Harvard University’s lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from freezing billions of dollars of federal funding encapsulates a tendency among those who receive grants and other taxpayer largesse to treat these subventions not as privileges but as entitlements.

There is an old insightful maxim that he who pays the piper calls the tune. It should apply as much to the nation’s most prestigious university as it does to everyone else. And as a practical matter, it does, or will. It is patently absurd for Harvard to claim that it must be allowed to hypothecate billions of dollars, to be dependent on federal handouts, in order to be “independent.”