Harvard Will Lose Its Battle With the Trump Administration | Opinion

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” wrote Harvard University president Alan M. Garber in a defiant letter to his beleaguered institution’s fractured community on Monday. Those are bold words for a man whose immediate predecessor, Claudine Gay, resigned in disgrace after losing at least a billion dollars in donations, telling a congressional committee that “context” would determine whether calling for the deaths of Jews violated university anti-bullying policy, and facing humiliating accusations of career-long plagiarism that Harvard’s hiring and promotion procedures appear never to have detected.

Garber’s pseudo-Churchillian rhetoric came in response to the Trump administration’s demands, delivered last Friday, that Harvard make meaningful changes to its admissions, hiring, and disciplinary policies and submit to outside audits of aspects of its operations to ensure compliance with civil rights laws and executive orders. Failure to comply would cause the university to lose all federal funds.

Despite Garber’s bravado, the university president left Harvard’s formal refusal to a brace of attorneys, who, like him, insisted that Harvard has implemented “lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes” and that the university is “in a very different place today from where it was a year ago.” One of those attorneys, Robert K. Hur, was the special counsel who last year investigated then-president Joe Biden’s retention of classified government documents as a private citizen.

Harvard further insisted that the Trump administration has violated its First Amendment and statutory rights—a claim belied by the university’s insistence that it has already embraced and will enact further reforms in response to earlier deficiencies. Its lawyers’ letter further curiously states that Harvard remains “open to dialogue” about these measures, despite assertions of their illegality.

For a moment, Garber was perhaps the only hero American higher education could look up to. Plaudits poured in on social media and, eventually, in legacy media outlets, praising him for taking a stand and venturing hope that his solitary show of resistance would galvanize other institutions in, and perhaps beyond, academia and dissuade the Trump administration from acting like a “bully” in enforcing civil rights laws.

At best, it was a gamble, and Harvard lost. Within hours of Garber’s campus missive, the feds cancelled $2.2 billion in grants to the university as well as least $60 million in contracts—the largest penalty yet imposed on an educational institution. About $7 billion in additional grant funds that go to Harvard’s institutional partners could also be cancelled but so far remain untouched. Last week, in anticipation of such punitive action, Harvard floated $750 million in bonds to cover general expenses, though reports suggest that Garber privately doubts they will cover the hole in the university’s operating budget. Early media stories are replete with despair from faculty members and researchers who say their work cannot continue in the absence of federal funding.

No other university presidents or other organizational leaders have joined Garber in his defiant stance, though Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman has idly suggested that she will not allow Columbia, which already acceded to Trump administration demands, “to relinquish our independence and autonomy.” Shipman had previously, in a leaked private message, dismissed congressional hearings on campus antisemitism as “Capitol Hill nonsense.”

Federal lawsuits coming out of Harvard and Columbia demand that judicial rulings block the funding cuts. But they are by no means guaranteed success. Even if they initially succeed, they will ultimately be adjudicated by the majority Republican-appointed Supreme Court, which has lately given Trump a number of wins on legal challenges to other initiatives.

Harvard’s critics show no sign of backing down. The Department of Education, one of the federal agencies that pulled Harvard’s funds, denounced the “troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges.” New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R), a Harvard alumna who questioned Gay and other elite university presidents in congressional hearings, posted on X that “Harvard University has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education…. It is time to totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated President Trump’s view that Harvard “must follow the law” and should apologize for the “egregious antisemitism” on its campus. Trump further suggested in a post that Harvard’s apparent failure to serve the public interest could cause it to lose its tax-exempt status, a potentially crippling measure that would expose it to corporate taxation and also remove tax deductibility for its donors. On Wednesday, Trump declared that Harvard is a “joke,” “can no longer even be considered even a decent place of learning,” and “should no longer receive Federal Funds.”

Harvard sits on a massive endowment of $53.2 billion, an amount exceeding the GDP of almost half the world’s countries. About 80 percent of that amount is reportedly restricted by donor conditions, but the rest—well over $10 billion—could meet expenses for the programs Garber says are “vital” and “life-changing.” If he’s telling the truth, surely they would merit the expense. For the moment, however, Harvard is losing, and will likely continue to lose.

Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.