By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Donald Trump’s threats to withdraw federal funding from Harvard if it doesn’t comply with his demands presage his ultimate plan to transform the university into a propaganda arm of MAGA ideology. Here’s his plan:
The Harvard campus will be rebuilt adjacent to Mar-a-Lago. It will be renamed Trump University to revive the glory years of that prestigious institution of higher earning. The old campus will be destroyed and redeveloped as the Riviera on the Charles River featuring casinos, hotels, and golf courses.
The Harvard Kennedy School will be merged with the Harvard Medical School. Both will be called the Kennedy School in honor of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for sparing Americans from requiring painful inoculations. It will still specialize in training aspiring government employees and politicians to kowtow, parrot, and persecute dissidents. The International Relations program will be superseded by the America First Department since cultivating international relations will no longer be necessary when the United States fully embraces isolationism. The medical curriculum will consist of nutritional and physical education to eradicate disease. Thus, no research funding into cures and vaccines will be needed.
The Harvard Business School will streamline its curriculum for future MBAs into memorizing The Art of the Deal and designing a product to be marketed on Shark Tank whose judges will be Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. The winners will be awarded by one of these judges buying the rights to their products for a fraction of their anticipated profits. Once the winners are announced, tariffs will be imposed on similar foreign products.
The Andrew Jackson White Studies Department will offer courses that replace current Asian, Black, LatinX, and Native American courses. Similarly, the Harvard Divinity School will devote itself to the preaching of Christian nationalism with courses like the Abortion Holocaust, History of the War on Christmas, and Immorality of LGBTQ lifestyles. The Netanyahu Jewish Studies Department will be the one exception to Harvard’s evangelical mission. It will focus on protecting Jewish students from uncomfortable political opinions and promoting Israeli Manifest Destiny. It will be disbanded when Jesus returns to Israel and all the Jews in the world move there and accept Him as their Messiah. Women’s Studies will be converted into the Phyllis Schlafly School of Domesticity.
A Board appointed by the President will oversee hiring faculty. Prospective candidates will undergo lie detector tests, disclosure of social media posts, and proof of ancestry from Northwest European immigrants who legally came to the United States before the Civil War.
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Laurie Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University.
The definition of satire is “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” Transcribing? Has Trump announced he’ll move Harvard to Mar-a-Lago and repurpose the Boston campus as a resort etc.? Has he proposed that Harvard business school curriculum be reduced to reading his book and developing a Shark Tank proposal? Every one of the items I list is exaggeration and ridicule of his policies not a verbatim reiteration of them.
Where’s the fiction in all of this? Just transcribing Trump’s and Heritage Foundation’s notes doesn’t qualify as satire.
So true. I guess we live in a satire-proof age.