Last week the Trump administration proposed what amounts to a hostile takeover of the country’s oldest and wealthiest university. In an over-the-top letter to Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, and the senior fellow of its board, Penny Pritzker, administration officials demanded the power to overhaul and oversee what the school teaches, who it hires, and who it admits. Had Harvard acceded to those demands, it would have given up not just its autonomy but the most fundamental principle of academic freedom. Instead Harvard chose to fight for that principle. As Garber put it on Monday in his letter announcing the school’s decision, “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The outcome of the university’s struggle with a sitting president is likely to determine the future of academic freedom in the United States.
The decision to push back was by no means a foregone conclusion. Harvard has a lot to lose. Less than two weeks before issuing its demands, the Trump administration announced that it was “reviewing” $9 billion in federal funding for the university—not an amount that any school can afford to sacrifice without laying off substantial numbers of staff and shuttering programs. Harvard’s large endowment, in excess of $50 billion, affords it a cushion that few other institutions enjoy, but universities are understandably conservative about spending down their endowments, and $9 billion would be a substantial hit.
Before Monday Harvard had taken a number of steps that many observers criticized as anticipatory compliance with the administration. In January it adopted a controversial policy that comes close to equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, despite the profound difference between the two. In March it summarily removed the director and associate director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended a research partnership between its School of Public Health and Birzeit, a university in the West Bank. Earlier this month it placed a student group, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, on probation for allegedly protesting in violation of campus rules. These concessions looked disturbingly like those of Columbia University, which in March surrendered to the Trump administration’s illegal demands that it rewrite its policies about campus protest and faculty governance and alter the leadership of its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department, among other things. What finally made Harvard shift course and fight?
*
First, appeasement has been shown to be not just ethically compromising but ineffectual. Columbia’s capitulation did not lead to a restoration of the $400 million in federal funding that the administration initially froze; indeed, in early April, the administration announced that it was freezing another $250 million. Nor did it stop the Trump administration from subjecting Columbia to still further demands, reportedly including pressuring the school to place itself under entirely unwarranted judicial oversight. The administration may well have even had a part in the resignation of the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong. After Armstrong entered an agreement with the administration, the conservative website The Free Press published leaked comments she made in an internal meeting with faculty members downplaying the changes Columbia had committed to and suggesting that she was less than happy with the compromise. She was replaced shortly thereafter, and David Pozen, a professor at the university’s law school, has surmised that the two events were not unrelated. He notes that upon Armstrong’s replacement, Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism released a statement applauding “the action taken by Columbia’s trustees today, especially in light of this week’s concerning revelation.”
Nor has appeasement fared well elsewhere. Nine of the nation’s most powerful law firms struck deals with Trump to avoid being subjected to blatantly unconstitutional executive orders rather than challenge those orders in court, as four other law firms have successfully done. They agreed, among other things, to donate nearly a billion dollars in pro bono legal services to causes that Trump favors—effectively paying off the president and rewarding his illegal threats.
But giving in to a mob boss is the beginning, not the end, of one’s servitude. Many of the firms have maintained that their agreements do not actually require them to do anything they would not do otherwise, but Trump has other ideas, including potentially drafting them to support his trade wars or to work for the coal industry. They are likely to face serious ethical conflicts by seeking to mollify his ongoing requests. Meanwhile their reputations have forever been tarnished by their decisions to surrender. History remembers who named names in the McCarthy era and who resisted. We will not soon forget those who declined to oppose Trump’s illegal actions, either. By choosing otherwise, Harvard put itself on the right side of history.
The second factor that likely pushed Harvard to fight was just how outrageous the administration’s demands turned out to be. They included stipulations that the school reorganize its governance structure; alter its faculty hiring policies; allow the administration to monitor hiring for what it described as “viewpoint diversity”; change its admissions policy to, among other things, exclude any international student “hostile to the American values”; appoint an external monitor to review many of its departments for alleged “antisemitism or other bias,” among them the Divinity School, the Medical School, and the School of Public Health; eliminate all its DEI programs; and institute new disciplinary policies for students, including banning several pro-Palestinian student groups and the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive legal organization that long ago was condemned for being communist and is now vilified for supporting Palestinian human rights.
