I am late to the party, so you probably already know about this, but Harvard has refused to truckle to the demands of the Trump administration and has filed a lawsuit (Harvard v. HHS; see below). Briefly, those demands to Harvard were: “shape up or we’ll withhold federal grant money.” You can see the administration’s letter here and can read my summary of what the administration wanted let it withhold $2 billion in grant money:
This is a Big Demand and covers multiple areas, which I’ll just summarize with bullet points. Quotes are from [the administration’s] letter:
- Harvard has to fix its leadership, reducing the power held by students, untenured faculty, and by “administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.”
- All hiring from now on must be based on merit and there will be no hiring based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
- By August of this year, Harvard must have solely merit-based admissions, again without admissions based on ‘race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.” The “proxies” presumably mean the way universities now get around bans on race-based and similar admissions by asking admission questions like, “describe how you overcame hardships in your life.”
- Reform international admissions, by not admitting students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”
- Harvard is to commission an external body to audit the university for viewpoint diversity. Though they’re not clear what “viewpoint diversity” means, it’s obvious that they want more conservative points of view and fewer professors pushing pro-Palestinian points of view
- Reforming programs with “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”, including information about individual faculty who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or who incited violence
- Discontinue DEI programs, offices, committees, and the like
- Students are to be disciplined for violating University speech regulations, and student groups that promote violence, illegal harassment, or act as fronts for banned groups
- Harvard is to establish a whistleblowing procedure so that noncompliance with the Diktat above can be safely reported.
President Alan Garber responded by giving the administration the middle finger in a short response.
Yesterday I got an email from Harvard (it’s below but the link works, too) with an announcement by Garber that Harvard is suing the federal government:
It’s a good letter, but note in the third paragraph that the emphasis on why this bullying is bad centers on its medical effects: it will impede research on human diseases, and thus could hurt or kill humans as the withdrawal of funds brings a halt to research (it already has stopped some research). Well, there’s far more than that at stake, yet the health aspects are what take center stage.
But Presidcent Garber’s announcement does emphasize the government’s attack on Harvard’s values, which include academic freedom in the classroom. Garber is also clearly upset (I am reading between the lines) at the administration’s demand that the university produce more “viewpoint diversity” (see paragraph 5). Further, it’s demeaning to Harvard for the government to demand that an independent body certify the rise viewpoint diversity and to report back to the administration at intervals.
Now certainly many of the changes the administration demands are salubrious (I for one agree that DEI has to be dismantled, which comports with Harvard’s own internal committee of reformist professors, as well as the stipulation merit be the sole criterion for hiring and admissions (my own university has a similar hiring procedure in its Shils Report). As I’ve said, and others may disagree, I do think that minority status can be taken into account when two candidates are equally qualified, so that is a diluted form of affirmative action. And of course there should be no climate of antisemitism or hatred of any other group on campus, as specified by Title VI. I do note, though, that Garber says this:
We will also soon release the reports of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias. I established these groups last year as part of our efforts to address intolerance in our community. The reports are hard-hitting and painful. They also include recommendations with concrete plans for implementation, which we welcome and embrace. No one in our community should experience bias, intolerance, or bigotry. We believe adoption of the recommendations and other measures will go far toward eradicating those evils on our campus.
Yet according to the Free Press (article archived here), the report on antisemitism hasn’t been published on time, and I have no information about the Islamophobia report. From the FP:
The demand is only the latest controversy for Harvard’s antisemitism task force, a committee that has been plagued by problems throughout its short existence.
Foremost among them: its failure to deliver a report. The task force had originally said they would publish their findings in the “early fall” of 2024, yet the report has still not been released. The report is meant to detail all occurrences of antisemitism at the university.
The committee has been mired in controversy from the moment it was announced in January 2024.
First, Derek J. Penslar’s appointment as co-chair of the task force was met with harsh criticism from the Harvard community over Penslar’s public comments about Israel and antisemitism on campus. Larry Summers, Harvard’s 27th president, wrote that “Penslar has publicly minimized Harvard’s antisemitism problem, rejected the definition used by the U.S. government in recent years of antisemitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state, and more.” Summers added that “none of this in my view is problematic for a professor at Harvard or even for a member of the task force, but for the co-chair of an antisemitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”
Then, less than a month after Harvard’s antisemitism task force was announced, its co-chair, Raffaella Sadun, resigned, claiming she wanted to “refocus her efforts on her research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities.”
A source close to Sadun told The Free Press that the real reason for her resignation was that “she found it impossible to make any progress” or to get the committee “to take the problem of antisemitism as seriously as she thought it ought to be taken.”
. . . . [Claudine Gay] ended up forming an Antisemitism Advisory Group and asking Wolpe to join. Summers cautioned Wolpe not to take the position for fear he was “being used,” but Wolpe accepted anyway. Two months later, in December 2023, Wolpe resigned from the advisory group, stating that “both events on campus and [Claudine Gay’s] painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”
Rabbi Wolpe notes that there is indeed endemic antisemitism at Harvard, though former President Larry Summers says that the big drop in Jewish student enrollment at Harvard (now less than 5% compared with 25% in the 1970s) reflects not antisemitism but “an arithmetic consequence of efforts and developments leading to more African American, Hispanic, Asian, and more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.” Not being at Harvard, I have no opinion on this but will be interested to see the reports of the task forces when they come out. I do not know, however, of much “Islamophobia” at Harvard save the outing of students who said that October 7’s attack was Israel’s fault.
All that said, it’s reprehensible when the government forces Universities to make changes to comport with their political views by threatening to withhold grant money and impede research. This would give any administration the right to mold universities to its liking simply by withholding federal funds, which come in many forms. But punishing grantholders for the sins of their university seems somehow wrong. Yes, the government does already demand enforcement of some provisions and has made implicit threats (recall the “Dear Colleague” letter of Obama), but what the administration is doing to Harvard is qualitatively different, and far more threatening to the working of American universities.
Greg Mayer has read the lawsuit complaint (below) and gave me permission to add his comments:
As Garber wrote, the complaint is worth reading. It strikes back on two fronts: First Amendment and due process. The latter, I think, is critical, as the wholesale illegality — not unconstitutionality, just facial illegality—of the Trump administration actions is blatant, and I can’t imagine even the most conservative court overlooking it.
To use a criminal justice analogy, constitutional arguments over whether particular forms of capital punishment are permissible might go either way; but you certainly can’t execute someone who hasn’t been convicted of any crime!
I’m not saying that Harvard’s First Amendment argument isn’t strong, just that the due process argument is so compelling that it should put a halt to the rescission of grants without any need to decide constitutional issues until much later. (Courts love deciding on single issues, putting off more difficult questions till another day.)
The change in overhead rates is a different situation– that’s more of a contractual dispute than just plain breaking the law.
The complaint (click on screenshot below to go to it; it’s also here.) The lawsuit is 51 pages long.
There’s also a NYT news article about the lawsuit (archived here). Their short summary of the points at issue:
The 51-page lawsuit accused the Trump administration of flouting the First Amendment by trying to restrict what Harvard’s faculty could teach students. “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that the First Amendment is designed to safeguard,” the complaint argues, quoting from a 1969 Supreme Court opinion upholding the First Amendment rights of high school students.
The complaint also argues that the government “cannot identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, science, technological and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives.”
Who pays the piper calls the tune. This has been the tactic of government for decades, especially in education, for enforcing a variety of mandates. Frankly, I don’t think government should be funding any of this, partially for this reason, partially because I don’t think government chooses well how to spend the money, and partially because it IS political. Harvard is happy to spend our money and not theirs. What is the point of their enormous endowment?
The enormous endowment has been explained a few times. The bottom line is that based on everything I’ve read about them, university endowments are contractually not available to fund programs other than what they were intended for.
I definitely do think that the government should be funding much of this, since society has a strong interest in funding science, and most science is done in universities.
The US government began funding research via universities starting after WW2. This is largely science and medical research.
The Trump Administration is (as usual) taking an over-aggressive, blunderbuss approach.
However, the list of demands outlined above would be good and necessary policies if only Harvard were to introduce them voluntarily. Is that likely? Well, no, it’s not, given the woke skew of academia. And the government has no way of “encouraging” them except by threatening to withhold funding. So perhaps some middle path can be reached, where funding is not withheld but Harvard agrees to implement the policies.
And I don’t understand the “first amendment” complaint, since the first amendment does not entitle you to receive federal funding, and funding can be (and always is) offered on government terms. Thus funding can be restricted to institutions that have merit-based hiring and no DEI. Perhaps the “due process” complaint has validity though, if funding has already been promised.
Coel, what you wrote is a common-sense take on this.
Federal funds already come with strings. For example, schools were forced in some cases to reduce men’s athletic teams to comply with Title IX so that they could provide equal opportunities for women or face loss of funding. The administration is alleging that Harvard violated Article VI of the Civil Rights Act; if true (and this might have to be adjudicated to determine), this would be a valid reason for pulling funding, but as you mention, a middle path should be found.
Something tells me that if the last administration had said that Harvard must increase it’s LGBTQ++% representation and increase DEI training or face a similar loss of funding that they would have done so.
I honestly don’t see how a true merit-based admissions process can be implemented though unless the school went to using only SAT scores as the criteria. Everything else adds subjectivity, which means the system can be gamed.
Side note: Interesting how “due process” issues keep coming up with the Trump administration. That and “chaos” seem to be the latest words to attack the actions.
Merit based admissions not only would mean dumping DEI but also legacy and donor admissions.
These are both still a thing at Harvard.
I’m good with that
Thank you for reminding us of that connection.
The Trump admin would have a mucher stronger case if they focused on the illegal hiring discrimination that many universities have practiced recently. I mean we have academics in administrative position admitting that they practive such discrimination. Also simple probabilistic arguments show that such discrimination has been happening. Go hard after this.
Go hard on the antisemitism issue.
Go hard on title IX violations – letting males compete in female college sports.
Make sure that zero government research grants are given for DEI stuff, bogus research on how racist and sexist math and astronomy are, decolonizing this and that, etc.
So these are four areas in which the Trump administration would have very good cases to hit the universities hard.
And by hard, I mean hard. Go not only after the schools, but also after individual university administrators who oversaw the title IX violations, who oversaw the hiring discrimination, etc. Only then will this stop.
But Trump has stuffed his admin with lots of incompetent people … The overreach itself signals incompetence (and/or hubris).
According to Inside Higher Ed, NIH has just announced that research grants will not be awarded to institutions that retain DEI programs:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-research-policy/2025/04/23/no-nih-grants-colleges-dei-programs-or-israel?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=ca22291b14-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-ca22291b14-237208717&mc_cid=ca22291b14 . This is presumably based on a simple interpretation of Title VI, and will no doubt be litigated. Those who have not yet developed a case of emeritis are living in interesting times.
This seems like a good idea. Since the D in DEI, de facto, stands for discrimination.
DEI is really: discrimination (D), illegal hiring quotas (E), intolerance towards those who don’t share far-left, illiberal ideology (I)
The Harvard Crimson has published a letter from 100 Jewish Harvard students who emphasize the variety of outlooks they hold on political issues. But they all wanted to express their support for Harvard in the face of the attacks by the Trump administration. Their basic point is that while the Trump administration claims that its attack on Harvard is meant to support Jewish students and faculty in the face of antisemitism, what Trump is doing is no benefit to Jews.
Let’s hope lawsuits are successful in reigning in someone who’s played the courts his entire life, drowning creditors and victims in lengthy proceedings which made giving up preferable to staying afloat. Trump probably feels little concern, he thinks he knows the legal system. I bet he’s wrong. Hope so, anyway.
“All that said, it’s reprehensible when the government forces Universities to make changes to comport with their political views by threatening to withhold grant money and impede research.”
If you look at the issue from the perspective of Harvard/higher ed, that’s a succinct and unquestionable truth.
