american
affairs
Trump’s
Attack on Harvard Marks a New Phase in the Culture War
By Ross
Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer
May 29, 2025
It is easy
to understand the populist case against Harvard.
The elite
Ivy League university holds an endowment worth more than $50 billion. For
centuries, the richest, most powerful, and influential human beings on earth
have gone to school there. Like other major educational institutions, Harvard
does not pay taxes — and there’s an argument that local and federal governments
should get much tougher with them.
But Donald
Trump’s war on Harvard — and Columbia and other schools targeted for funding
cuts and radical overhauls of their curricula — far transcends any good-faith
effort to change the way universities operate. A new General Services
Administration letter outlines a plan for the federal government to slash $100
million of federal contracts with Harvard following an attempt to bar foreign
students from the university. The Trump administration has also paused all new
interviews for student-visa applicants as it considers significantly expanding
how much social-media vetting it may undertake.
The irony of
the current moment is that conservatives are cheering all this on, that they
are thrilled the federal government is at last attempting to violate the tenets
of academic freedom. Big-government interference is exciting for them. The
concept of the individual university that can educate students free of state
interference is a relic of another age, perhaps one when they happened to not
control the federal machinery.
All weapons
wielded by one side can, of course, eventually be turned on that same side. The
left has learned this the hard way over the past year, finally beginning to
understand why the values of free speech and free expression had been such
fundamental parts of the liberal project for so many decades. In the name of
social justice, many leftists attempted to curtail speech they didn’t like and
were generally dismissive of any concerns over state and tech censorship. The
right wing, temporarily at least, became the ideological faction that
championed free speech, and many conservative pundits refashioned themselves as
First Amendment warriors. A new heterodox movement was born of conservatives
and dissident liberals. The anti-woke backlash was genuine and effectively won
the culture war.
Now we enter
a new phase. Some of the anti-woke are MAGA shills, while others have kept
their speech commitments. Most conservatives have proved that whatever interest
they took in free speech was faddish at best, deceptive at worst, and
opportunistic either way. In today’s GOP, any value held is subservient,
always, to the interests of Trump.
What this
new phase looks like is uncertain, but it will break from the tired woke and
anti-woke binary. The woke era, even before Trump’s ascension, was ending, and
now it is definitively over. Trump’s attacks on speech will win the moment
because he is president, but there’s a longer war the Republicans can easily
lose. They’ve proved they don’t actually care about free speech, and they’re
violating their professed values so they can back a far-right Israeli regime —
one that does not resonate with most Americans. A lot of voters are nominally
pro-Israel, but most don’t truly care either way. And they’re looking on as
Trump tries to jail and deport students who do little more than write op-eds
and lead protests.
The avatar
for this odious shift is J.D. Vance, once a furious Trump critic and now his
vice-president. In a recent X post, Vance argued the Trump administration was
merely offering a “necessary corrective” to the “problems” of “racial
discrimination” against whites and Asians. (As if Asian voters who care about
the prestige of the Ivies asked for the Trump regime to try to wreck them.) He
also inveighed, “The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided
that they look like the election results of North Korea.”
All of this,
Vance said, should be understood as “basic democratic accountability.”
But would
Vance and his MAGA acolytes approve of a Democratic administration trying to
engineer the curriculum of a conservative Catholic college? Or Liberty
University’s? Or Brigham Young’s, which is Mormon run? Colleges and
universities, even those that are public, do not exist to reflect the whims of
a particular elected administration. If they did, they would just be
disseminating government propaganda. We are far from a world where MAGA talking
points are being drilled into the students at the nation’s elite universities,
but we have glimpsed a dark path, one where speech is relentlessly chilled and
campus activists are arrested for expressing opinions critical of Israel.
Luckily,
universities are fighting back. Columbia capitulated to Trump, but Harvard
hasn’t. Trump and Vance remain on shaky legal ground, and the universities
themselves, with their large endowments and reservoirs of political power,
don’t have to readily bend the knee to the administration. The smart ones, at
least, won’t. University presidents understand, at minimum, what a
public-relations catastrophe Columbia’s leadership brought upon itself.
Credibility is not easily recovered. There is little to be gained by
collaborating with the Trump administration anyway because Trump himself
doesn’t respect weakness. If a college decides not to stand up to him, he will
seek to take more and more. He will keep pushing until he has broken the
institution.
This is why
the Harvard battle matters so much. Trump is calculating that Harvard is an
unsympathetic foil. Working-class America wouldn’t mind, in theory, watching an
elite university suffer under the yoke of a president who did (narrowly) win
the popular vote. But what Trump forgets is that this is not something tens of
millions of Americans voted for. They hoped Trump could combat inflation and
control immigration at the southern border. They hoped Trump’s unconventional
foreign-policy views might bring about less bloodshed in the Middle East and
Ukraine. Speech crackdowns were decidedly not on their mind. Not surprisingly,
Trump doesn’t care. He has signed on to this illiberal right-wing project, one
overtly hostile to free expression, and it will be up to the rest of us to
ensure its failure.
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