Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/business/trump-harvard-letter-mistake.html

Archived: https://archive.is/AM8Up

280 points · 38 comments · view on lemmy.world

38 Comments

catloaf@lemm.ee · 129 pts · 1y (2 replies)

Yeah once they actually get pushback it's all "oops we accidentally drafted, signed, and sent that letter, we didn't actually mean it". This is why everyone should have been pushing back since day one.

Tilgare@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1y

There's also the claim that it was sent too early, so regardless of what the error was, these were going to be the demands all along. They were just moving much slower in the discussion prior to the letter being sent. A wise attempt to boil the frog, and then somebody moved the pot over a rocket engine.

resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee · 3 pts · 1y

Union makes us strong.

jordanlund@lemmy.world · 116 pts · 1y (2 replies)

"Reign of Error".

Draegur@lemm.ee · 61 pts · 1y

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

As written in "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45" by Milton Mayer

veroxii@aussie.zone · 12 pts · 1y

Fuck that's good.

ButteryNickel@lemmy.wtf · 91 pts · 1y (2 replies)

Trump failed with Mexico and Canada when demanding they change their border policy. They stood up to him and he backed down.

Trump has failed repeatedly with his tariffs. When countries stood up to him, he backed down.

Trump failed to force the ivory-est of ivory towers to abandon DEI. They stood up to him, he's backing down.

Resistance. Is. Working.

InverseParallax@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 1y (1 reply)

It's not working, because too many ass clowns keep giving in.

kandoh@reddthat.com · 6 pts · 1y

Colombia and those law firms look like the jokes they are. The administrators of those places need to resign in disgrace

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · 59 pts · 1y

Translation: We thought we were gonna threaten them and they’d comply. They didn’t flinch, we feel silly, this was never the plan.

emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de · 43 pts · 1y (2 replies)

Holy fuck "viewpoint diversity" reads like the most dystopian thing I've ever seen. Basically boils down to 'you must also teach right wing beliefs even when they are near unanimously rejected by the scientific community'. If im reading that right it would mean they'd essentially have to have flat earth classes in the geography department alongside all the regular classes, and give them equal resources. Plus who knows what other bullshit. How do you draw a line when you're mandating thar schools teach fiction based on what your followers believe?

kandoh@reddthat.com · 3 pts · 1y

DEI for stupidity

HiddenLychee@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

Wow, you really can't make this up. Two paragraphs about how they need to foster "viewpoint diversity", whatever that means, and they need to keep hiring faculty and admitting students until they have it, followed by a paragraph saying "no diversity in skin color is allowed".

Like, are they are saying a physics department needs to have equal number of physicists and fucking dumbasses, but God forbid the department keep track of numbers to make sure they're not systematically ignoring black applicants.

orcrist@lemm.ee · 42 pts · 1y
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Chozo@fedia.io · 34 pts · 1y

Uh oh, Harvard staff better be on high alert. Last time the White House made an "administrative error", they sent somebody to a concentration camp before mocking him on social media.

dan1101@lemm.ee · 34 pts · 1y

Oops we accidentally sent you this email that we accidentally wrote.

Yeah that won't work.

magnetosphere@fedia.io · 29 pts · 1y (1 reply)

“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”

“Malpractice”? “Victimhood campaign”? Go fuck yourself, May.

frunch@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 1y

Yeah, "victimhood campaign" is probably the most blatant example of projection I've seen from them in a while, and that's really saying something for this group of fuckfaces

blakenong@lemmings.world · 26 pts · 1y

“It’s not our fault, it’s the fault of a mistake”

lol.

tal@lemmy.today · 26 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Let's see what other policies that meet with pushback can turn out to be inadvertent mistakes.

adespoton@lemmy.ca · 22 pts · 1y

Trump getting elected turns out to be an inadvertent mistake….

Wazowski@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 1y
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barnaclebutt@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 1y

Oh no. Just kidding! Fucking cowards...

melsaskca@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 1y

"Whoops! We fucked up." "Sir, tell them we made a mistake!" said a sycophant with tears streaming down his face.

Gates9@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Jerb322@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1y

I'm surrounded by Assholes

Chestnut@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 1y

Hire clowns, get a circus

HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 11 pts · 1y

BAHAHA

ThomasCrappersGhost@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 1y

Most smartest and bestest businessman ever.

Draegur@lemm.ee · 8 pts · 1y

yeah it was a mistake that he ever got elected.

Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1y

F'ed around with the wealthy and found out.

resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee · 7 pts · 1y

Sure was. Found out pretty quick.

Maeve@kbin.earth · 7 pts · 1y (4 replies)

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_University

Perhaps it's time for Harvard alumni to open the coffers and reject government funding.

This is how enlightenment ideas and ideals became and remained demonized, even in our most liberal of eras, in service of mammon. Now I see the deeper level of kenning in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown.

atzanteol@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1y (3 replies)

Open what coffers?

gt5@lemm.ee · 2 pts · 1y (2 replies)

I think they mean the $ 50 billion endowment

atzanteol@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 1y

How do you think an endowment works?

Maeve@kbin.earth · 1 pts · 1y

That and their own individual accounts.

Linktank@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 1y (1 reply)

There should be a sign that's like the likelihood of fire sign, except it just points to which stage of the narcissists prayer the Dump administration is using today.

Zippygutterslug@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1y

Today's Warning Level: Ketchup

kikutwo@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y

No backsies.