In what might reflect a belated recognition on the administration’s part that it had gone too far, or simply more evidence of its reckless chaos, yesterday The New York Times reported that, soon after Harvard issued its statement, the administration claimed that this list of demands “should not have been sent and was ‘unauthorized,’” although it bore the signatures of three top administration officials. The administration nonetheless “stood by the letter,” and has not withdrawn it. As Harvard noted in a statement, “it remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say.” In any case, none of the reforms the administration proposed has any basis in law. The Trump administration has not pointed to any specific instances substantiating its vague charges of “antisemitism,” nor even tried to tie its proposals to that problem. No university could accept those demands and retain a shred of integrity.
*
Third, Harvard cannot help but have taken note of the many voices condemning the institutions that surrendered to Trump’s illegal threats and praising those that fought for fundamental principles, such as the four law firms—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—that courageously challenged Trump’s illegal orders, even at the risk of losing substantial business. Many of the voices calling on Harvard to fight came from within its own community. In March and April two alumni letters and a petition, each garnering more than a thousand signatures, urged Harvard to defend academic freedom and the freedom of speech. More than eight hundred Harvard professors signed a letter distributed to the faculty by Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky encouraging the university to condemn Trump’s actions and uphold the institution’s autonomy. And earlier this month Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times with the title “If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?”
Virtually all university leaders stayed silent in the face of Trump’s outrageous assault on Columbia, including Garber himself. But his counterpart at Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, set a different example. He wrote a forthright essay for The Atlantic that condemned Trump’s attacks, and, when the federal government subsequently froze $210 million in aid to Princeton, pledged to defend the university’s academic freedom and due process rights. Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, has also been tireless in his insistence that universities must resist Trump’s incursions, and Georgetown Law’s dean, William Treanor, publicly rejected a demand from Trump’s Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, to remove DEI from its curriculum.
Too many university leaders are still keeping their heads down, evidently hoping that if they do not speak up Trump will not target them. But now that Harvard has resisted the administration, a few others are starting to follow suit. Within twelve hours of Garber’s statement, Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, issued a statement saying that, while she stands “firmly behind the commitments” the school made last month in response to Trump’s demands, the university would oppose efforts on the administration’s part to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy”—the first indication that Columbia might also push back. Stanford’s president, Jonathan Levin, and provost, Jenny Martinez, likewise issued a strong statement supporting Harvard’s fight. And nearly nine hundred Yale professors signed a letter to the university’s president urging her to stand up to Trump.
Trump’s own response to Garber’s letter was swift. He immediately froze $2.2 billion in grants and contracts; the next day, he asked the IRS to revoke the school’s nonprofit tax status—a move for which he has absolutely no basis. He has now demanded that Harvard produce years of records on foreign students and donors. And his administration has other levers it could pull. It could seek to deport many of Harvard’s students using the same bogus charge it has leveled against Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi of Columbia, Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown, and Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts—namely that their pro-Palestinian advocacy somehow poses “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Congress could increase the tax on Harvard’s endowment or decline to authorize funding for future programs associated with the school. It might be difficult to show that such actions were in retaliation for Harvard’s resistance, even if in fact they were.
The terms that the Trump administration tried to impose on Harvard were so severe that it seems to have been itching for this fight. Trump may well come to regret that decision. The administration’s outlandish letter should make Harvard’s case in court a slam dunk. No law authorizes the federal government to take over a private university in this way, even if the administration establishes that the school had responded inadequately to student antisemitism—and it hasn’t. Even if some statute authorized such measures, the First Amendment protection of academic freedom would affirmatively forbid them.
The stakes of this fight could not be more profound. The very idea of a free university cannot coexist with the ideological micromanagement Trump sought to impose. If Harvard wins, its struggle will provide critical protection for the independence of the US’s entire, world-class system of higher education. If it loses, no university will be safe.
English (US) · 