‘Barely literate’: Education secretary’s ‘deranged’ letter gets  major red ink corrections

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is facing criticism for a hyper-partisan letter she sent to Harvard University, riddled with grammatical errors and dubious claims.

In the 979-word statement, the Trump administration, through McMahon, condemned Harvard’s admissions policies, staffing decisions, and institutional leadership, and informed the nation’s oldest university, a 388-year-old private Ivy League institution, that it will not receive new federal research grants.

“Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country—and why is there so much HATE?” Secretary McMahon asked in the opening paragraph of her three-page letter.

“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claimed.

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“This year Harvard was forced to adopt an embarrassing ‘remedial math’ program for undergraduates,” the Education Secretary declared. “Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this ‘acclaimed university’? Who is getting in under such a low standard when others, with fabulous grades and a great understanding of the highest levels of mathematics, are being rejected?”

The Harvard Crimson last September reported that “the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.”

“Much of Harvard’s hateful discrimination was revealed, last year,” McMahon charged, “by the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, and her Committee. As if it were trying to embarrass itself even further, Harvard hired failed Mayors Bill De Blasio and Lori Lightfoot, perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history, to supposedly teach ‘leadership’ at their School of Public Health. This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation to future captains of the sea.”

McMahon also took issue with “strongly left-leaning Obama political appointee Penny Pritzker, a Democrat operative,” being elected to lead the Harvard Corporation. She described the former Obama Cabinet secretary as “catastrophic and running the institution in a totally chaotic way.”

The Education Secretary also blasted Harvard for allegedly failing “to abide by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing [sic],” and for allegedly continuing “to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools, and even within the Harvard Law Review itself. Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence and achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans.”

McMahon also demanded Harvard’s “cooperation with Law Enforcement, and reporting compliance with the Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, and other Federal Agencies.”

She ended the angry missive in a very Trumpian fashion: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Critics blasted McMahon.

“Did you use A1 to write this,” asked investigative reporter Roger Sollenberger, mocking the Education Secretary’s embarrassing remarks confusing artificial intelligence (AI) with the popular steak sauce (A1).

“Whoever wrote this is barely literate,” declared The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg.

“Did a high school kid write this?” asked veterans’ activist and podcaster Fred Wellman. “You’re the Secretary of ‘Education’ and this is a chaotic mess of bad grammar and illiterate rambling. You poked the bear and you’re too stupid to even know it.”

Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, wrote:

“Informing a private entity it will no longer be eligible for government contracts in part because a Democrat sits on its board.”

She added, “what’s terrible is that the administration had many natural allies in academia – professors who wanted more diversity in thought, fewer regulations governing research funding, higher & consistent academic standards, and better protections of academic speech,” and noted: “But not like this!”

“It may be wise for a private institution to have wide ideological diversity in its membership and leadership,” She also noted. “But the government may not mandate it, nor make it a requirement for applying for unrelated funding.”

Journalist John Harwood wrote simply, “this letter is deranged.”

In addition to criticism of the content, some offered red-inked corrections that appear to be major:

See the social media posts above or at this link.