After a federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to stop Harvard University from enrolling foreign students, the Vice President of the United States JD Vance continued to attack the state of American higher education in broad strokes.
Taking aim at issues beyond the scope of the administration’s current accusations against Harvard, Vance wrote on Saturday on X: “There is an extraordinary ‘reproducibility crisis’ in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.”
[NOTE: The so-called crisis Vance addresses is not new, having been cited by a Stanford University researcher in 2005. Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research reported in 2024 that “in its most basic sense, the replication crisis refers to a pattern of scientists being unable to obtain the same results previous investigators found. At its most expansive, the crisis threatens the scientific enterprise itself, leading to questions not just about research practices and methods, but the very reliability of scientific results.”]
Vance continued with a litany of wide-ranging complaints: “Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.”
[NOTE: A 2021 study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, President Trump’s alma mater, revealed in that commercialization of academic scientific research is, in fact, common, but that the universities may not benefit commensurately. Wharton writes: “university research has produced pathbreaking innovations across many disciplines, many of which have been commercialized successfully. Yet, on average, universities capture 16% of the value they help create through licensing revenues or equity stakes in the startups their research spawns.”]
Vance also slammed colleges for the way professors allegedly vote, saying that “the voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.”
There is an extraordinary “reproducibility crisis” in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting…
— JD Vance (@JDVance) May 24, 2025
“And on top of all of this,” Vance claimed, “many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
“Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
“Or, they could yell ‘fascism’ at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.”
Vance is receiving backlash from political pundits including Jon Favreau, founder of Crooked Media and former head speechwriter for President Barack Obama.
The federal government just punished thousands of innocent students because a private university refused to violate their constitutional rights and allow the state to spy on them. You’re seriously referring to that as democratic accountability?
Your intellectual justifications…
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) May 24, 2025
Favreau replied to Vance: “The federal government just punished thousands of innocent students because a private university refused to violate their constitutional rights and allow the state to spy on them. You’re seriously referring to that as democratic accountability? Your intellectual justifications for your administration’s thuggish, unlawful behavior are insulting. At least your boss just owns it.”
Seattle political insider Ron Davis replied to Favreau: “They aren’t intellectual justifications though. JD knows these strung-together words fail to form an argument and would never pass muster in a serious classroom. He’s just plain full of [expletive] —sold his soul for power.”
NOTE: Vance is a graduate of Yale Law School, among the most prestigious academic institutions in America, where other notable graduates — spanning the political spectrum — include both former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor.