The White House’s Clumsy Attack on Harvard

The Trump administration’s war on higher education has entered its hottest phase yet. On April 14, the administration froze $2.26 billion in federal funding for Harvard University, in response to Harvard’s rejection of administration demands for reform. News of the university’s defiance ricocheted around the globe. The fate of the White House’s academic reform efforts depends heavily on how the coming showdown concludes.

The present conflict began in on April 11, when representatives of the Trump administration’s Joint Anti-Semitism Task Force sent a demand letter to the Harvard president and the head of the Harvard Corporation (the university’s equivalent of a board of trustees). The April 11 mandate is much more sweeping and detailed than the task force’s March 13 demand letter to Columbia University. In order to preserve its federal funding, Harvard must immediately:

• empower faculty and administrators who are most committed to the Trump administration’s agenda and disempower faculty and university bureaucrats who are more committed to activism than to scholarship;
• implement merit hiring, run a plagiarism test on existing and prospective faculty, and submit to an audit of university hiring practices;
• adopt merit-based admissions, submit admissions data to the government, and certify that the university no longer employs racial preferences;
• reform international student admissions to ensure that Harvard does not accept students “hostile to the American values and institutions,” including by supporting terrorism or anti-Semitism;
• audit each department or teaching unit for viewpoint diversity; if a department is found deficient in viewpoint diversity, the university must hire a “critical mass” of intellectually diverse faculty for that department; if a department is averse to faculty and students with diverse viewpoints, control of the department must be transferred to more compliant overseers;
• audit ten Harvard schools and programs that “most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture”;
• shutter all DEI programs and offices;
• reform student discipline procedures to remove double standards based on identity and ideology; enforce conduct rules to prevent the disruption of scholarship and teaching; and end support and recognition of five student groups that “engaged in anti-Semitic activity since October 7th, 2023”;
• implement a mask ban with suspension as a minimum penalty for violation;
• expel or suspend students who engaged in assault or illegal sit-ins since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel;
• formally protect whistleblowers;
• report quarterly on its progress on the above reforms; disclose all foreign funding; and comply with requests for immigration information.

Though the pretext for the Harvard demands and those directed at other universities is those schools’ alleged indifference to, or cultivation of, anti-Semitism, the administration’s conditions extend beyond anti-Semitism and beyond even the vast diversity bureaucracies that the administration maintains violate anti-discrimination laws.

Harvard had already signaled its resistance to parts of the Trump academic reform agenda. On February 25, Harvard president Alan Garber told the university’s third annual Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) Forum that the Harvard “community” “speeds excellence by embracing difference in its many forms.” Diversity was a “critical enabler of learning,” Garber said. That same day, Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana told the Harvard Crimson that the university remained committed to “diverse backgrounds and experiences and talents.” All these formulations—“embracing difference,” “diverse backgrounds and talents”—are university-speak for racial preferences in faculty hiring and student admissions, and thus contrary to the Trump administration’s many edicts against such practices.

Lest there be any doubt about Harvard’s determination to hold on to its diversity bureaucracy and the victim ideology that drives it, Harvard College dean of students Thomas G. Dunne said in an April 7 interview that the school would be making no changes in Harvard College’s Equity, Diversion, and Inclusion entities, which include the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, and the Women’s Center. (Virtually every other Harvard entity has its own massive diversity bureaucracy.) According to Dunne, the College’s EDI programs did not need to be eliminated, because their programming is open to all students. (That programming, of course, is premised on the fiction that Harvard requires special offices to create “inclusive spaces on campus,” in the words of the EDI Office, whereas in fact, Harvard is already “inclusive” to all its members.)

These declarations of fealty to the diversity regime must not have endeared Harvard to an already hostile White House. But Harvard’s response to the April 11 demand letter is its most sweeping declaration of resistance to date. Harvard would not “accept the government’s terms,” its outside counsel wrote on April 14. (Robert Hur was one of those outside attorneys; in February 2024, he notoriously declined to prosecute Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents on the ground, in part, that Biden would strike a jury as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”)

Harvard president Garber circulated an email on April 14 entitled “The Promise of American Higher Education.” The missive contained the usual amusing boilerplate about the university’s commitment to “truth” as a “journey without end,” its openness to “different perspectives,” and its nurturing of a “thriving culture of open inquiry.” Garber reaffirmed that Harvard would not accept the Trump administration’s proposed agreement. Doing so would require it to “relinquish its constitutional rights.”

