What Harvard has set the stage for

Students on a sunny afternoon at the Harvard University campus, April 17, 2025. In a swift broadside with little precedent, the Trump administration has frozen $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard, while seeking to exert unprecedented control over hiring, impose unspecified reforms to its medical and divinity schools, block certain foreign students from enrolling and, potentially, revoke its tax-exempt status. (Cody O’Loughlin/The New York Times)

By The Editorial Board

Harvard University refused last Monday to submit to the Trump administration’s quest to command and control America’s higher education system. Its president, Alan Garber, brightly illuminated the profound principle at stake in remaining independent of the government’s edicts.

“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,” he wrote in a public letter that took a stand against government overreach into academic freedom. Doing otherwise, he said, would threaten the values of any private university “devoted to the pursuit, production and dissemination of knowledge.”

With these words, Harvard became the first university to officially resist the administration’s abusive intimidation, and it is urgent that it not be the only one. Its actions, supported in recent weeks in statements by other academic leaders, including the presidents of Princeton University and Wesleyan University, light the way forward on a vital path to fighting President Donald Trump’s war on the independence of higher education. Its example should also offer encouragement to those states fighting a similarly coercive cutoff of federal aid, to law firms facing a loss of business from the president’s campaign of retribution, to every group challenging unconstitutional actions in court, to the public square and ultimately to voters at the ballot box.

Nearly immediately after Harvard’s lawyers made its refusal public in a letter rejecting the government’s long list of demands, the Trump administration announced it would freeze more than $2.2 billion in Harvard’s federal grants and contracts. Academic leaders around the country might be staggered by the prospect of losing even a fraction of that kind of money, but Harvard made it clear that it wasn’t taking its stand simply because its $53 billion endowment gave it the resources to do so.

Giving in to the unreasonable demands of the Trump administration would shatter an engine of American culture, as many academic leaders are beginning to recognize. Less wealthy colleges should also follow Harvard’s example, even though it could come at a high cost. They may have to choose between losing their federal grants and losing their souls, and the choice, painful as it may be, is clear.

Wesleyan, a top-tier university with an endowment of $1.55 billion, gets $20 million a year in federal funds, much of which could be at risk if it similarly refuses to bend the knee to the government. But its president, Michael Roth, has made it clear that it will not submit. “If we don’t speak up, it’s going to get worse,” he told The Wesleyan Argus this month. “Much worse, much faster.” Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton recently wrote that the administration’s crusade represents “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”

Their stiffened backbones present a contrast to the concessions made by Columbia, which agreed to many of Trump’s demands in the hopes of protecting $400 million in federal funds. In exchange, it won only the right to negotiate with the administration.

Harvard will no doubt pursue its rights in court, as it should; no college should accept the loss of its First Amendment freedoms without a fight. But at a core level, higher education could very well be reshaped and diminished by the widespread loss of federal funds if institutions refuse the government’s virulent bargain. They might have to cut vital scientific and medical research, for example, the kind that has long been supported by taxpayers to keep the nation safe, healthy and prosperous. The University of Pennsylvania faces a loss of $175 million in research funds, which its president, Larry Jameson, said would jeopardize lifesaving research into hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against viruses and protections against chemical weapons.

If universities accept Trump’s terms, on the other hand, the consequence would be far greater, undermining the very purpose of an independent institution.

Ostensibly, the Trump administration is penalizing universities for not protecting the rights of Jewish students during the protests over Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. And some universities have failed to stand up to antisemitism. But it’s increasingly obvious that fighting antisemitism is simply a pretext for what Trump and his supporters hope to be an overhaul of American higher education.

Consider some of the dictates made to Harvard by the administration last week, which seemed to distinguish between bad diversity and good diversity. All forms of traditional diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring and admissions must be eliminated, the government said. (That demand has nothing to do with ending antisemitism.) Harvard would be required to conduct an audit to ensure that something called “viewpoint diversity” is maintained in every department, course and classroom.

There’s no doubt that conservative students often feel ostracized and voiceless on many campuses, which have failed to welcome open debate consistently on many significant issues. Roth, for instance, has spoken forcefully about the insularity of American academia, and change is necessary. But this is work the universities should be undertaking in the name of academic freedom and excellence. It is not the role of federal bureaucrats to police every college course, threatening to slash federal funding if they don’t like what they find.

Trump himself promised to “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left,” and Christopher Rufo, an ideological author of the academic crackdown, told Times Opinion recently that the goal is “to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror.”

Fear is a formidable tool, and it is the principal weapon the administration has used to bully immigrants, law firms and centrist Republicans into submission. But universities, which have for generations taught their students the principles of American democracy and the long, dark history of authoritarian rule around the world, are supposed to know better. If they follow Harvard’s example and refuse to be intimidated by unjust abuses of power, they may inspire other fundamental national institutions to do the same.