Viral Posts Claim Harvard Responded to Threatening Letter from Education Department with a Tough Edit
By Sarah Komar
What happened: Liberal social media users are circulating a doctored version of a letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to Harvard University, falsely claiming that Harvard officials marked up the letter to correct McMahon’s congenitally shaky grammar.
Context: On May 5, McMahon posted a letter addressed to Harvard President Alan Garber, stating that the university “should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided.”
In the letter, McMahon accused Harvard of a range of alleged offenses, including illegal race-based affirmative action practices and admitting foreign students “who engage in violent behavior and show contempt” for the United States.
A closer look: The day after McMahon posted the letter to her X account, a version surfaced online, covered in red-pen edits pointing out incomplete clauses, inconsistent capitalization, and grammar slip-ups. Left-leaning accounts eagerly shared the spoof, praising Harvard for supposedly putting the secretary of education in her place. At the same time, some conservative users criticized Harvard for arrogantly treating McMahon as a lowly student.
Liberal X user @PrincessBravato posted the marked-up letter, stating: “I can’t stop laughing. Harvard sent back the Linda Letter marked for spelling & punctuation…. Morons, literal stupid people run the government. Very low IQ cabinet.” The post received 2.4 million views and 81,000 likes in a day.
Liberal Threads user @meidas_societyschild shared the letter and wrote: “Linda McMahon wrote Harvard a letter to which they responded by noting areas that are in need of corrections and then posted it on social media. Great job Harvard!” The post garnered 693,000 views and 8,700 likes in a day.
In response to liberals sharing the marked-up letter, conservative X user @HRH_SHP stated, “It just makes Harvard look even more condescending and elitist.” X user @False_Shadows wrote, “Mostly ridiculous markups and debatable usage — same people who couldn’t identify plagiarism,” apparently referring to a plagiarism scandal involving Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay.
Actually: The annotated letter wasn’t Harvard’s handiwork. It was created by X user Daniel Luo, a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has no connection to Harvard.
In an email to NewsGuard, Luo said that he “felt very perturbed by the writing style” of the education secretary’s letter and “thought it would be funny to mark-up the paper in the style of an exasperated high school teacher trying to give feedback to a struggling student.”
While Harvard did not edit McMahon’s letter, it did respond in a May 6 statement that accused the federal government of trying to “impose unprecedented and improper control over Harvard University.”