Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe claimed Tuesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” that President Donald Trump’s actions against Harvard University are out of the “dictator’s handbook,” liking them to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Host Wolf Blitzer said, “Harvard University is filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration, accusing the White House of violating the First Amendment and freezing federal funding to the school.”
He asked, “Help us better understand the claim that Harvard is making.”
Tribe said, “Well, the basic claim is one that really connects what’s going on here to what’s gone on throughout history when autocrats and tyrants and basically mafia-like leaders decide that they really don’t want universities to be independent. Nice little university you have there, be a shame if something happened to it. That’s what Hitler basically said, although it sounds different in the original German when he said it to the university at Frankfurt and then took them over.”
He added, “If we allow the government to take over private institutions that are centers of innovation, of medical advances, of advances in philosophy, of better understandings of history, we will play into the dictator’s handbook, because that is what dictators want. They want to shut down independent thought and centers of potential opposition.”
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