Check Your Work
The Trump Administration has been at odds with a variety of institutions of higher learning, threatening to withhold federal dollars if certain requirements are not met. Harvard is the latest.
There are different ways this can all be accomplished. The administration can try to claw back money that was approved but not yet distributed. The government can try to revoke the university’s non-profit status, which the President has advocated. And it can stop issuing new grants to a place like Harvard.
That’s exactly what the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, did in a letter sent to Harvard this week. A four-page letter, in fact, documenting all manner of abuses and wrongdoing.
Now, this could have been accomplished with a simple, one sentence letter: “The federal government will no longer issue grants to Harvard.” But to make a point, there were four pages.
And that’s when someone decided to have a bit of fun with the Secretary of Education, copy editing the letter in red ink and posting the edited results on social media.
It pointed out errors in grammar, punctuation and capitalization…word choice, like when she wrote “systemic” and they suggested she meant “systematic”…incomplete and run-on sentences…incorrect use of conjunctions and titles…and so on.
This was not an official response from Harvard, but it is a really good troll.
It is said that the more words that are used, the less the writer actually understands the topic. So I’ll just stop now so I am not copy-edited on line.
