Has the anti-Trump “resistance” finally started to resist?
“Fight fiercely, Harvard,” was the name of a satirical song by Tom Lehrer, but the university now seems to be trying to live up to its credo. On Monday, former president Barack Obama weighed in on behalf of his alma mater as its president, Alan M. Garber, summarily rejected the Trump administration’s sweeping demands for oversight, including steps to combat anti-semitism on campus (a curious preoccupation for Trump who had previously declared, in his first term, that there were “some very fine people on both sides” during white nationalist protests in Charlottesville). For Garber, whose recent predecessors, ranging from Lawrence Summers to Claudine Gay, flamed out as heads of Harvard, it offers a golden opportunity to seize the mantle of crusader for academic freedom.
Is Trump turning crimson over the defiance of the Crimson? He stated on Tuesday morning, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
But the demands that his administration set—oversight of its academic departments, sharing hiring data, and so on—were so sweeping that they amounted to an offer that Harvard was supposed to reject. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university,” Garber wrote, “can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” The Trump administration has now frozen $2.2 billion in multiyear grants as well as a $60 million contract. Ultimately, some $9 billion in funding could be at stake.
Like its trade battle with China, however, the Trump administration may have picked a fight with an institution that it cannot bully into submission. Trump’s quondam nominee for United Nations ambassador, Elise Stefanik, declared that it’s time to “totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution that has failed to live up to its founding motto Veritas. Defund Harvard.” Good luck with that. Columbia University, which capitulated to Trump, was one thing. But Harvard may be too big to fail. Its endowment is $53.2 billion—presuming Trump doesn’t crash the stock market. Even then, Harvard would probably be sitting pretty, at least when it comes to its finances.
The hope among the Trump administration’s detractors is that “the resistance,” as it is known, will actually begin to resist. Obama declared that Harvard had “set an example” for other institutions of higher education. Former federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig told The New York Times that Harvard’s move is of “momentous significance. This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”
For decades, the Right has viewed universities as a target-rich environment. It began with William F. Buckley, Jr.’s book God and Man at Yale, which was a bestseller when it appeared in 1951. Similarly, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind achieved national notoriety in 1987. More recently, Christopher Rufo has entered the lists against academia in his book America’s Cultural Revolution, which maintains that left-wing intellectuals and activists have infiltrated key American institutions.
But a backlash is mounting. A group of universities has joined Harvard to sue the Trump administration over its attempt to cut federal research grants for so-called “indirect” costs. They include Brown, Princeton, MIT, and Caltech universities. “If DOE’s policy is allowed to stand, it will devastate scientific research at America’s universities and badly undermine our nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation,” the lawsuit stated.
The benefits that have accrued to America from the union of government and academia—ranging from the moon landing to the internet—are legion. Even as China has doubled, if not tripled, down on its investment in scientific enterprises, America has not. Academic institutions would do well to toot their horn more loudly about their accomplishments over the decades—and the mounting China challenge.
For now, the battle over Harvard has become a proxy for a larger battle over liberalism and academic freedom in America. Writing in New York Magazine, Ross Barkan observed, “A university founded in 1636 that is as famous as Trump himself is, at the very minimum, an equal co-combatant. Now’s the time to hit back.” So far, Harvard isn’t backing down.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.
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