During the dozen years between little league play and my high school graduation, the New York Yankees won seven pennants and lost another three. If you were a fan of an American League team, it meant the Yankees grabbed 10 of 12 championships. There was no more hated baseball team in the country. That didn’t mean individual players weren’t admired. Mickey Mantle, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, Roger Maris, Billy Martin and pitchers like Whitey Ford and Don Larsen, who threw the only perfect game in World Series history, were admired from coast to coast. Baseball was the national sport during the 1950s in part because its athletes didn’t have to be 300 pounds or seven feet tall to find their way into baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

President Donald Trump is gambling that Harvard University, hands down the premier higher education institution in the nation, is just as reviled today as the Yankees were during their glory years. That’s a dubious wager. The number of Americans who roll out of bed each morning asking themselves, “What can I do today to besmirch the reputation of Harvard?” seems confined to a handful of MAGA acolytes working at the White House. There is little doubt a Harvard credential carries a scent of privilege and durable advantage. Winning admission involves a byzantine selection process that can favor applicants’ choices made in elementary school. There is ample reason to resent, even revile, the intrinsic elitism of the process. One thing which remains largely unchallenged is both students and professors are a damned smart bunch of people.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

President Trump would like us to believe, as he accused recently on Truth Social, that Harvard University is a, “…threat to democracy,” explaining, “Harvard is an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution… with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart. The place is a Liberal mess allowing a certain group of crazed lunatics to enter and exit the classroom and spew fake ANGER AND HATE.” A surprising number of these foreign haters reside here for the remainder of their lives. Yale law graduate and Vice-President JD Vance has piled on, charging, “Universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth.” If this crusade against Harvard sounds a little overwrought, you might be on to something. Harvard pre-dates the U.S. Constitution by 150 years, and more than a few of its graduates signed the Declaration of Independence and later attended the Constitutional Convention.

So, why did it take another 240 years to notice Harvard had become a “national disgrace”, a “woke madrassa”, a “ship of fools” and a “Maoist indoctrination camp” according to its critics? Gerard Baker, writing on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this past week, sounds a more restrained alarm, suggesting Harvard, “Through its hiring practices and teaching, has created an oppressively intolerant monocultural intellectual microclimate.” This conclusion is a good bit more erudite than the president’s suggestion the University has been “…hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and birdbrains who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.” Dr. Steven Pinker, noted conservative professor of psychology at Harvard University, has identified these imprecations as “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.”

Perhaps most perplexing is why any politician thinks he or she has the right to tell a private educational institution how to conduct its affairs. The president and his minions have demanded control of Harvard’s hiring, admissions, curricula choices (classes) and the administration of student discipline. On what basis, in a free country, does the federal government have any right to issue such ultimatums? I suspect Harvard operates under some version of non-profit agency established by Congress, but this legal arrangement does not permit government to seize control of the university. Nor has it prevented Harvard from accruing a $50 billion alumni endowment. These funds will see the university through the next few years, even if stripped of further research revenues from Uncle Sam.

As Pinker explains, “The Trump administrations punitive defunding of science at Harvard won’t work. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country.”

Trust me, private-sector companies will rush to fund Harvard’s laboratories. They are the best in the world, staffed by the finest scientists on the planet. We need to keep them that way. If the White House doesn’t approve of the way they conduct their admissions, my suggestion is, “Don’t apply to Harvard.” I did in 1963 and was offered a place in the freshman class. Meanwhile, I was awarded a National Merit Scholarship at the University of Maryland — they were not transferrable then — which paid 100% of my expenses. I opted to become a Terp.

During my sophomore year I enrolled for two semesters in classes taught by a young assistant professor, Alice Rivlin. I’m fairly certain she was the same Alice Rivlin who would move on to manage the Congressional Budget Office and then serve a turn as Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. On our first day of class, she informed us she graduated from Harvard (fact check: her Ph.D. was earned at Radcliffe College, the distaff arm of Harvard), and she would be grading us on the same standard she would use with students at Harvard. I escaped with an A and a B, which told me I likely could have held my own in Cambridge. In another 250 years, I suspect Harvard will still stand as the flagship among American universities and its 21st century critics be relegated to a mere footnote in its illustrious history. There’s nothing contradictory with respecting snobs who “kinda” annoy you from time to time.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.