Welcome back to the City Journal podcast.

I'm your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the senior editor of City Journal.

Today on our panel, I am joined by Judge Glock, Economics Policy Guy at the Manhattan

Institute, Rothman Gwahl, our crime policy expert, and today we're special guest, Heather

McDonald, Thomas Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and of course, a contributing editor

of City Journal, longtime champion of City Journal. Heather, thank you so much for joining us.

I want to get us right into the news of the day. We've been following very closely this Harvard case,

the conflict between the Trump administration and Harvard University. On Monday, Harvard brought suit against the administration, alleging a variety of both procedural and substantive violations. The administration, meanwhile, has sort of tried to backtrack on its particularly aggressive ask of Harvard, saying basically, we didn't really mean to send you that memo.

Heather, you wrote in CJ, I think last week about the administration's movement on Harvard,

and you should have said that it's going in the right direction, but they're going about it

in a somewhat a blundering way. Can you elaborate

a little bit on how you're thinking about that and how you thought about their initial actions?

Well, it's very frustrating for me, Charles, because I will secede to no one in my hatred for

universities. I think they are the driving force for the anti-Western hatred that is pulling down our civilization,

that is destroying meritocracy, that is breeding division, that is breeding falsehood.

You know, they are currently constantly talking about themselves as so fanatically dedicated to the unfettered pursuit of truth. Well, that's completely wrong

as far as the unfettered pursuit goes because they are absolutely involved in shutting down

contrary unorthodox viewpoints. And they are taking us in the opposite direction of truth. So I'm all for uprooting

them. I'm just very uncertain that the government, the federal government, is the right

entity to do so. And this puts me in a difficult position, but I do think that conservatives

above all have to believe and maintain

the idea that the federal government is limited in its powers. It can act only on the basis

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