Former Harvard president urges people to ‘speak out' against threats to US democracy

The Guardian

26-05-2025

A recent former president of Harvard University urged people to 'speak out' in defense of 'foundational threats' to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy in the US, as those whose deaths for such causes in war were being honored on Memorial Day.
Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, also warned on Monday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being 'at risk' under the current administration, even as Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university as it seeks to repel his assaults on its independence and funding.
'We are being asked not to charge into … artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which [the US civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?' Faust wrote in a guest opinion essay for the New York Times.
She highlighted, in particular, the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers in the US civil war and the roles played by assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and leading Black civil rights leader of the 19th century.
'We must honor these men,' she wrote.
Faust, who led Harvard between 2007 and 2018 and still teaches there, did not mention the US president by name but she referred to his position and made a direct link between the civil war and now.
Noting that about 2.7 million men, mostly volunteers, in 1861-1865 'took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth', she went on to warn: 'Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires.'
Faust said that Lincoln regarded the Confederacy's split from the Union, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery and evade federal government intervention, as a 'direct assault' on government by the majority 'held in restraint' by constitutional checks.
'Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders,' she wrote in her essay.
Critics of Trump lament congressional Republicans' acquiescence to the president's expansions of his authority and challenges to constitutional constraints, Democrats' lackluster resistance, and the administration's defiance of court orders over various anti-immigration extremes and partisan firings of federal officials and watchdogs without cause.
Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly accused Harvard of antisemitism and bias against Jewish students and attacked its efforts towards greater diversity on campus, and the administration has further demanded cooperation with federal immigration authorities, while harnessing federal powers to try to punish the university.
Last Friday, Harvard sued prominent government departments and cabinet secretaries for what it said was a 'blatant violation' of the US constitution when the Trump administration announced it would revoke federal permission for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution to enroll international students. A federal judge issued an injunction within hours, temporarily blocking such a ban.
Harvard had previously sued in April over what it said was Trump's attempt to 'gain control of academic decision-making' at the university and the administration's threat to review about $9bn in federal funding.
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On Monday, Trump posted on his social media platform: 'I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,' adding: 'What a great investment that would be for the USA.'
By Monday afternoon the president had not followed up with action or further explanation or statements.
Harvard's current president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, has called the Trump demands 'illegal' and said the administration was trying 'to control whom we hire and what we teach'.
Faust, a historian and research professor at Harvard, who was also its first president to have been raised in the US south, concluded her essay by acknowledging that those who fought in the US civil war did, in fact, save the nation and subsequently gave opportunities to the generations that followed.
'They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future,' she wrote, adding that 'we possess a reciprocal obligation to the past' and that 'we must not squander what they bequeathed to us'.