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That is, in effect, what the Trump administration is proposing. Not content to monitor Harvard’s efforts to combat antisemitism, the administration has proposed to tell Harvard how it must run admissions, hiring, departmental teaching, and internal governance. It proposes to require Harvard to “increase the power of some [faculty and administrators], to reduce the power of others,” and to make reductions based on a vague standard — those “more committed to activism than scholarship.” Each of the required changes must be “durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes comprehensive throughout all of Harvard’s programs” and audited by the federal government for a period of “at least” three years. Because Harvard has refused to comply, the government has already frozen $2.2 billion in grant funding. It has suggested that it may revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and it has threatened to block the university from enrolling international students.
Trump’s actions have often been compared to those of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s led to blacklists, firings, and many ruined careers. But McCarthyism provides only a pale comparison to what Trump is doing. Some 100 professors lost their jobs during the McCarthy era because of alleged Communist affiliations, and many more were silenced for fear of losing their positions. But McCarthy did not propose to embed government spying into the daily operations of a private organization.
Some on the right argue that the actions of the Trump administration are necessary to roll back previous and equally extensive impositions of Democratic administrations on the workings of higher education. By this they mean the early affirmative-action rules and the later requirements for compliance with diversity initiatives. It is true that racial and gender quotas were encouraged for a decade following President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order on affirmative action. It is also true that the federal government, under Democratic administrations, imposed sweeping DEI requirements on federal agencies and federal contractors.
But the notion that Trump is simply engaged in a necessary rebalancing will not hold water. The administration’s efforts to direct Harvard’s operations are far more extensive than anything that occurred under Presidents Obama or Biden. Obama and Biden promoted equity efforts that sometimes hardened into targets, and indirectly into the excesses of call-out culture, but they did not attempt to bend the entire university operation to the government’s will. They did not place huge sums at risk when they felt that compliance efforts were insufficient. They did not seal their orders in scabrous rhetoric, as in President Trump’s recent declaration that “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.” And, most important, they did not attempt to destroy America’s greatest colleges by depriving them of grants that increase knowledge, save lives, and create jobs.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo is one of the chief architects of the administration’s attack on the country’s leading colleges, including Harvard. He has repeatedly advocated using the Departments of Justice and Education to “relentlessly degrade the status and prestige” of elite institutions. The most notable feature of his recent interview with The New York Times was his utter indifference to the role university research has played as a contributor to the economic competitiveness and societal well-being of the United States. Rufo is not alone. Vice President JD Vance declared in 2021 that “universities are the enemy.” And in 2023, former U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, then head of the Republican Study Committee, urged defunding of elite institutions “by cracking down on … their student loans, taxing their endowments, and forcing their administrations to actually conduct civil-rights investigations.”
Harvard vs. Trump will be a grueling fight and likely a long one. It is not a fight that Harvard will necessarily win.
Given sentiments like these, Harvard vs. Trump is a fight that may have been destined to happen. The Trump administration has shown a unique obsession with undermining the strongest institutions in civil society, those that can stand in its way of concentrating power, and Harvard has occupied a unique position as an incubator of talent, a generator of research, and a supporter of liberal and progressive ideals. Higher education’s adversaries are very determined people who have unparalleled tools of control at their disposal. They have not yet invoked them all. Unless they are definitively stopped by the courts or public opinion, it will be a grueling fight and likely a long one. It is not a fight that Harvard will necessarily win.
But it’s surprising, and heartening, that they’re willing to fight. I was initially doubtful that college presidents and governing boards would step into the breach. College presidents are managers. They are umpires and mediators. Their survival depends on not rocking too many boats. And of course they have substantial institutional resources to steward. My expectations changed on April 14 when President Alan M. Garber announced that Harvard would not comply with the administration’s demands. (On April 21, the university filed suit against the administration in federal court, seeking to block the funding freezes.) Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber and Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth had previously indicated that their institutions would not comply. I subsequently heard reports that Columbia was reversing field from its earlier capitulation and Stanford was also prepared not to comply. I read that the faculty council at Indiana University was organizing other Midwestern universities to refuse and so too the University of Massachusetts with land-grant universities. It only takes the courage of one or two for others to feel motivated to join in. This is what has happened, and why the opposition is snowballing.
Let us hope that our courts will show the same respect for contracts and college autonomy as the Supreme Court did in Dartmouth v. Woodward 200 years ago. Until they do, those who are devoted to the cause of research and teaching should take heart from what Harvard and these other colleges are doing and support them in word and deed, including with financial donations.
Yet as the historian Timothy Snyder and many others have emphasized, the prospect of successful opposition to authoritarianism lies primarily in civil society. Many more businesses, law firms, and media organizations will need to step up in opposition, together with many more colleges. The swelling of institutional voices, the unfurling of popular discontent, and ultimately votes at the ballot box will decide whether this administration fails. If you don’t like what is happening to colleges — or to the country at large — it would be a good idea also to join a protest, a boycott, or a strike. The future standing of America’s great educational institutions is at stake, and much else besides.
