Harvard Takes a Stand; plus Musk and the Technocrats | Start Making Sense

While Trump’s attacks on the universities have broadened, and while Columbia is submitting to his requirements, Harvard’s president has declared that Harvard will not comply with the Trump’s demands in exchange for keeping its federal funding. David Cole comments - he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown.

Also: Elon Musk’s obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that’s what Jill Lepore has found. His ideas at DOGE seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. Jill Lepore teaches history and law at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker.