Why
Harvard Decided to Fight Trump
The Trump
administration will freeze over $2 billion in federal funds because Harvard
refused to comply with a list of demands. Harvard leaders believed saying no
was worth the risk.
By Alan
BlinderAnemona HartocollisVimal Patel and Stephanie Saul
April 15,
2025, 9:54 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/why-harvard-resisted-trumps-demands.html
Late last
week, officials at Harvard University were trying to decipher what the Trump
administration wanted the school to do to combat antisemitism.
The
government had made some straightforward demands, like requiring the school to
ban masks, which are often favored by protesters.
But other
demands seemed vague.
Then, late
on Friday night, the federal government sent Harvard a five-page fusillade of
new demands that would reshape the school’s operations, admissions, hiring,
faculty and student life.
It took less
than 72 hours for Harvard to say no.
The decision
is the most overt defiance by a university since President Trump began
pressuring higher education to conform to his political priorities.
It came
after leaders at Harvard, during intense discussions over the weekend,
determined that what the government was proposing represented a profound threat
to the 388-year-old university’s independence and mission.
Harvard has
extraordinary financial and political firepower for a clash with Washington.
And the university’s leaders watched Columbia University reel, as the Trump
administration made more demands, even after the school capitulated.
Harvard
would fight. The alternative seemed far worse.
“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,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber,
wrote in an open letter on Monday.
This account
is based on correspondence between Harvard and the government, public
statements, and interviews with Trump administration officials, people at
Harvard and close observers of the university. Harvard declined to make Dr.
Garber available for an interview.
In response
to his announcement, the government swiftly retaliated with a freeze of more
than $2.2 billion in federal funding. Nearly $7 billion more remains imperiled,
including money that goes to Harvard’s affiliated hospitals. And on Tuesday,
Mr. Trump — who has picked out elite universities, long accused by
conservatives of leaning left, as a special target — threatened Harvard’s
tax-exempt status.
Even for the
world’s richest university, which has an endowment of about $53 billion, a
lasting freeze would cut deeply into labs, departments and even classrooms. But
officials at Harvard elected to prize its reputation, independence and legacy,
wagering that the institution could outlast Mr. Trump’s crusade.
“This is
what Joe McCarthy was trying to do magnified ten- or 100-fold,” said Lawrence
H. Summers, a former Harvard president, adding that “it runs directly against
the university’s role in a free society.”
‘The
university will not surrender.’
The first
sentences of the Trump administration’s letter on Friday were civil but
frustrated. Three federal officials wrote that Harvard had “failed to live up
to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal
investment.”
The
officials — one from the Department of Education, one from the Department of
Health and Human Services and one from the General Services Administration —
told Dr. Garber that they would “welcome” his “collaboration in restoring the
university to its promise.” If Harvard agreed to their terms, the officials
wrote, they could begin work on a “more thorough, binding settlement
agreement.”
The letter
arrived after Harvard sought clarification over the comparably anodyne list of
proposals that the government had shared eight days earlier. What landed in
Cambridge on Friday night went well beyond an explanation.
The polite
opening paragraphs gave way to a range of demands so broad and intrusive that
they stunned Harvard leaders, who had until recently been open to hammering out
some kind of accord with the government.
The
government said it wanted the Harvard faculty’s power reduced, and demanded
that Harvard embrace “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies. The Trump
administration wanted to audit university data, and sought changes to the
“recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students.”
The
administration also insisted that Harvard conduct a review for “viewpoint
diversity.” The government wanted Harvard to “immediately shutter” any programs
related to diversity, equity and inclusion and to bring in an outsider to
examine “those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment
or reflect ideological capture.” And the government wanted reports “at least
until the end of 2028” — around the time Mr. Trump is to leave the White House
— on Harvard’s compliance with the administration’s demands.
The
ultimatums seemed only tangentially connected to the Trump administration’s
stated ambition of erasing antisemitism on campus. Kenneth L. Marcus, the
Education Department’s civil rights chief during Mr. Trump’s first term, said
the government’s proposals went “far beyond antisemitism and reflect a far
wider cultural concern within the conservative movement about what is rotten in
higher education.”
Mr. Marcus,
who is the chairman and chief executive of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for
Human Rights Under Law, said the demands were an attack on “the left-wing tilt
that Harvard is thought to exemplify.”
Dr. Garber
did not frame Harvard’s response as a matter of left or right. In his letter
rebuffing the administration, he used 12 words to summarize Harvard’s stance:
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its
constitutional rights.”
His
announcement plunged Harvard into one of the gravest confrontations in its
history.
Steven
Pinker, a psychology professor and a co-president of the Council on Academic
Freedom at Harvard, said that it was “almost inconceivable that a university
president could have acceded to that list of demands, because they actually
stipulate the content of beliefs of faculty and admitted students.” But he
still marveled over the speed of Harvard’s response.
Dr. Summers,
a former Treasury secretary who is more a veteran of political combat than most
in academia, said he figured “the extremity of the demand letter made this an
easier decision than it might otherwise have been.”