If you look at the issue from the perspective of a public funder who holds enlightenment values, there are a few important issues that need to be tackled before trusting Harvard with public research money. Research integrity is one of those issues. How can Harvard’s research be trusted by a heterodox public when the University has wandered so far afield from valuing heterodox thinking or perspectives, at least in certain fields, and the review and publication industries are similarly thought siloed so the scientific method is not available as a corrective to flawed research or flawed thinking? How can you ask that heterodox public to fund any part of a thought siloed research enterprise?
But this applies mostly to issues that have a political valence/charge. In these areas we absolutely need more viewpoint diversity. Otherwise the reasearch will not be properly conducted (weak arguments and data analyses will win as long as the conclusions are ideologically congenial; example: transgender youth medicine); and even if the research is properly conducted, outsiders will not trust the conclusions when they don’t have the expertise to evaluate the details of the research.
Good points Peter. The social justice missions of many institutions have affected their reputations for objectivity which, in turn, calls their research results into question. If an educational or research oriented organization wants widespread respect, it must make a clear and consistent choice between being an engine of social justice or being an engine of objective scientific exploration. Chances are, it can’t be effective at both at the same time.
I’m not sure there is any difference in principle between what Trump is doing and what Obama did with his “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 that stripped due process protections from millions of male college students.
Moreover, Obama deported over 5 million people during his two terms.
Via Perplexity:
Obama deported more people than his predecessor, George W. Bush, and more than his successor, Donald Trump, during equivalent periods.
Immigrant rights advocates and some political opponents referred to Obama as the “deporter-in-chief” because of these high numbers.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the rules are different for Democratic presidents.
Personally, I would like to see the powers of the presidency reduced across the board.
A dear colleague letter is one thing. Taking away billions of dollars from needed research is another thing. Totally different universes. Deportations are one thing (and are legal!), sending people to a foreign gulag with no due process is another thing. I keep hearing these equivalences and I keep wondering if they are really made in good faith.
One difference is that with “Dear Colleague” Obama was writing to overwhelmingly left-wing, Democrat-voting recipients who would be delighted to do his bidding. So no “stick” was needed.
Trump is dealing with universities that despire him and which will do anything to thwart his bidding. For example, when Harvard lost in the Supreme Court, and were told that race-based admissions are illegal, universities were near unanimous in declaring, “well, we’ll still continue with exactly the same race-based admissions, we’ll just hide it better”.
Hence, Trump has no option but to wield the big stick if he wants universities to actually move to merit-based admissions.
Yeah but he wants a lot more than just that, and doing so by defunding science is suicidal for the US so regardless it is a whole different thing.
If Trump wasn’t such an obnoxious creep he wouldn’t be despised and a stick wouldn’t be needed.
The universities have flaws but Trump seems incapable of diplomatic behaviour.
Big time. Congress needs to get back to work and get off X. I was wondering when someone would mention Obama with respect to due process and deportations. I grow tired of being accused of whataboutism when pointing to past administrations but it’s relevant here.
Harvard:
“The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that the First Amendment is designed to safeguard”
When you have faculty and staff protecting and encouraging pro-Hamas demonstrators for weeks on end, and no real consequences for law breakers and breakers of Harvard’s own Code of Conduct by the University administration, please forgive me for having grave doubts about whether a true “marketplace of ideas” exists anywhere at Harvard, let alone MENA studies.
I’d like to know how DEI and Critical Studies foster a true “marketplace of ideas” when they appear to do the exact opposite by selectively quashing freedom of speech and the very idea of the validity of opinions held by some. I’d like to know how the changes promoted by the Trump administration will not, in fact, increase the “marketplace of ideas” on campuses.
Of course, there’s no free marketplace of ideas at Harvard. Just ask former Harvard lecturer Carole Hooven (biological anthropologist) – she left Harvard after she had been socially ostracised because she believes that humans come in two sexes only, and that nobody can change his/her sex – these were judged major thought crimes.
Or ask Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer.
Also check here:
Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE [US] Faculty Survey Report
FIRE’s new report finds that faculty members are four times more likely to self-censor than they were in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism.
https://www.thefire.org/facultyreport
Data on Harvard are on page 51 of the report.
