Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has a financial endowment higher than the GDP of almost one hundred countries and has trained eight US presidents. Then, if an institution were to face the Donald Trump government war against the academic world, Harvard would be the first on the list.
On Monday, Harvard did it vigorously and in a way that encouraged other universities from all over the country fearful of the president’s anger, rejecting the demands of Trump’s government in hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators came to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firm, courts, the media and other White House objectives to also counterattack.
“This is transcendental importance,” said J. Michael Luttig, an outstanding former team of the Federal Court of Appeals, revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s offensive against US institutions.”
Michael S. Roth, who is president of the University of Wesleyan and an unusual critic of the White House among university managers, celebrated Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they find resistance,” he said. “It’s like when an abuser stops dry.”
A few hours after Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze US $ 2,200 million in multiannual subsidies to the university, along with a US $ 60 million contract.
This is a fraction of the US $ 9 billion of federal financing that Harvard receives, of which US $ 7 billion allocates the 11 hospitals affiliated with the University in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, including the Massachusetts General, the Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Oncological Institute. The remaining US $ 2 billion is allocated to research scholarships directly for Harvard, among other things for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.
It was not clear immediately to which programs would affect the freezing of financing.
Harvard, the richest and most ancient university in the country, is the most prominent object of the government campaign to purge ideology Woke of American university campuses. Government’s demands include sharing their contracting data with the Government and hiring an external entity to ensure that each academic department is “diverse in view of views.”
The University of Columbia, which faced a loss of US $ 400 million of federal financing, accepted important concessions demanded by the Government last month, including installing a new supervision of its Department of Studies on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.
In a letter sent on Monday, the rector of Harvard, Alan Garber, refused to resign. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow the federal government to take over them,” he wrote.
The government’s fight with Harvard, which had an endowment of US $ 53 thousand 200 million in 2024, is a fight that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House advisor, wants to have. In the government’s effort to break what the control of liberalism about higher education considers, Harvard is an important piece. A high -level judicial battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with anti -Semitism, elitism and suppression of freedom of expression.
Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also president of the Harvard Academic Freedom Council, said Monday that he was “truly Orwellian” and contradictory that the Government imposed on the University the diversity of points of view. He said he would also lead to absurdities.
“Will this government force the Department of Economy to hire Marxists or to psychology to hire Jungians or, in that sense, to the Faculty of Medicine hired homeopaths or American native healers?” He said.
Harvard has not escaped the problems that stirred the campus throughout the country after the attacks led by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023. In his letter, Garber said that the university had taken measures to address anti -Semitism, support various points of view and protect freedom of expression and dissent.
Those same points were exposed in a letter addressed to the government by two lawyers representing Harvard, William Burck and Robert Hur.
Burck is also an external ethics advisor to the Trump organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the agreement that recently reached with the Trump government.
Hur, who worked in the Department of Justice in Trump’s first mandate, was the special prosecutor who investigated the handling of documents classified by President Joe Biden and described him as a “old man with a bad memory”, which enraged Biden.
Both lawyers know the legal functioning of the current government, a beneficial experience for Harvard.
“Harvard is still open to dialogue about what the university has done, and plans to do, to improve the experience of all the members of their community,” Burck and Hur wrote in the Charter, addressed to the general counselors in functions of the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and a commissioner of the General Administration of Services. “But Harvard is not willing to access demands that go beyond the legal authority of this or any government.”
The representative Elise Stefanik, Republican for New York, who last year celebrated hearings to investigate anti -Semitism in the University Campus, including Harvard, was scathing in a message posted on social networks.
“Harvard University has earned its place as an epitome of moral and academic rot in higher education,” Stefanik wrote, Harvard graduate. He added that “it is time to completely cut the financing of US taxpayers to this institution, which has not lived up to its founding motto Veritas. Harvard Financien. ”
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It is not clear what other measures could take Trump’s government against Harvard for its resistance, although possible actions could include an investigation of their non -profit organization status and new cancellations of international students’ visas.
The president of the American Education Council, Ted Mitchell, said Harvard’s action was essential.
“If Harvard had not adopted this position,” he said, “it would have been almost impossible for other institutions to do it.”