Harvard could lose Tax-exempt Status

AP reports:

For more than a century, the majority of colleges and universities have not paid most taxes. The Revenue Act of 1909 excused nonprofits operating “exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes” in order to continue acting in the public interest.

President Donald Trump is looking to challenge that designation, complaining that colleges and universities are “indoctrinating” their students with “radical left” ideas, rather than educating them. And he has decided to start with the 388-year-old Harvard University, one of the world's most prestigious institutions of learning and the first college founded in the American colonies.

This is not as ridiculous as it sounds. The precedent here is Bob Jones University v. United States, where a college lost its tax-exempt status for similar reasons, and in 1983 lost 8-1 in the US Supreme Court. Bob Jones eventually gave into pressure and changed its policy in 2000, and got its tax-exempt status back in 2017.

Perhaps you will say that the case is not comparable, because Harvard is noble and honorable, and Bob Jones is so repugnant. The Bob Jones issue was that it was religiously opposed to interracial marriage. The Court acted as if there were a national consensus to promote interracial marriage, and so the Congress laws can be ignored.

I do not think that there was any such consensus, but that is not for me to say. That was considered racial discrimination, and now Harvard has been found guilty of even worse racial discrimination. It fought and lost at the Supreme Court, and it appears to be continuing its previous practices. It is also doing many other things that Trump could declare to be against the public interest.

You might say that the President should not have so much power. Or that colleges should have some First Amendment rights. But who spoke for Bob Jones in 1983? Almost no one. Even the court lone dissent was weak.

For some expert legal opinion, here is a famous Harvard Law professor predicting that Harvard would lose a court battle. The administration wants to settle, but the faculty does not.