https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/04/harvard-has-brought-this-reckoning-on-itself/
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.