46% of Harvard faculty respondents answered that it was not at all clear or not very clear that the Harvard admin protects free speech on campus (N = 132).
Rikki Schlott: Over half of Harvard professors are too afraid to discuss controversial subjects with students – what’s become of this bastion of free speech? New York Post, Oct. 22, 2024
https://archive.ph/yk2J7
Excerpt:
Harvard’s (and many other unis’) Marketplace of Ideas reminds me of the quote in the Blues Brothers movie: When Elwood asks what kind of music they’ve got at the bar they go to for a gig, the bartender says, “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western”.
😀
People need to understand that essentially all innovation starts with university funded research. Companies and industry can perfect and improve upon those innovations (and once and a while make them). You need both the short and long term motivations. But you like crispr technology, ozempic and the fact that lymphoma and melanoma now have much higher successful treatment rates? Thank academia. You want the smart people who work at the most innovative companies? Thank academia for training them. If you say universities shouldn’t have this money please explain your model for science innovation. Defunding the academy is the right wing version of defund the police…
AIUI, the US does proportionately much more private-industry research than most OECD countries. (I haven’t check this at oecd.com, so it may be out of date.)
The US does more private and academic research than other countries. There is fundamental research done at companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft. At pharma companies. And at foundations like the Simons Foundation. All of the people in these set ups are trained as academics. The pharma-based research is pretty low level and is wholly dependent on partnering with academia. The research at companylike google is very good but very specific. On the whole it is still true that in terms of fundamental breakthroughs academia is still king.
Now one could go to a Bell labs model where all fundamental research is separated from academia but this hasn’t worked in the past and someone would still need to train the scientists…
If you’re going to fall back on all innovation starting with training the people, then sure. Kindergarten is even further back. But the main point at issue is funding research within academia. Academic research is often already spun off into wholly-owned subsidiaries such as SRI; they could readily become independent.
And Bell Labs was brilliant for a long time. It just couldn’t survive sort-term shareholder-value neoliberalism, IMO. I don’t know the dollar value of the IP generated by Bell Labs, but it was significant. And don’t forget the CMB.
Bell labs was completely brilliant. Some of the most important innovations in history were made there. Many of those scientists were true heros. The issue with Bell labs was the following: the creation of those innovations was not cost effective for the company. That’s why it died. I’m honestly intrigued by a model where scientific funding goes to institutes to do fundamental work, but to do this at scale is a heavy lift. It would require a big upheaval that isn’t realistic on a short time scale and it is not clear it would function, especially since it isn’t set up for training together with research as universities are. Low level schooling is one thing-all citizens need some baseline education. But cutting edge research requires a high degree of specialized training beyond college.
I always find it bizarre when government officials – and Harvard too, apparently – feel the need to add “and Islamophobia” to any condemnation of antisemitism. It is a lot like those Muslims who counter with “but look what the Jews are doing” whenever their fellow Muslims’ actions are criticized.
Mike, by questioning the terrifying, systemic presence of Islamophobia everywhere in the West, you identify yourself as an Islamophobe in dire need of months of training by
highly trained Diversity trainers. Why, implicit association tests will probably show that people tend to associate shouts of Islamic piety with unfortunate events, particularly in NYC, Madrid, Paris, Nice, London, Manchester, and other such hotbeds of Orientalism.
Thanks for the LOL!
Re “American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution”, these must be so precious that they were not just written down, but inscribed (presumably on stone tablets). The hypocrisy here is miraculous, especially re the constitutional institutions. Gag me with a spoon.
I read both Garber’s letter and the text of the lawsuit. I agree with Greg that Harvard has an excellent case against the government. If I had to guess, my guess would be that the government will back down.
But… but… that would make iDJiT the loser, which is not conceivable. Although in this case he could blame looney lefty judges and/or bad-faith defendants, or (the old favourite) just delay delay delay.
And yet https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-fires-college-free-speech-rankings
Looks like the next attack might be to make Harvard’s accreditation contingent on teaching the MAGA party line. This might actually work, and still fall short of sending the military to occupy the classrooms.