ILYA MARRITZ: The Yale Halloween costume controversy of 2015 is not much remembered today. But for Aaron Sibarium it was decisive.

AARON SIBARIUM: So let me just preface this by saying I'm only speaking in a personal capacity.

MARRITZ: Sibarium is now a reporter with the Washington Free Beacon.

SIBARIUM: Views do not reflect those of my employer or anyone else in my immediate professional orbit. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

MARRITZ: Back then, Sibarium was a Yale sophomore, and opinion editor of the Yale Daily News. Shortly before Halloween, the university’s committee on intercultural affairs sent out an email on blast, about how not to dress for the holiday. Avoid cultural appropriation,

SIBARIUM: Be respectful of everyone. Don't wear offensive costumes, pretty boilerplate bureaucratic stuff.

MARRITZ: Then, a lecturer named Erika Christakis (Harvard College class of 1986) sent a follow up email to students in the residential college where she worked, with her own take.

SIBARIUM: More or less saying, aah - you shouldn't expect the university to police Halloween costumes. Talk to each other if you're offended. That was really it.

MARRITZ: Christakis, who is an early childhood specialist, opined “is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

SIBARIUM: And campus goes crazy. Oh my God, she's defending blackface. She's X, Y and Z.

MARRITZ: Then her husband, a Yale professor, also got swept into it.

SIBARIUM: And next thing you know, her husband, who's the head of the whole residential college, is encircled by screaming students in the courtyard.

Student: ...sending out that email that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?

Nicholas Christakis: No, I don't agree with that.

Student: Then why the f__k did you accept the position? Who the f__k hired you? I have a different vision than you. You should step down.

MARRITZ: It became a whole thing, with The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other news outlets getting in on the story. The editors of The Yale Daily News – of which Sibarium was one — met to decide what kind of editorial they wanted to write on this.

SIBARIUM: It became very clear two minutes into the meeting that anyone who pushed back was gonna get called racist…

MARRITZ: Sibarium was in the minority. But as the opinion editor, it fell to him to write a piece that reflected the majority view – not his own.

SIBARIUM: And so I ended up having to write this sobbing, saccharine editorial about how horrible people of color at Yale are treated. Uh, and how the administration hasn't done enough to elevate their voices, blah blah blah blah blah. And obviously I didn't believe in any of this. You know, I thought the whole controversy was nuts.

MARRITZ: He saw how it resonated, though. And he wanted to cover colleges in the aggressive, skeptical way he thought they deserved. So after Yale, he found his way to the Washington Free Beacon, a pugnacious, right wing outlet whose motto, flanked by two cartoon missiles, is “Covering the Enemies of Freedom The Way The Mainstream Media Won’t.” There, he made college controversies his beat.

Years later when things blew up at Harvard, Sibarium got out the popcorn.

SIBARIUM: It was fun to watch them squirm because they couldn't issue a full throated condemnation of Hamas without really pissing off a certain small slice of activists. But they couldn't not issue such a statement because then Jewish students and donors, as they did, were going to say, hey, what the hell, guys? And yeah, I kind of thought that was delicious.

MARRITZ: Sibarium has a scruffy beard and describes himself as a secular Jew and a big believer in free speech.

He wasn’t writing much about the Harvard crisis until one day, just after the congressional hearing where Claudine Gay testified, he received a tip from an anonymous source.

SIBARIUM: It was about Claudine Gay's plagiarism, so I thought, Wow, this could be big but I don’t want to get my hopes up.

MARRITZ: He did his due diligence, and the tip checked out. On December 11, 2023, his story ran in the Free Beacon asserting that Gay had taken from others’ work on four papers published between 1993 and 2017.

Harvard’s rolling crisis had entered a new phase.

TV news clip: University says Claudine Gay has now asked that corrections be made to her 1997 dissertation because of what it called inadequate citations.

TV news clip: In a statement to multiple news outlets Harvard said the university reviewed more of Gay’s academic work and that the president plans to update her dissertation to correct instances of quote “inadequate citation,” stopping short of calling it plagiarism.

MARRITZ: I found reviewing Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism to be tedious. It’s about matching four words here, six words there, about a paragraph that looks to be around 70% the same as someone else’s work. And so much academic jargon. Some of the alleged lapses are in the description of methods, or the review of others’ writing. Language here can be jargony and formulaic. And repetitive. And that’s expected.

