That’s the question The Wall Street Journal asked, ironically, on D-Day. The news outlet also asked “How?” but I’m setting that aside as irrelevant: Harvard doesn’t need saving, at least not financially.
Harvard has that $53+ billion endowment, with its annualized return on that endowment of roughly 11% over the last 50-ish years. The question proceeds from the false premise that it needs saving.
Harvard doesn’t need our taxpayer money. More than that, if it no longer gets our money, it’ll be free of government strictures on what it does with the money it receives—the school can do whatever it wants, politically and scholastically, including reforming itself and ridding itself of its institutional antisemitic behavior and ridding itself of those in its employ or student population who act overtly on their own antisemitic behavior, illegalities like seizing and occupying buildings, denying its owners their own property; vandalizing those buildings and others on campus; openly denying Jewish students access to their classes; overtly threatening Jewish students with violence and delivering that violence; and actively denying those who disagree with them their own rights to free speech. That’s the short subset of a very long list.
Or Harvard can choose to continue those bigotries, absent government funding and attached strings. With either choice, though, it cannot continue—must not be allowed to continue—the illegal behaviors in which so many of the school’s bigots openly engage. A school that chooses to continue those behaviors and to condone them among its population doesn’t deserve saving, even with its own money.