Fight Fiercely, Harvard!

Donald Trump has done you a favor

If you went to Harvard there is no good way of saying, “I went to Harvard.” You can sound arrogant, or supercilious, or faux-flippant; but you can’t sound normal. This does not apply, at least to the same degree, to Yale or Princeton or Stanford. That is not because Harvard is better than the others, but because it is richer, older, more powerful and more self-regarding. Harvard is the Yankees. In 1978 John Leboutillier, a young conservative, wrote Harvard Hates America—unfair perhaps, but a title calculated to sell.

Now that’s over. Thanks to Donald Trump, last week Harvard became, for the first time, a victim, and a victim of a force immensely more powerful and ugly than itself. By refusing to capitulate to the Trump Administration’s demands, Harvard has made itself a martyr to the cause of free speech and academic freedom. The venerable Harvard Square burger stand Bartley’s added a new item to its sandwich board: “the ballsy Harvard.” Perhaps even more to the point, the university received four thousand online gifts worth $1.14 million in the hours after President Alan Garber announced Harvard’s open defiance. That is a tiny sum compared to the $2.2 billion that the Administration plans to withhold; but the reputational boon is incalculable.

Illegitimum non carborundum! (Don’t let the bastards grind you down)

Harvard has been celebrated for its brave act of defiance; but the demands that the Trump Administration issued April 14 were so outlandish, so openly insulting, that they appear to have been designed to force Harvard into opposition. Two weeks earlier, in fact, President Garber had published an open letter to the Harvard community designed to explain Harvard’s acquiescence to demands similar to those imposed on Columbia. “We will,” Garber promised, “engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done. . .” Harvard seemed perfectly ready to strike an expedient bargain with the Devil.

Eat Dirt, Harvard

Trump and his team of Jacobins could have had that win; but they wanted more. The letter they finally sent Harvard sounds something like Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer to end the war in Gaza if Hamas eliminates itself as a fighting force–designed, that is, to be spurned, and thus to justify all-out war. The letter required Harvard to not only discontinue DEI and eliminate alleged pockets of antisemitism but to reduce the power of the faculty and “empower” only those faculty members “committed to the changes indicated in this letter”; share with the Administration “all hiring and related data” to ensure compliance with non-discrimination demands; bar all foreign students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution,” and hire an outside body to vet every department for “viewpoint diversity.”

The letter cited no legal authorities or precedent; it was, to resume the Netanyahu analogy, the notice of an impending missile strike. Or perhaps it was an astounding mistake, as the Times subsequently reported; but now, apparently, it can’t be walked back, because Trump has already responded to Harvard’s resistance by ordering the IRS to look into denying the university’s tax exempt status, while Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has threatened to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students.

Let’s accept that the letter actually represents something like a consciously formed intention. Did Trump’s people imagine that the courts would side with them if Harvard resisted, as they had left it no choice but to do? We now understand an elemental fact about Trump 2.0: it doesn’t matter. Trump is determined, as the Times has reported, to “topple” a major university. Trump cannot force Harvard to leave the country, as Viktor Orban did with George Soros’ Central European University. Nor can he raze it to the ground. But he can make Harvard regret its principled stand in a thousand different ways. He can humble America’s mightiest university; that’s enough.

Embrace The Resistance!

Yet Harvard should be relieved that the Administration’s ludicrous incompetence, if that’s what it was, precluded it from complying with less onerous demands. In recent years the university has suffered terrible blows to its reputation. In the affirmative action case Students For Fair Admission v. Harvard, the university was compelled to disclose that it had awarded Asian applicants lower scores for personality traits like “integrity, helpfulness, courage” in order to tilt admissions away from them and towards legacies, athletes and Black students. And for the second year running Harvard has come in dead last in ratings–by students–of free speech on campus. Last year applications to Harvard dropped 5 percent.

Donald Trump has given Harvard a chance to chart a new path. Americans are right to wonder why private universities with the wealth and power of city-states enjoy a tax exemption for their giant endowments. Doing research to cure tuberculosis and ALS is not enough. Neither, even, is promoting respect for the truth and civil debate–though it’s a very great deal. Harvard will not seem like a truly public good so long as the undergraduate class, as Richard Kahlenberg points out in Class Matters, his recent book on affirmative action, has fewer first-generation college students than it has legacies, though the first category outnumbers the second by a factor of 382. Our great universities do far more to reproduce privilege than they do to promote social mobility.

And Harvard must make the classroom safe for conservatism, or even moderate liberalism. The one kind of diversity for which universities do not select is ideological. Why do students profit from hearing a “BiPOC” voice but not, say, a libertarian one? Students who have never met anyone who can make an intelligent case for a view different from their own will naturally think that no such intelligent case exists.

Still, that’s for tomorrow. The work of today is to risk harm in order to stand for principle–and to let Trump know that institutions take those principles seriously enough to put their well-being in jeopardy. That is the struggle that law firms and universities–and soon, no doubt, foundations and museums and others–are being called to undertake. Shouldn’t it be Harvard, which has given America so many presidents and Supreme Court Justices and scientists and scholars and writers, that seizes that banner? Some day, not so long from now, students may no longer have to say they went to college “near Boston.”