The phrase “hoist on his own petard” comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A petard was a crude explosive device–essentially a crude grenade–and being hoisted on one’s petard meant being harmed or killed by one’s own weapon.
Well, the Ivy League has been using DEI petards against disfavored groups–whites, Jews, Asians–and their chosen weapons are about the blow up in their faces.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 24, 2025
By now, everyone interested is aware that Trump and the Ivy League schools are at war, and Trump is determined to see the schools concede to his demands that they follow federal civil rights laws or face the consequences.
As wealthy as these prestigious universities are–and they are very wealthy indeed–they remain utterly dependent on federal funding and tax benefits. Harvard, for instance, has an endowment that is truly mind-blowing at over $50 billion, depending on the day and market values, but it would blow through that amount in a few years if they didn’t get that cool $9 billion a year from the federal government and benefit from tax breaks as a nonprofit institution.
The same is true for almost every college and university to at least some extent–in fact, most would cease to exist without federal support.
These schools helped create this situation in the first place–it was only a few decades ago that state and federal money weren’t even a part of their budgets. They wanted this money, and were confident that their influence with lawmakers would shield them from political influence they didn’t like.
They had their cake and ate it too–they railed against America, Americans, and capitalism. They then deposited huge sums of money from the very governments and taxpayers for whom they professed hate and against whom they trained their students to destroy.
Trump’s “trump card” against these institutions is not their use of federal dollars to preach and teach hatred against America, and especially conservatives, but rather their open violation of federal law in promoting “social justice.”
Chris Rufo’s exposé of Princeton–one that could be duplicated at nearly any institution of “higher ed,”— gets to the heart of the matter:
A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of “social justice.”
The basic structure of this system is the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy, which has expanded dramatically under Eisgruber’s tenure. An infographic circulated by Princeton shows at least 40 academic and administrative departments with established DEI committees, with the express purpose of adjusting the campus’s racial composition. As Princeton’s first annual diversity report noted, “Every administrative and academic leader is being held accountable for demographic evolution.”
According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to “increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process.” The report advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least “two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates.”
The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don’t hire white men unless absolutely necessary. According to one professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, this meant abandoning merit-based hiring in favor of race-based preferences—the only way, given the current pipeline, to accomplish Eisgruber’s stated goal of increasing “by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years.”
Though many of these policies relied on euphemism, some were openly and explicitly discriminatory. The university’s Target of Opportunity Program, which was cancelled shortly before the 2024 presidential election, made funding available for departments to hire “candidates from groups that are underrepresented on campus.” According to conversations with Princeton professors, this referred primarily to racial minorities and women. The program covered half of each hire’s salary, allowing departments to bring on new faculty without bearing the full financial burden. In effect, the administration created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities.
It’s not even an open secret–it is often said loudly and proudly–that race, gender, and sexuality are primary factors for who gets hired, who gets fired, and who gets admitted or funded as students at places like Princeton, Yale, and Harvard.
This is uncontroversially illegal–there is no gray area, and if the goal was to hire more white, heterosexual males, the federal government would apply all its existing civil rights laws to hammer these schools into compliance. All of them are required to certify compliance with the existing laws, and not a one of them is compliant in the least.
In other words, they knowingly break the law, lie to the government in documents that make them eligible for federal funding, and are subject to fines equivalent to 3x the amount they receive under false pretenses.
That is according to the False Claims Act, which pays bounties for whistleblowers.
The university’s race-conscious initiatives were not limited to faculty hiring. In 2021, Princeton released its multiyear plan for “Supplier Diversity,” which called on departments to award contracts based not on quality or cost, but on race. The report offered staff a step-by-step guide for effectively funneling university procurement contracts to minority-owned or -operated businesses. Failing that, the report suggested, staff should prioritize awarding contracts to companies with a philosophical commitment to DEI. “We will also explore opportunities to highlight relationships with firms that do not qualify [as certified diverse suppliers] but otherwise demonstrate the values to which we aspire,” according to the report. The report also notes Princeton was willing to “[s]upport capacity-building efforts” at “diverse firms” so they could better “meet the needs of the university.”
Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, said Princeton’s Supplier Diversity initiative constitutes a “straightforward violation” of federal civil rights law. “Parties may not decide who to contract with and who not to contract with based on race,” Morenoff said. “It sounds very clear that this is what they were doing, and they were bragging about it.”
The United States Department of Education Division of Civil Rights has the power to impose enormous pain on institutions that fail to comply with the law, and while schools like Harvard and Yale can afford the best lawyers in the world and may be able to wriggle their way out of any penalties so drastic–what judge would want to be known as the guy who killed Harvard or Yale?!–Trump has a lot of cards to play.
The particular petard upon which these schools will be hoisted is that every one of them loudly proclaims that their institutions are so riddled with racism, sexism, and homophobia that they can be called “systemically racist.” In fact, they loudly proclaim their guilt. College presidents often abase themselves before faculty and students, loudly admitting their failures.
During Trump’s first term, he actually opened an investigation into Princeton because its president shouted about how guilty his institution is. Since the same President had also sworn to the federal government in a legal document that gave his institution access to billions of dollars, he committed fraud. Right?
It’s not just colleges and universities that have put themselves into similar binds. Every establishment institution has committed itself to explicitly race-based hiring and other practices, and these are, on their face, illegal.
In a just world, lots of petards would be exploding at the feet of these malefactors. In the short term, though, I would be satisfied if the big colleges and universities saw some of their limbs blown off.
