(NewsNation) — Bill O’Reilly has a message for Harvard in its battle with President Trump: “You’re flat-out wrong.”
Earlier this week, the university rejected the Trump administration’s demands to limit activism on campus. That decision prompted the federal government to freeze more than $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard.
The school’s focus on DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — has been at the center of the clash, but O’Reilly doesn’t think Harvard is sincerely committed to the idea because there are hardly any conservatives on campus.
“Your faculty is 90% radical left, you don’t hire moderate, traditional conservative professors,” O’Reilly said on “CUOMO” on Wednesday.
“Conservative, Republican students feel uneasy, threatened,” he said. “Jewish students feel uneasy.”
O’Reilly said the campus wasn’t always hostile to conservative viewpoints.
“When I went there and got my masters in the mid-90s, it wasn’t that way,” O’Reilly said. “It was a liberal culture, but other points of view were accepted.”
He added: “We all got along swell, the professors didn’t try to indoctrinate anybody.”
In a letter Monday, Harvard President Alan Garber said the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status.
O’Reilly thinks a lot of the Trump administration’s threats would go away if the school proved it was committed to ideological diversity.
“If people were reasonable, this thing could be solved, and I hope it is,” O’Reilly said.