It seems clear though that she was at best sloppy. Even professors who are sympathetic to her say they are troubled by this stuff. But I’m calling it “alleged plagiarism,” because Harvard’s own review did not conclude Gay’s errors met its standards for plagiarism. Instead, it said she had left out citations and quotation marks in several articles. The reviewers said Gay’s work still stands as original, and that she did not intentionally claim other people’s work as her own.

After that review, yet more examples of Gay’s alleged lapses were reported.

We now come to the scuzzy side of this whole affair. The plagiarism allegations fueled attacks on Gay that were ugly and personal.

TV news clip: Claudine Gay has revealed she faced death threats and was repeatedly called the n-word in recent weeks as a right wing effort …

MARRITZ: Gay and her family began receiving 24/7 police protection.

TV news clip: You might as well murder someone in academia if you’re going to plagiarize their dissertation ok?

TV news clip: Harvard is committed to DEI and Claudine Gay’s race protected her from losing her job...it's outrageous!

TV news clip: That’s right, the president of what is supposed to be America's most prestigious university is accused of plagiarism on top of everything else.

MARRITZ: That was the public side of the plagiarism conversation. I want to show you what I’ve learned about what was going on behind the scenes. These plagiarism allegations didn’t come out of nowhere. They emerged from a complex web of tips, and axes to grind. The whole picture may never be clear, but it’s useful to examine what we do know…because a close reading of one academic’s footnotes and quotation marks became a referendum on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Eight years after the Yale Halloween costume flap that crystallized things for Aaron Sibarium, he landed a story that helped to oust a college president.

But: Sibarium didn’t get to break that news. Because hours before The Free Beacon published his story, he was scooped by another critic of campus life.

SIBARIUM: I was just kind of like, like, I'm not the first one. Damn it.

MARRITZ: And behind that scoop there’s a tale involving one of America’s most active culture warriors.

In 2019, a man named Christopher Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox, for the very first time. He was talking about the homelessness problem in Seattle, where he then lived. Rufo’s look is clean-cut young dad. He speaks in complete, forceful sentences. He must have made good TV, because he was invited back.

By 2020 Rufo had pivoted from quality of life issues in cities to a different problem:

RUFO clip: Critical race theory in simple terms is an academic discipline that holds that the United States was founded on racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and that those forces are still at the root of our society today.

RUFO clip: Tucker, this is something I’ve been investigating for the last 6 months and it's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government.

RUFO clip: It's not a benign philosophy about teaching racism; it's a radical philosophy that’s rooted in Marxism.

MARRITZ: Right after one of these appearances, then-president Trump ordered government agencies to cut back sensitivity training programs. There seemed to be a direct line from Rufo on the TV to an executive order, as The New York Times noted.

Now - so many of Harvard’s critics are alumni. Elise Stefanik, Bill Ackman, and so on. Not so many people know that around this time, Christopher Rufo enrolled at Harvard.

Specifically, he entered a master’s program, getting his degree in 2022. It was at the Harvard Extension School, a way easier to get into institution than other Harvard schools. It’s designed for working adults, and much of the instruction happens online.

When Rufo published his book, “America’s Cultural Revolution”, his dust jacket bio touted his masters from Harvard.

Rufo’s book has become a bible to the critics of wokeness at universities. It traces the intellectual roots of current efforts at diversity and racial reconciliation, back to the radicals of the 1960s and 70s. He promoted the book on podcasts.

RUFO clip: The critical race theorists were very focused on building a pedagogy.

MARRITZ: When their revolutions failed, he says, they retreated to the universities, incubating many of the concepts that have become huge today.

RUFO clip: Systemic racism, whiteness, white privilege, intersectionality, etc., These kind of core set of ideas that are now ubiquitous at one time were really marginal academic ideas limited to just very few of these scholars and intellectuals.

MARRITZ: For some influential Harvard alums, Rufo’s ideas were transformative. Bill Ackman, hedge fund billionaire, twitter influencer, Harvard College class of ‘88 called Rufo’s book, “America’s Cultural Revolution” quote, “one of the more important books I’ve read.”And another hedge fund billionaire, and Harvard College grad – class of ‘89, Ken Griffin, has referred to quote, “this cultural revolution in American education.”

