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:

Four days ago, three members of the Trump Administration (Josh Gruenbaum of the GSA, Thomas Wheeler, acting general Counsel of the Dept. of Education, and Sean R. Keveney, acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services), sent a Big Stick (or a rotten carrot) to the President of Harvard University and the head of the Harvard Corporation (Penny Pritzker, the sister of Illinois’s governor). It was one of those threatening letters that tell a university that they’d better reform—or else. “Else,” of course, is the withdrawal of federal funds. This threat was made to Columbia University, which caved. But Harvard didn’t. I suggest you read the Trump Administration’s letter by clicking on the screenshot below:

This is a Big Demand and covers multiple areas, which I’ll just summarize with bullet points. Quotes are from the 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.

All this must be started no later than June 30 of this year, and Harvard has to report on its progress every quarter until at least the end of 2028.

Now many of these reforms are laudable (weakening of DEI, effacing any climate of anti-Semitism, mandating the kind of merit-based hiring used at Chicago, etc.), while others are problematic, the most being (to me) assuring “viewpoint diversity” (see Steve Pinker’s quote below). But the most offensive thing about this is the Trump Administration’s attempt to control universities using financial threats.  Many of the people who will suffer by the withholding of government money (probably much of it earmarked for science) are not guilty of these violations, and it’s just a horrible idea to allow the government to demand that universities act this way or that.

Yes, Harvard should have already made some of these reforms, and I know it’s trying to enact some of them, but allowing political forces to control how colleges and universities are run takes one of America’s glories–the quality of its higher education that already attracts students from throughout the world–and turns it into an arm of one political party or another. (It would be just as bad if the Biden administration had threatened universities if they didn’t become more liberal, though of course they already are!). Universities should remain as independent as possible from the vagaries of politics, though of course if politics affects the mission of universities, then schools can speak out.

Harvard responded by giving Trump a big middle finger. Here’s the response from Alan Garber, President of the University, which I mentioned yesterday. Click headline to read:

A quote from the response:

Late Friday night, the administration issued an updated and expanded list of demands, warning that Harvard must comply if we intend to “maintain [our] financial relationship with the federal government.” It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

I encourage you to read the [Administration’s] letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community. They include requirements to “audit” the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduc[e] the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views. We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. 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.

Harvard’s letter doesn’t address the specific accusations of the administration’s letter, but simply affirms that Harvard will “nurture a climate of open inquiry,” respect free speech save for the appropriate “time, place, and manner” restrictions, and will “foster and support a vibrant community that exemplifies, respects, and embraces difference.”  There’s nothing about anti-Semitism, viewpoint diversity (save the last claim above), or merit-based hiring.  Garber could have responded, point by point, to what it’s already is doing to meet the demands of the government, but that would simply be playing their game.

And so, the administration began punishing Harvard: last night the Trump Administration struck back by freezing 2.2 billion in funds to the school. (archived here). From the NYT article:

And today’s  NYT reports on Harvard’s decision (archived here) with a few words from Steve Pinker: (h/t Greg). They quote Harvard’s pushback as being “momentous”:

Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.

Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.

“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”

Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”

We’ll see if Harvard’s response gives some moxie to other threatened universities. So far Harvard hasn’t been one of them.

And Professor Pinker was quoted giving a good, pithy response:

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

Recently, Columbia University caved into the Trump administration’s demands that unless the University reformed itself (mostly doing things to dispel the anti-Semitic climate), they would lose $400 million in federal funding. While most of the changes demanded were good ones, I object to the administration using science funding as a club to bludgeon Columbia into compliance. (On the other hand, Columbia wasn’t doing much, but why should science be the field to take the brunt?)  And Columbia’s caving led to the forced resignation of the interim President, Katrina Armstrong.

“This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow antisemitism to fester,” he added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”

I didn’t know that, though, when I woke up this morning and found this email from the President Alan Garber, who was also an interim President after Claudine Gay’s resignation but now will be serving as a regular President until 2027.  Read what I got and you tell me: is Harvard about to cave, too? I have bolded the parts that suggest that Harvard will do what the administration wants. Again, Harvard did, I think, need to change to get rid of its antisemitic climate, but I would prefer that it do so voluntarily rather than be forced to.

I’ve bolded the parts below suggesting that Harvard is about to cut a deal with the administration:

Dear Members of the Harvard Community, Earlier today, the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism issued a letter putting at risk almost $9 billion in support of research at Harvard and other institutions, including hospitals in our community. If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation. The government has informed us that they are considering this action because they are concerned that the University has not fulfilled its obligations to curb and combat antisemitic harassment. We fully embrace the important goal of combatting antisemitism, one of the most insidious forms of bigotry. Urgent action and deep resolve are needed to address this serious problem that is growing across America and around the world. It is present on our campus. I have experienced antisemitism directly, even while serving as president, and I know how damaging it can be to a student who has come to learn and make friends at a college or university. For the past fifteen months, we have devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism. We have strengthened our rules and our approach to disciplining those who violate them. We have enhanced training and education on antisemitism across our campus and introduced measures to support our Jewish community and ensure student safety and security. We have launched programs to promote civil dialogue and respectful disagreement inside and outside the classroom. We have adopted many other reforms, and we will continue to combat antisemitism and to foster a campus culture that includes and supports every member of our community. We still have much work to do. We will 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 and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism. We resolve to take the measures that will move Harvard and its vital mission forward while protecting our community and its academic freedom. By doing so, we combat bias and intolerance as we create the conditions that foster the excellence in teaching and research that is at the core of our mission. Much is at stake here. In longstanding partnership with the federal government, we have launched and nurtured pathbreaking research that has made countless people healthier and safer, more curious and more knowledgeable, improving their lives, their communities, and our world. But we are not perfect. Antisemitism is a critical problem that we must and will continue to address. As an institution and as a community, we acknowledge our shortcomings, pursue needed change, and build stronger bonds that enable all to thrive. Our commitment to these ends—and to the teaching and research at the heart of our University—will not waver. Sincerely, Alan M. Garber

I cannot interpret this other than as Harvard capitulating to the administration’s demands. Neither the administration nor Harvard are specific here, and Harvard does admit that it still has a “serious problem” of “antisemitic harassment” (I’m not sure how pervasive the problem still is.)  Indeed, Garber says that he himself has been a victim of antisemitism.  How did that happen? The NYT suggests one explanation:

He may have been referring to a poster showing him with horns and a tail that was displayed by a student group during Harvard’s encampment last year.

There’s a lot more in the NYT piece, so have a look if you’re following the Siege of the Universities.  This is only the beginning!