Fact Check: Did Harvard Correct 'Punctuation Mistakes' in Education Secretary Linda McMahon's Scathing Letter?
For the left, it sounds too good to be true: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon having her letter to Harvard being marked up with red ink for its punctuation and supposed logical errors … by Harvard University itself.
But is it true?
So, as you may know, the Trump administration has been locked in a pitched battle with the Ivy League institution over federal funding and the conditions attached to it.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the future of higher education hangs in the balance. If the Trump administration prevails, the strings the federal government attaches to money to institutes of higher education will be contingent on greater ideological neutrality and protections for students who face real, not imagined, persecution. (Jewish students, Asian students, conservatives, just to name a few groups.)
Meanwhile, if Harvard prevails in the American courts, the federal government will be essentially forced to fund academia no matter what it preaches to your children — and particularly if it preaches the leftist gospel it does now and allows pro-Hamas radicals to run roughshod over campuses.
McMahon put Harvard on notice — again — in a scathing letter dated Monday.
“The Federal Government has a sacred responsibility to be a wise and important steward of American taxpayer dollars,” she wrote.
“Harvard University, despite amassing a largely tax-free $53.2 billion dollar endowment (larger than the GDP of 100 countries), receives billions of dollars of taxpayer largess each year. Receiving such taxpayer funds is a privilege, not a right. Yet instead of using these funds to advance the education of its students, Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law.”
“At its best, a university should fulfill the highest ideals of our Nation, and enlighten the thousands of hopeful students who walk through its magnificent gates,” she continued.
“But Harvard has betrayed this ideal. Perhaps most alarmingly, Harvard has failed to abide by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing, and continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools, and even within the Harvard Law Review itself,” the letter noted.
“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.”
The letter implored the university to work with the administration or lose its funding and tax-exempt status; McMahon noted at the end that “today’s letter marks the end of new grants for the University.”
Dear @Harvard: pic.twitter.com/XmMimXfkX0
— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) May 5, 2025
The university wants both, of course. They also want to ridicule McMahon, a Tea Party darling and one-time Connecticut GOP Senate nominee.
To be fair, McMahon has made her share of solecisms in the role, including referring to “AI” as “A-1” during a recent speech. It’s hardly worth pointing how much more attention that gets than stuff like this did a few years back — but that’s spilled milk under the bridge, as Jeremy Irons’ character in “Margin Call” might have put it:
BIDEN: “God save the Queen!”
He’s in Connecticut. And the Queen is dead…
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 16, 2023
Anyway, plenty of social media accounts — including a Facebook one called “Trump’s Tiny Hands” shared a marked-up version of McMahon’s letter, with mistakes pointed out in red ink, purportedly from the university itself.
“Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote a letter to Harvard. The university responded by marking up the letter for spelling and punctuation mistakes, and then shared it on social media, because who doesn’t love a good roast?” the post read.
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Again, most of this wasn’t actually “A-1” stuff. One correction involved saying that McMahon should have said Harvard was “engaging in a systematic pattern of violating federal law” vs. “engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law,” which she wrote. Merriam-Webster, it’s worth noting, said this on the matter:
Systematic and systemic both come from system. Systematic is the more common word; it most often describes something that is done according to a system or method …
Systemic describes what relates to or affects an entire system. For example, a systemic disease affects the entire body or organism, and systemic changes to an organization have an impact on the entire organization, including its most basic operations.
Perhaps “pattern” might not have been the best word choice to follow “systemic,” but there’s little doubt to anyone who takes a close look at the matter that Harvard University has spent much time and effort over the past half-century building up an institution that now exists in systemic resistance to the strictures of federal law — along with reality and fairness, but that’s for another day.
Anyway, if you are a liberal and subscribe to “Trump’s Tiny Hands,” you probably got a laugh out of this mock college red-ink professorial rebuke from Harvard. However, not only is much of it specious, it’s also … not from Harvard, a fact which you might think people trying to own Education secretaries for being stupid might have checked.
You would have been wrong, and these soi disant geniuses weren’t the only ones to fall for it:
HARVARD WON THIS ROUND!
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote a letter to Harvard. The university responded by marking up the letter for spelling and punctuation mistakes- and then shared it on social media.
Your thoughts? pic.twitter.com/xL28iTTuxn
— Lovable Liberal and his Old English sheepdog (@DougWahl1) May 6, 2025
As it turns out, patient zero here was likely @danielluo_pi, who describes himself in his X account as being a “michelle steel hate account.” (Rep. Steel, who — unlike the British-Irish shoegaze band my bloody valentine, does not stylize her name in lowercase — is a California Republican who was defeated last November. Some people, apparently those without shift keys, cannot pull an Elsa and let it go.)
Or people with intermittently working period keys, for that matter. Just pointing that out, because if you’re going to be a pedant, you’d best come correct.
our secretary of “education” https://t.co/ds5cwk0uHl pic.twitter.com/4MR4DEydUZ
— daniel (michelle steel hate account) (@danielluo_pi) May 6, 2025
(“Come correct,” being slang, is exempt from hard-and-fast grammatical rules, just in case Daniel needs someone new to hate now that Steel is out of office.)
Point being, unless our friend here is a Harvard grad, Harvard had nothing to do with this — and, in an official capacity, it definitely had nothing to do with the pedantry that got passed around social media.
As a fact check, this gets an F. Not only did they not put in any original research, they didn’t even use ChatGPT, since even that lazy cheater’s tool managed to get it right.
When even AI — or A-1 — can manage to tell social media fact from fiction, it’s a sad day for those caught on the wrong side of the truth.
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