Just a few months earlier, Griffin seemed to be happy with Harvard. In the spring of 2023, the university announced a 300 million dollar gift from Griffin to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, then led by Claudine Gay. Totally unrestricted.

Within a year, he changed his tune completely, calling American college students

KEN GRIFFIN: Frankly, just like whiny snowflakes.

GRIFFIN: Like, where are we going with education in elite schools in America? (applause)

MARRITZ: Christopher Rufo wasn’t done shining a bright, blinding light on universities. Because on December 10th, 2023, one day ahead of Aaron Sibarium, he published an article breaking the news of Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism. Then he went on TV again.

RUFO clip: The facts are clear and now the decision that has to made is a very simple one - does Harvard value veritas or truth or does Harvard value DEI or having the right race and gender symbolism at the top of its university hierarchy

MARRITZ: We asked Rufo for an interview, more than once. He declined comment.

But. Rufo had a co-author. Who did speak.

AIDAN RYAN: How, how'd you get the story, you know, how, what, what led you to want to pursue that?

MARRITZ: The Boston Globe’s media reporter, Aidan Ryan, Harvard College class of 2021, talked with the co-author last January.

BRUNET: I'm not sure how familiar you are with my whole involvement in this,

MARRITZ: Meet Chris Brunet. Yes, another Chris. He’s a substacker from Canada.

BRUNET: I was working as an investigative journalist at The Daily Caller News Foundation.

MARRITZ: The Daily Caller News Foundation is a nonprofit connected with an outrage-fueled media company that was co-founded by none other than the man who nurtured Chris Rufo’s career: Tucker Carlson.

Brunet told Aidan that he was the one who brought the story to Rufo. Here’s how he says it happened. Brunet had suspected a different Harvard government scholar of falsifying data. By the way, that was never proven. But in the course of his digging, Brunet got interested in Claudine Gay.

BRUNET: …and then I wrote several articles about her.

MARRITZ: The Daily Caller didn’t want Brunet’s reporting, so he published on his substack.

BRUNET: I thought my articles were super damning, but once again, they didn't have any impact. Partly because I kind of discredited myself by just not being professional enough. And I was, like, writing angry screeds. Pretty much. And so, my articles kind of fell flat.

MARRITZ: A year passed. Claudine Gay was elevated to President. And a tip came in.

BRUNET: which actually contained a firm plagiarism accusation — finally.

MARRITZ: Much like the tip Aaron Sibarium saw, at The Free Beacon, this one said Gay’s articles lifted from other scholars’ work. Brunet then approached Chris Rufo…

BRUNET: I didn't really know him before. Like we were mutuals on twitter. But I needed firepower, so I brought it to him.

MARRITZ: Rufo was interested. They spent a few days reporting it out.

BRUNET: And we published it. And his initial tweet got at first, it got 100 million impressions, it’s probably like 200 million now.

MARRITZ: After years of digging in the wilderness, Brunet finally had a reporting coup that would get him noticed. He told Aidan he had actually logged his own time in academia – he wasn’t just reporting on it. Brunet previously had been a research assistant to an economist at U Chicago who came under attack from other economists for comparing BLM activists calling to defund the police to “flat earthers.” The professor still has his job. Brunet defended the professor on Fox News.

BRUNET: That more or less got me rejected from every PhD program I applied to. I was cancelled, pretty much. That was pretty nakedly my motivation, so I was angry …

MARRITZ: So. You could say resentment of academia was one motive behind the very first story about Claudine Gay and plagiarism. But who was Chris Brunet’s source? What was their motive?

Brunet isn't saying.

Still. If you talk with people inside the government department at Harvard, the place Chris Brunet was writing about, and not getting a lot of pickup, people who were there at the time remember one particular grad student who seemed to be struggling with their coursework. This student hurled a lot of accusations at a lot of people in the department about scholarly misconduct.

We really don’t know whether this person was the source. When I reached them by email, they didn’t confirm or deny any role. But they did include in the message the ugliest things I have ever seen written about Claudine Gay.

Just a note: the Chris-and-Chris reporting team is no more. After their initial success, Rufo steered a fellowship to Brunet to support his work. But then, according to Rufo, Brunet started a lot of fights with their colleagues. He also spread anti-semitic content online, and called Rufo “an Israeli asset.” According to Brunet, Rufo has blocked him on Twitter.

