Come At Me, Bro | Opinion

Recently, the Harvard administration has engaged in an admirable strategy which might be summarized as: “We shall fight in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. We shall fight in mild-mannered Jewish doctor interviews with the Wall Street Journal. We shall fight in the court of public opinion by subtly taking on many of the reforms that are being asked of us, but claiming we were going to do it all along.”

It is hard to tell which approach, exactly, would land with the Trump administration. Some have argued that the MAGA right only respects self-respect, and that in order to win against Trump we need to stand up and be strong. (That hasn’t worked yet.) Some argue that there is no way to win, and universities must swallow major concessions in order to retain their funding. (So far that hasn’t worked, either.)

I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success. Secretary, I hope you brought your mouth guard.

Linda — can I call you Linda? — I’ve spent weeks trying to get into your head. My Google Docs is littered with abandoned drafts for every time you have promised this is really it, you are really taking Harvard’s funding this time, no please notice me, here goes another $60 million.

But I have been met with failure. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get married at 17, or because I’ve never witnessed my husband get his head shaved by Donald Trump on national television, or because my pedagogical experience leans more front-of-classroom, rather than distributing-bookmarks-featuring-scantily-clad-lady-wrestlers. Some way or another, I’ve never been quite able to figure out how you think.

Until now.

Secretary, you spent nearly three decades as a WWE executive, where you orchestrated such spectacles as “The Undertaker vs. Kane: WrestleMania XIV” and “WWF Badd Blood: In Your House.” Suffice to say, you respect a good fight. And thus I say: Come at me, bro.

In my Jewish name you and your entourage have destroyed research on cancer and heart disease, threatened to essentially deport my friends, and tried to increase Harvard’s tax burden fifteenfold. Stop it. Put that down. Let’s settle this like biological women: knock-down, TKO, cage match.

Each of us will get a backup. I choose Joe Blitzstein, he’s huge. You can have Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem; I’ll be sure to hide my dog. If Harvardians are really the lib wimps you say we are, surely you aren’t afraid to throw hands.

Some might argue that putting somebody in a figure-four leg lock has little relevance to “combating antisemitism” or “encouraging common-sense reforms of disciplinary procedures and ideological bias in hiring.” I would argue, though, that choreographed physical violence has about as much to do with the issues at hand as the current strategy of slashing research funding via Twitter diatribes and Canva graphics. Cut the political kayfabe. You want to make us bleed? Then why not just throw a chair at us.

I know, I know, that all this is really because Harvard is the symbol of everyone’s least favorite concept: the elite. But why don’t we make this whole punching bag metaphor literal? I understand if lucha libre is too ethnic for you; Anarchy in the Arena works too.

Right now, as a (non-Marxist) friend of mine wisely pointed out, “this is like in elementary school when one person doesn’t clean up snack so they take away snack for everyone.” We don’t need to indulge this ridiculous collective punishment, which if anything, is more similar to when one person doesn’t clean up snack, so they demolish the part of the classroom where that kid never plays anyway. I promise you, the “Free Palestine” people aren’t spending all their free time in the protozoa lab.

And I know, I know, you love the bit where you’re like “I am working tirelessly to protect the Jewish students abandoned by rabid antisemite Alan Garber!!!” But let me tell you, missy, when you threaten to deport my co-conspirator in writing the weekly Shabbat joke newsletter, along with the literal Israelis who I practice my literal Hebrew with on literal Wednesday mornings, then you really start to lose whatever credibility you had left.

Enough is enough (is enough). I’ll see you on the mat.

Yona T. Sperling-Milner ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Cabot House. Like Secretary McMahon, she too sometimes wonders, “Why is there so much HATE?”???