If
government officials were spoiling for a fight, their tactic appears to have
worked. But because the Trump administration itself did not publicly release
the bombshell letter, Harvard had time to fine-tune a counterattack, including
a glossy website outlining its contributions to society. It was a rare example
of a university upstaging the Trump administration’s campaign, which has often
hinged on unpredictability.
Harvard’s
burst of defiance unleashed surprise across higher education, partially because
there had been little sense it would be bold in the face of Mr. Trump’s
attacks. When dozens of university leaders participated in a conference call on
Sunday, according to two people familiar with the private discussion, there was
no mention of the government’s new demands to Harvard, or of the school’s
coming response.
Preparing
for a White House Clash
In recent
months, Harvard had adopted a conspicuously low and accommodating profile — so
much so that many on campus had openly fretted that the university was pursuing
a Columbia-style path of appeasement.
In March,
Columbia acceded to a roster of Trump administration demands in a quest to
restore $400 million in federal grants and contracts. But the money had not
begun to flow again. Instead, the government is now weighing the possibility of
a consent decree with the school, which would empower a federal judge to
monitor an agreement with the university and give the White House leverage,
potentially, for years.
In the
run-up to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Harvard hired a powerhouse lobbying firm
with close ties to the White House and the Justice Department. The university
also adopted a stricter definition of antisemitism that upset many free speech
advocates. As the federal government then dialed up the pressure on Columbia
and its elite peers, Harvard moved to oust two leaders of its Center for Middle
Eastern Studies, paused a partnership with a Palestinian university, then
agreed to start one with an Israeli school.
Harvard was
also not among the top universities listed as plaintiffs in court challenges to
the Trump administration’s proposed changes to research-funding formulas.
Still, the
university had been making subtle preparations for a clash with the White
House, some of them long before the announcement by the government on March 31
that it would review roughly $9 billion in Harvard’s funding.
The
university imposed a hiring freeze in March and has sought to raise $1.2
billion in the bond market. Harvard also weighed adjustments to the $53 billion
endowment’s payouts, just as it had done during the pandemic.
The End Game
The
financial stakes for Harvard are enormous. They also have implications for the
rest of the country, as the Trump administration appears determined to retreat
from the government-university relationship that has flourished across the
United States since around World War II
The actual
details also remain hazy.
The Trump
administration has not explained to Harvard how it came up with the $2.2
billion that it intended to freeze. But officials believe the number could be
the entirety of the roughly $650 million the federal government provides the
university’s researchers annually and the life span of any multiyear contracts.
Harvard was
already feeling the fallout by Tuesday morning. The university’s T.H. Chan
School of Public Health confirmed that Sarah Fortune, an infectious disease
specialist, had received a stop-work order. Dr. Fortune’s tuberculosis research
was supported through a $60 million National Institutes of Health contract
involving Harvard and other universities across the country.
Federal
officials didn’t immediately respond to messages asking about their
communications with the university and researchers.
Harvard’s
endowment may help it weather some of the financial fallout. But university
leaders are often stringently adverse to tapping into these funds, worried
about drawing down funds they will need in the future. At Harvard, roughly 80
percent of its endowment funds are limited to specific purposes.
Still, in
its most recent financial report, Harvard said that there were billions of
dollars that it could tap “in the event of an unexpected disruption.”
Columbia’s
experience in recent weeks made it clear that any path the university chose
seemed just as likely to lead to ongoing turmoil, and the Trump
administration’s continuing treatment of the Ivy League university unnerved
officials at Harvard, who feared the White House would renege on any agreement.
Lee C.
Bollinger, who was Columbia’s president for 21 years, said on Tuesday that a
strategy of “negotiation and conciliation seems to have no acceptable ending
point.”
Dr. Pinker
had a similar feeling. He said he believed that Harvard might have tried to
negotiate just as Columbia did, “if it had assurance that the administration
was negotiating in good faith.”
The Trump
administration and some of its allies on Capitol Hill have bashed Harvard for
its defiance. The administration task force that is handling the dispute with
Harvard, for instance, said in a statement Monday night that the university’s
response reflected “the troubling entitlement mind-set that is endemic in our
nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges — that federal investment
does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.”
But in many
quarters, especially on campuses, Harvard’s new gumption has brought relief.
Many fear how billions in lost research funding could threaten jobs,
laboratories and longstanding projects. They argue, though, that it was
imperative for a university as muscular as Harvard to defend its principles.
Steven
Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who had been urging the university to
take a tougher stand against Mr. Trump, read Dr. Garber’s letter before a class
about authoritarianism and democracy.
“It looks
like Harvard has decided it’s time to fight,” he said when he began.
The room of
about 100 students, he said, erupted into applause.
Lulu
Garcia-Navarro and Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.
Alan Blinder
is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
Anemona
Hartocollis is a national reporter for The Times, covering higher education.
Vimal Patel
writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture.
Stephanie
Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic
changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and
inclusion in higher education.
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