[BREAK]

MARRITZ (on tape): So um I have, I have so many questions..

MARRITZ: I asked the Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium to help me untangle how he and the Chrises, Rufo and Brunet, came to report close to the same story at nearly the same moment. Rufo has called it a “team effort.”

MARRITZ (on tape): Were you aware of each other reporting? Did you know somebody else was on this story? Were you guys communicating at all?

SIBARIUM: No. I did not. And there was absolutely no coordination of any kind. And I genuinely did not know that they were on this.

MARRITZ: Sibarium says it was pure happenstance. In fact, he was a little upset when the Chrises published first. But then he saw the effect of one story landing right after the other, and he was pleased.

SIBARIUM: There was this really effective almost one two punch

MARRITZ: What’s more, it created a permission structure - Sibarium’s words - for mainstream outlets to pick up a story they might not have assigned on their own.

SIBARIUM: And from that moment on, uh, the narrative just totally was out of the control of Harvard.

MARRITZ: The New York Times was particularly activated, pulling in reporters from other beats to cover the story. I counted close to 50 pieces in the Times focused on this crisis, just in the three weeks between the plagiarism allegations surfacing, and Gay’s resignation as president.

The Boston Globe went big too, of course. Hometown paper. One editorial blamed Harvard for “muddying what should be a clear-cut line” about plagiarism “in its effort to defend Gay.”

Still, I was curious about the origin of Sibarium’s reporting, which like the Chrises’ began with a tip. He wrote that his source was a professor at another university.

MARRITZ (on tape): You wrote that you verified their identity, but um, I don't believe you told us who they are. I don't know who they are. Um, what can you say about the source of the allegations?

SIBARIUM: I mean, I can't say much more than what was reported, which was that anonymous individual who's a professor at another university.

MARRITZ: It’s kind of stunning how many tips were circulating about Gay’s scholarship in the fall of 2023. Aaron Sibarium got one, so did Chris Brunet. I’ve seen a tip, from an anonymous email account, sent to out the day before the big House hearing, apparently to five different news outlets. On top of that, the New York Post had been working on its own plagiarism story. But when the Post approached Harvard for comment, Harvard’s lawyers responded that publishing the piece could be defamation.

SIBARIUM: That did, I think, create a rational fear, in the complainant's mind and reinforced the complainant's desire to be anonymous.

In terms of my own, and I think other people's motivations for this story, I just think it is newsworthy that the president of the most famous university in the world plagiarized.

MARRITZ: All that said – For a guy who enjoys the cut and thrust of debate, Sibarium also concedes a lot of points. It’s like he thinks, on some level, the whole storm around Claudine Gay was an overreaction.

The alleged plagiarism. Not that bad.

SIBARIUM: It was not on the same level as a lot of other people who have since been caught up in plagiarism scandals.

MARRITZ: Was she really the apostle of DEI she’d been made out to be? Ehhhhh…..

SIBARIUM: Um, I honestly don't, even though I was emphasizing the DEI stuff, I, I kinda get the sense that she embraced that, in large part, because she thought that's what everyone wanted to hear.

MARRITZ: And what about his own work? Pointing a big finger at real people, academics and administrators. He told me he feels badly when one of these people becomes a target for hate. But to write about an issue you need a protagonist.

SIBARIUM: It's frankly impossible to scrutinize them without there being some kind of main characters who get caught in the crossfire.

MARRITZ: He told me about some deans at Columbia, whose text messages he obtained and reported on. They contained some troubling stereotypes about Jews.

SIBARIUM: It wasn't like virulent anti Semitism, but it kind of, they maybe touched on some tropes that were troubling. They ended up resigning. Do I think that all of those deans are like evil monsters who hate Jews. No, like, of course not.

Marritz (on tape): Um, but you know, that's how your stories are gonna occur for people when they see them…

SIBARIUM: I know. I, I know. I know. I just don't know any other way to surface this stuff.

MARRITZ: In 2015 Sibarium was appalled by what he saw as politically correct posturing at Yale that targeted two administrators over halloween costumes. He might say it’s not a fair comparison, but it’s worth pointing out that in 2023 he and the Chrises did the reporting that fueled the social media pile-on that helped to take down Claudine Gay.

