had spent the last 50 years, no, the last 100 years, building foundations and NGOs and other instruments of power.

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Now, if you had an army, an army with the staff and energy to go around the Harvard history department, and every other humanities department, and every other humanities department in every university in America, and eradicate the progressive woke communist mind virus, like so many antibodies—great. It would be like turbo McCarthyism. It would be McCarthyism on steroids. Imagine how great America would be if McCarthy didn’t just go after the communists, but also the liberals too. California would consist entirely of surfer girls who get married off to stockbrokers. We would still be #1 in plastics.

It’s not where we are. Maybe it’s where we want to be. Maybe it isn’t. None of that matters. What matters is that it would be completely crazy if, in a 2025 America totally colonized by “progressivism”—in your heart, you know it’s a euphemism—this turbo McCarthyism, with its imaginary cadre of uniformed Muskites, was to go around, not eradicating the cancer, but splitting the difference and asking for a variety (sorry, I can’t even use that other word) of viewpoints. Like: we’re not eradicating communism from the State Department. We’re just looking for a balance of communists and Christians. We just don’t want America’s diplomatic personnel to consist entirely of Soviet spies. Not that actual McCarthyism worked, either—but McCarthy himself would laugh. When we find the closest examples of programs like this that did work, such as the denazification of postwar Germany, they had no interest in balance whatsoever. Lol.