The Trump administration is right that schools like Harvard have cultivated progressive orthodoxies that can harbor antisemitism, among other issues. So its threat to review nearly $9 billion in federal funding at Harvard might seem like the right way to fix the academy, and vindicate the taxpayers.
But the broadness of the administration’s potential retribution — even as Harvard is already taking hopeful steps to address antisemitism — and the vagueness of its demands, could also end up imperiling the growing national view that American universities need a vibe shift. All while setting a dangerous precedent for conservatives under a future liberal White House.
Over the past 10 years, the percentage of Americans with little or no confidence in higher education has more than tripled, to 32 percent. Of those with dwindling confidence, more than 40 percent attribute their falling trust to universities’ “political agendas.” The campus protests over the past two years laid bare the extent to which students are willing to reject competing narratives and align themselves with violent extremists — all with insufficient pushback from school administrations.
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But the administration could distract from this moment by giving progressives the ammo to say the Republicans are punishing cancer patients, all while failing to even make clear demands of universities.
According to a Trump administration official’s statement, though Harvard’s recent steps to address antisemitism “are welcome, there is much more that the university must do.” But failing to make any clear requests makes it seem like the administration doesn’t actually have any, and that it’s just bent on punishing Harvard.
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The fact that there seems to be no clear connection between the threatened grants and instances of antisemitism reinforces those fears.
Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, told me that the administration hasn’t said “anything about what it is about those grants that would determine whether they should or shouldn’t be continued because of something related to Title VI,” which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs receiving federal funding. That makes it easy for detractors to say the administration is going after life-saving cancer research as much as it’s attacking antisemitism. But much of the noxious activism we’ve witnessed on campus comes out of the humanities — not out of Dana Farber.
With a $53 billion endowment like Harvard’s, the university could make up for some of its lost funding in the sciences by pulling from progressive humanities programs. But still, the administration is alienating the crucial campus voices that have demanded viewpoint diversity all along. Now these free speech champions — the ones who could have been natural allies in fixing the campus climate — are worried about an infringement on the academic freedom of a private institution.
Like Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, who shares some of the Trump administration’s concerns about troubling trends at Harvard: “antisemitism, seeking social justice not truth, choosing self-esteem not excellence, pursuing diversity of everything except perspective, no discipline or maintenance of order,” he told me. But instead of the administration taking a targeted approach, Summers says they are “just going to war.”
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Alienating allies and inflicting damage on sympathetic targets means the administration could waste this moment — while also planting the seeds for a backlash. After all, what happens when a future progressive president gets to choose what kind of discrimination dictates the yanking of federal funds?
“President Elizabeth Warren, what kind of conditions is she going to impose on Notre Dame?” Harvard professor Steven Pinker mused in an interview. We’ve already seen what federal overreach in colleges can look like when the Obama administration threatened universities’ funding over concerns about sexual assault, issuing guidance that undermined due process for accused students. Conservatives were outraged.
Harvard is already taking positive steps. Its president, Alan Garber, readily acknowledges that antisemitism is a problem on campus, and even before Trump took office, the university adopted promising policies like institutional neutrality and abolishing diversity statements for its largest faculty division. This week, before the threats to Harvard’s funding, the university forced out the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies after the program faced antisemitism allegations.
Pinker, who’s been a tireless advocate for academic freedom — even at a steep personal cost — told me these are “steps that Harvard is taking in the right direction.” He shared that Harvard is on the cusp of approving an undergraduate council for academic freedom, which will supplement its faculty counterpart. “A lot of faculty academic freedom means that professors get to do whatever they want, and that can mean shutting up undergraduates. We need a separate body that will stand up for students,” Pinker told me.
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And the social taboos that constrained nonprogressive activity when I was a Harvard student are now loosening. Groups like the Salient, Harvard’s recently revived conservative publication, and the Conservative Coalition, which was just a handful of students when I helped start it in 2021, are eagerly taking on progressive narratives on campus.
This recent attack on funding didn’t produce this shift. It came from intense media scrutiny, existing political pressure, donor outrage, and the growing popularity of competitors (Southern schools are seeing a notable bump in enrollment).
Trump is right that universities have gone astray. But the administration doesn’t need to overplay its hand.
Carine Hajjar is a Globe Opinion writer. She can be reached at carine.hajjar@globe.com.