While Aaron Sibarium and Christopher Rufo were not cooperating on their plagiarism reporting, there is a link. Their paychecks. Both men’s earnings depend in part, on the generosity of a billionaire hedge funder you haven’t met yet.

SINGER: Professors … they are mostly hopeless beyond repair.

MARRITZ: Paul Singer, Harvard Law class of 1969, doesn’t do a lot of public speaking. But when he does… he does not hold back.

SINGER: The minuscule number of ones who are not radical left-wing dolts, clutching Mao's little red book, are huddled together in basements, whispering the truth while the thugs and deranged are upstairs on the quad, screaming at Jews.

MARRITZ: At a Manhattan Institute dinner last summer, Singer ripped universities as havens for marxists and Jew haters. Singer is the major funder of The Free Beacon, where Aaron Sibarium published his scoop. He’s also a funder and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, where Christopher Rufo is a scholar. That means both men’s work is supported by a very rich man who is clearly very, very angry about the direction universities have taken. Singer declined to comment.

Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard on January second, 2024, exactly four weeks after the House hearing.

She wrote in a message to the community: “when my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.”

It does appear that Gay was steered towards the job. I learned, in the course of reporting this story, that she was asked by the Harvard Corporation, more than once, to put her name forward for president. She was one of three Black women to be made deans by the previous president, Larry Bacow. Bacow was known as someone with a knack for nurturing talent.

One could argue the Harvard Corporation should have done more to vet her. And once she was hired, that they should’ve prepared for a possible backlash.

RUFO clip: Claudine Gay is now gone, we’ve exposed the DEI regime and there’s much more to come.

MARRITZ: The day after Claudine Gay resigned, Christopher Rufo claimed credit for Gay’s downfall, with a piece in The Wall Street Journal. “Throughout the campaign,” he wrote “I adopted the unorthodox approach of narrating the strategy in real time, explaining how conservatives could shape the media narrative and apply pressure to Harvard.” He linked the offensive against Harvard to ones against Disney, Target, and Bud Light. And noted approvingly that Florida, Texas, and other states have banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

MUHAMMAD: So in public universities there have been somewhere around 100 bills in states across the country of which a number of them have passed that have rendered illegal, DEI offices at universities.

MARRITZ: Muhammad is probably the university’s most vocal defender of DEI programs. Although he’s about to leave Harvard for Princeton. Muhammad was already tracking the backlash to DEI, when it came for him.

MUHAMMAD: I can show you right now on my computer. It doesn't take much.

MARRITZ: On his office computer, he pulled up a clip from the same House Education Committee hearing where Claudine Gay gave testimony.

MARRITZ (on tape): Show me, show me. Let's do that.

MUHAMMAD: Sure, sure. Absolutely.

MARRITZ: before any of the college presidents had the chance to speak.

FOXX: It’s clear that rabid anti semitism in the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another.

MARRITZ: In her opening remarks, Virginia Foxx, the committee chair, called out a class that Muhammad was teaching that semester. He calls it a “mouth-drop moment.”

FOXX: A prime example of this ideology at work is at Harvard

MUHAMMAD: Here it comes

FOXX: where classes are taught, such as DP385

MUHAMMAD: It’s DPI

FOXX: Race and racism in the making of the United States as a global power.

MUHAMMAD: Yeah, boom, there it is. It's like, whoa, really? So the first class mentioned in the world is my class, scientific racism. And then she goes on to say two more

FOXX: history and recent perspectives. Even the Harvard Divinity School has a page devoted to quote social and racial justice.

MARRITZ: Muhammad’s course is called Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power. It includes readings on anti-semitism in the United States, and the race laws Nazi Germany adopted on the road to murdering millions of Jews. I asked Virginia Foxx how she became aware of the course. She didn’t answer that, but a spokesperson said it’s “emblematic” of the oppressor-oppressed framework she says fuels antisemitism on college campuses.

Fox seems to be saying that a course which includes teachings about antisemitism was now evidence of how universities encourage antisemitism.

For Muhammad, this is when we entered upside-down world.

MUHAMMAD: How did a concern about what the university leadership was doing to protect Jews come to blaming me and others who teach about race and racism on this campus as the root cause of the problem?

