'I hate Harvard,' says Sen. Dan Sullivan, boosting the Trump assault on higher education
“I hate Harvard,” Sen. Dan Sullivan said, according to reporting in the Baltimore Banner. “I’ve been fighting it since I graduated.”
I don’t remember Sullivan explaining his Harvard hatred to Alaskans before, but his attack on one of the world’s leading institutions of higher learning is what to expect from a Trump toady.
Sullivan claimed that as a student 40 years ago at Harvard he “saw his university disparage military service,” Baltimore Banner columnist Rick Hutzell wrote.
“Now he says all college professors beyond service academy walls teach that there is no honor in fighting for your country,” Hutzell said.
He could have earned a degree in pandering from Trump University.
Sullivan’s slamming of higher education, claiming he is not proud of his Harvard connections, echoes that of fellow humble bragger Pete Hegseth, the Harvard man who made a big show of scribbling all over his diploma on TV in 2022 and claiming he was going to send it back.
Sullivan made his anti-Harvard remarks during a May 5 meeting of the Naval Academy Board of Visitors, the organization that helps guide the Naval Academy, another one of the world’s leading institutions of higher learning.
Sullivan is the chairman of the Naval Academy advisory board, which is supposed to “inquire into the state of morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods, and other matters,” according to the Navy.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, another board member, proposed that the group advise the Naval Academy to overturn the banning of 381 library books deemed unacceptable by the Trump regime.
Van Hollen said that banning library books does nothing to prepare young people to become leaders with the ability to think for themselves.
More than 600 graduates of the Naval Academy signed a letter objecting to the Trump book purge and other actions that have damaged the integrity of the institution. They said effective leaders have to be free to pursue knowledge for its own sake.
It’s hard to argue with any of that, but the Alaska senator who says he has hated Harvard for 40 years said he didn’t understand Van Hollen’s proposal.
“In my time on the board, this is a rather unprecedented request,” Sullivan said, according to reporting by the Capital Gazette. “It’s a little confusing whether your motion lays out an objection to procedure or substance. The substance is still being shaped within the chain of command.”
Van Hollen released a statement later saying he put his proposal on hold pending a report from the Naval Academy superintendent on the book ban.
“The Naval Academy’s purge led to the removal of books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’ based on the list of 381 books that have been taken out of its library,” the Associated Press reported.
As of late May, the Navy had returned most of the books it had “sequestered” to the library shelves.
Regarding Sullivan and Harvard, in 2023 he joined other Republicans attacking the university and its students for not stopping protests regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
He said the situation was like Germany in the 1930s and he could see no difference between protesting actions by Israel and antisemitism.
In January, he complained on the Senate floor about the “explosion of antisemitism that we have seen at our so-called elite universities—I don’t call them elite—I just call them expensive, universities—on the campuses of the top universities in America, has been nothing short of astonishing, disgusting. I don’t know what other acronym, or adjective I can use Mr. President, but horrifying.”
“I witnessed this at my alma mater, Harvard, my wife and I went there. I don’t always talk about it because I’m not proud of it,” he said. “This university has huge problems.”
In 2023 he attended the Army-Navy game on Saturday in Boston and stopped by the Widener Library the next morning, where there was a peaceful protest against what the demonstrators claimed was genocide by Israel in Gaza.
“And there was a giant anti-Israel protest in this reading room. Shocking, Mr. President, what was going on at Harvard.”
“As I wrote then, I couldn’t believe this was happening. I took a picture. That’s a picture from my camera,” he said, referring to this column he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
“This giant anti-Israel protest in the middle of the biggest library, at one of the biggest libraries in America, the reading room at Harvard, pure antisemitism protest,” he said.
Responding to Sullivan, student Sanaa Kahloon challenged his interpretation and conclusions. There were students who had signs on their laptops opposing genocide and many wore keffiyehs, the scarf that shows solidarity with the Palenstinians, as they worked silently at library tables.
“There must be nothing more terrifying than watching college students take a nonviolent stand,” Kahloon said.
“Every day without a ceasefire is a day of unspeakable horror. Massacres, raids on hospitals, men stripped naked, women glassy-eyed, children in pieces—each day I watch death unfold on my screen in ways I could never have imagined,” she said.
The Harvard Crimson reported that more than 100 people took part in the silent “study-in,” an hour-long event calling for an end to the war in Gaza. This was two days after the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
After leaving the library, one of the organizers spoke at a rally and objected to the “dangerous conflation” of pro-Palestine speech with antisemitic speech.
In the Wall Street Journal column, Sullivan said he told a protester he was a senator and that he opposed a ceasefire because Israel had a right to defend itself. One of the protesters called him a murderer, he said, another said he supported genocide.
He said he was appalled because all this happened inside the library.
“My thoughts then turned to Harvard undergrads. Imagine if you were an 18-year-old Jewish or Israeli student, or even a pro-Israel Catholic like me, and you wanted to study for your chemistry final in the Widener Library reading room on a Sunday morning. This was on a Sunday morning. Imagine being confronted by this protest, obviously condoned by Harvard’s leadership. And commandeered by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, the antisemitic group behind the notorious statement that held Israel entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.”
“Would you feel welcome in Harvard’s most famous library? Would you feel rattled and intimidated and harassed by the anti-Israel banner screaming ‘Stop the Genocide in Gaza?’”
There was no place for dissent within the library, Sullivan claimed, and Harvard should have stopped it.
“Not all university leadership is so craven, morally bankrupt and afraid of the most vocal, radical sects of their own student bodies. I serve on the board of visitors for the U.S. Naval Academy, which is the No. 1 public university in America. The contrast couldn’t be starker between the service academies and the Ivy League on issues like civil discourse, so-called safe spaces, trigger warnings, American history and our unique and, yes, exceptional place in the world,” he said.
“America’s so-called elite universities used to be a positive source of our nation’s power, strength and influence. No longer. I believe over the past several weeks a bipartisan consensus has emerged: It is time for Congress to save these important and once-respected institutions from themselves and their weak leaders who have lost their moral compasses,” he said.
This from the same guy who can’t bring himself to denounce the Trump decision to ban hundreds of books from the Naval Academy library and won’t recognize or admit that the dangers identified by the 600 academy graduates.
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Sen. Dan Sullivan, speaking on the Senate floor in January, said a protest against genocide in Gaza that he witnessed inside a Harvard library in 2023 was antisemitic, but organizers said that trying to help the Palestinians is not the same as being antisemitic.