RUTHFULLY YOURS

In its war on Harvard, the Trump administration has dropped some serious bombs on America’s most prestigious university. It is investigating Harvard for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by tolerating racial discrimination and anti-Semitism. It has frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding and cancelled the government’s remaining contracts with Harvard. Trump himself has threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. A Republican budget bill, meanwhile, would impose higher taxes on Harvard and other universities’ endowments. Most recently, the administration has sought to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students for allegedly failing to comply with requests for information about ‘pro-terrorism conduct’ on campus (a court has temporarily halted that attempt).

These aggressive moves follow Harvard’s decision to sue the administration for threatening its funding, unless it complied with demands outlined in a letter sent in April. These demands include allowing the government to review hiring and admissions decisions, audit faculty, students and staff for viewpoint diversity, ban students ‘hostile to American values’, and provide regular updates to the administration, among other stipulations.

While Harvard has an immense $53 billion endowment, the Trump funding cuts, if enacted, could still be financially devastating. Barring foreign students would be particularly damaging, as they make up 27 per cent of Harvard’s total enrolment and an even greater proportion of its revenue. One Harvard professor has called it ‘an extinction-level event’.

Harvard and its president, Alan Garber, have refused to negotiate with the administration and instead appear to be relishing the fight. Opponents of Trump – the broader Harvard community, Democrats and sympathetic media – hail Garber as a hero, the face of a renewed ‘Resistance’. Bernie Sanders has congratulated Harvard ‘for refusing to relinquish its constitutional rights to Trump’s authoritarianism’. Garber received a standing ovation at Harvard’s recent commencement ceremony.

Harvard claims it is focussed on resisting government overreach into academic affairs, specifically the administration’s ‘demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the “ideology” of its faculty and students’. But underlying its resistance is the belief that criticisms of Harvard are largely unfounded, and that the university does not require significant reforms. Trump, in Harvard’s view, is motivated by animus toward higher education, and the issue of anti-Semitism is merely a pretext for destroying institutions he sees as hostile. Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who has previously criticised his university on free-speech issues, recently wrote that Trump and other critics suffer from ‘Harvard Derangement Syndrome’. Trump’s ‘obvious motivation is to cripple civil-society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch’, he says.

But Harvard’s problems are real and fundamental, not merely the product of Trump’s imagination. Whether or not Trump despises elite universities, many of the criticisms levelled at Harvard are legitimate.

A recent internal report by the Presidential Taskforce on Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias highlighted that anti-Semitism is prevalent at Harvard. This includes harassment, physical intimidation and violence towards Jewish students. Anti-Semitism is only one – particularly vile – expression of a broader campus-wide identity politics and anti-Western ideology, promoted by faculty and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) administrators alike. The DEI mindset has had real implications for hiring and admissions, and the Trump team’s investigations into racial discrimination in these areas are justified. Harvard has a history of punishing professors – such as Carole Hooven, Ronald Sullivan and Roland Fryer – for deviating from woke orthodoxy. ‘Veritas’ is the university’s motto, but there is a strong case to be made that Harvard has long abandoned its mission to state and seek the truth.

President Garber claims Harvard has already reformed itself, thus making government oversight unnecessary. It’s true that the university has adopted several reforms, including: tighter restrictions on disruptive, harassing protests; the elimination of mandatory diversity statements for new hires; cancelling racially segregated graduation ceremonies; and adopting a policy of institutional neutrality on political issues. But these reforms are too little, too late – begrudgingly introduced and tokenistic in comparison with the scale of change required.

Harvard’s actions – or inaction – speak louder than its claims of reform. As a recent internal report demonstrated, anti-Semitism remains pervasive, and Harvard remains unwilling to address its roots among faculty and in the curriculum. David Volpe, a Harvard Divinity School scholar who resigned from the anti-Semitism taskforce, wrote in response to the report: ‘Without a vast unlearning – among the faculty, not just the students – all the reports in the world will not change the atmosphere on campus. We will only be spraying perfume on a sewer.’

In other areas, Harvard’s reforms seem superficial. Internal documents gathered by conservative activist Christopher Rufo suggest that Harvard continues to favour certain racial groups in hiring. Despite the US Supreme Court striking down Harvard’s admissions criteria in June 2023 for being unfair to Asian students, the university appears unrepentant – the percentage of Asian students admitted to the Class of 2028 remained unchanged. Perhaps the most symbolic sign of Harvard’s unwillingness to change is the continued employment of disgraced former president Claudine Gay – infamously known as the DEI enforcer-in-chief and a plagiarist – who reportedly still earns $900,000 a year as a professor in the political-science department.

Harvard’s claims of defending academic freedom and opposing government interference have gained some sympathy, even among critics of the university. But Harvard’s defence seems more opportunistic than principled. It has long been one of the worst offenders when it comes to free speech and respect for academic freedom (FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings has rated it zero out of 100). The university’s current opposition to government interference contrasts with its compliance under earlier Democratic administrations. In 2011, the Obama administration threatened to reduce funding unless universities removed due-process protections for male students accused of sexual assault. In 2016, the same administration required transgender access to bathrooms and locker rooms, again threatening to withdraw funds. Harvard did not sue the government in either case.

Moreover, Harvard has shown little interest in self-regulation. It is damning that the university’s recent attempts at reform have come only as a result of external political pressure. Only following the congressional hearing in late 2023, and Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, did Harvard begin making modest policy changes. As Pinker himself notes: ‘The uncomfortable fact is that many of [Harvard’s] reforms followed Mr Trump’s inauguration and overlap with his demands.’ While Harvard may chafe at Trump’s demands, one has to ask why it did not voluntarily adopt similar, reasonable measures before if it genuinely wishes to uphold academic openness and political neutrality.

The Trump administration’s demands have sparked valid concerns about heavy-handed government intervention in academia and the risk to intellectual freedom. But elite universities have abused the academic freedom afforded to them. Administrators and faculty have used their autonomy to turn these institutions into ideological monocultures, abandoning scholarship for partisan activism. Once academia enters the political arena and surrenders its scholarly mission, government backlash becomes inevitable.

The war between Trump and Harvard is likely to continue for years, as both sides possess the resources for a prolonged fight. In the short term, Harvard may prevail in certain legal battles. The Trump administration’s blunderbuss approach invites legal challenges. The administration has taken procedural shortcuts. Its actions often lack proportionality (such as slashing scientific-research funding when the DEI issues are primarily in other departments) and appear retaliatory in nature.

Yet Trump has two significant advantages that could turn the tide in the law courts and the court of public opinion. First, given the vast scale of government funding, private universities like Harvard function as quasi-public entities. If taxpayers are footing the bill, it is reasonable to expect some accountability in return. No constitutional principle guarantees Harvard unlimited access to public funds.

Second, and perhaps more critically, Harvard and the Ivy League are deeply unpopular. Public trust in higher education has collapsed – according to Gallup, only about a third of Americans now view universities as valuable, down from nearly 60 per cent a decade ago. Many Americans see universities as hostile to their values and blame them for unpopular policies, such as biological males competing in women’s sports. After years of elite condescension, Harvard can hardly expect the working class to rush to its defence. Many families may even welcome Trump’s promise to redirect billions in federal funding from elite universities to trade schools.

The message from Harvard and its defenders is that Trump must be stopped from waging an authoritarian war on higher education. But the more urgent task is for Harvard to acknowledge its own failings and restore its historic mission. Unless Harvard and other major universities commit to genuine reform – and there’s little evidence to suggest they will – they will continue to face external pressure, including calls for government intervention. Harvard may resent the Trump backlash, but it brought it upon itself.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.