MARRITZ: Muhammad freely concedes that some DEI workshops can alienate people. As for where Jews, and anti-semitism fit in, he says the DEI framework was originally conceived around racial, not religious identity. It missed a lot.

MUHAMMAD: So is it a fair criticism that many DEI offices weren't built to address religious based discrimination? Yes, I would agree.

MARRITZ: That’s changing now, he says.

What I see is that DEI has become one of those terms that’s prisoner to our increasingly stupid, social media-fueled discourse.

BASH: Governor, some Republicans are trying to blame the bridge collapse on policies that encourage workplace diversity.

MARRITZ: For example: this absolutely incredible exchange between CNN’s Dana Bash, and Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, after the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed. Moore is Black.

BASH: A Utah State representative who is running for governor tweeted, quote, this is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well being and security of citizens.

MARRITZ: The Key Bridge was completed in 1977. It was rammed by a container ship.

BASH: Another Republican running for Congress in Florida posted “DEI did this.” What's your response?

MARRITZ: Actually, let’s not hear Governor Moore’s response. Let’s look at the effects of the DEI panic.

MUHAMMAD: Slavery, for example, cannot be taught in the state of Texas currently,

MARRITZ: To kids in school.

MUHAMMAD: except as an aberration with America's founding principles of liberty. But it's more of a contradiction because we have a very difficult time explaining why we had slavery longer than we've had freedom in this country. So it doesn't actually make sense. It doesn't pass academic muster. It is a lie. Texas is legislating a lie.

MARRITZ: The DEI panic had the most success, initially, in red states, and in public institutions. Now, Muhammad says, it’s making inroads in elite, private schools.

Just four years ago, Claudine Gay’s predecessor as president, Larry Bacow, started using terms like “structural racism” and “white supremacy.” The university accelerated a “diversity plan.”

You could say the rapid adoption of inclusion programs at places like Harvard and Disney was its own kind of social media-fueled contagion. In any case, it’s over now.

Harvard’s new president does still talk about diversity as a core value. But Muhammad sees quiet retrenchment.

MUHAMMAD: They haven't yet dismantled the offices that were built, uh, but there is almost no public defense of the work, uh, coming from Harvard University, and you can find mostly silence across higher education amongst the most powerful universities, many of which were taking a leadership role in this work.

MARRITZ (on tape): Was it, was it possibly a mistake? I mean, given the ferocity of the counter reaction, and as you say, the fact that in many parts of the country now, a lot of this history can't even be taught, or not taught with the fullness that, that, that you feel it deserves…Was it a mistake to pursue DEI in this way in the first place? Is there any other way to get to the conversation that you think that America needs to have?

MUHAMMAD: No. No.

MARRITZ (on tape): You would do it all again?

MUHAMMAD: I'd do it all again, yes. Because you cannot solve for people who are committed to structural racism and forms of neocolonialism by appeasing them. You cannot solve that problem. There is no pathway to justice but through truth and education, period.

MARRITZ: There is an insane circularity to these fights. The critics say that college campuses have become ideologically rigid, and intolerant of dissenting viewpoints - especially conservative ones. This is what Aaron Sibarium saw in the Halloween costume controversy.

Their solution - as espoused by Virginia Foxx, and Chris Rufo - is to drop DEI, to tell teachers what they can and cannot teach, and to silence liberal voices.

So who here really believes in free speech? And academic freedom.

MUHAMMAD: In the December 5th testimony, if you go back and listen to it, the solution to anti Semitism was education, was training. Every faculty member and every student at your university should be taught about the history of anti-Semitism. How many classes do you have on anti-Semitism? How many Jews are teaching the history of their people? I mean, so, they're right, actually. Which only shows you the moral duplicity in their critique of race and racism as something that is destroying higher education, that promotes censorship, doesn't promote free thinking.

MARRITZ: In the months after Claudine Gay resigned, Chris Rufo lobbed accusations at more Black women at Harvard saying their scholarly work was inferior. Those women kept their jobs.

Pro-Palestinian encampments sprouted up on campuses across the country, keeping colleges in the headlines.

TRUMP: The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that

MARRITZ: And the founder of Trump University, a now-defunct unaccredited, for profit, sham institution of learning promised to use the power of the government to squeeze real universities.

TRUMP: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

MARRITZ: That’s next week, in the third, and final episode of The Harvard Plan.