Many critics of the politicized academy will greet the Anti-Semitism Task Force’s April 11 demand letter to Harvard with a cheer, and understandably so, since it attacks longstanding distortions of the academic mission. But just because something is warranted does not mean that it is lawful under current legal standards. It is likely that a court—where this dispute will inevitably land—will agree with Harvard’s analysis of the letter. The Trump administration would be within its rights to withdraw funding or to sue Harvard for any ongoing hiring and admissions practices that privilege certain races over others, or females over males. Such preferential treatment violates federal protections under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The administration is also well within its rights to demand data on admissions and hiring to ensure that Harvard is not discriminating based on race or sex.

But other aspects of the administration’s demand letter arguably encroach on academic freedom—however overrated and hypocritically invoked that concept has become. The administration calls for oversight of faculty hiring to ensure “viewpoint diversity,” though the legal basis for such authority is unclear. Its demand for a “critical mass” of intellectually diverse faculty is either a wry joke or unintentionally ironic. After all, the notion of a “critical mass” of “diverse” students was one of the flimsy concepts the Supreme Court used for decades to justify racial admissions preferences.

Defining “viewpoint diversity” is inherently subjective—unless accompanied by highly detailed criteria. But the more detailed those criteria become, the more the administration risks appearing to control the content of higher education. Moreover, any system of preferences inevitably stigmatizes its intended beneficiaries. Students or faculty brought in explicitly to enhance “viewpoint diversity” will carry the burden of suspicion that they were admitted or hired under a lower standard, however worthwhile the goal of intellectual balance may be.

The Trump administration also demands that Harvard allocate academic and bureaucratic “power” based on an individual’s relative commitment to activism versus scholarship. To many critics of higher education, the distinction between the two is clear. Yet with billions of dollars at stake, making that distinction actionable would require highly specific definitions and criteria. Even then, the effort risks veering dangerously close to federal viewpoint discrimination.

The Trump administration is forging full speed ahead into uncharted legal territory. If the federal government had never funded Harvard in the first place, for all the reasons outlined in its demand letter, it would be on safe legal ground. No university is entitled to government largesse. The question is: Once that funding has been granted, what are the processes required for cancelling it? What are the substantive grounds for cancelling it? The administration’s freeze on $400 million in funding to Columbia University raised the same questions, but Columbia acceded to its own set of conditions without a legal challenge. So the procedural hurdles for a funding revocation remain untested, at least at the scale of the Trump higher-ed reform campaign.

Massive federal subsidies for America’s bloated and wasteful higher-education sector have proven to be a mistake. Taxpayers are getting nowhere near their money’s worth—and in many cases, are subsidizing institutions that actively undermine Western civilization. University leaders now routinely highlight scientific advances to justify continued public funding, but these achievements cannot obscure the broader failure. If we were starting from scratch, the concept of academic freedom should be scaled back to allow funders—especially taxpayers—a say in how universities are run, including in what is taught.

But disentangling the federal government’s academic subsidies from their often-unworthy beneficiaries is much more difficult than the initial entanglement, especially as traditions around the sacred untouchability of universities have evolved. The Trump administration could have proceeded with greater subtlety, rather than effectively hanging out a flashing red “sue me” sign. It could have allowed grants to expire quietly, declined to renew them, or penalized universities specifically for racial discrimination. Instead it has managed to elevate Harvard University into the incongruous role of a noble David standing up to the government’s Goliath. Law professor Laurence Tribe has called for alumni and other potential Harvard supporters to “GIVE NOW!” His call will undoubtedly be followed, despite Harvard’s $53 billion endowment cushion.

The administration is growing ever bolder in its crusade against the institutions responsible for left-wing ideology—whether elite law firms or universities. That crusade is unquestionably justified. Its targets deserve little sympathy. But a question arises: Is the administration more interested in maximal disruption or in achieving its long-term goals? The two aims may not be compatible.

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