By going after Harvard, Trump undermines one of America's greatest assets — higher education

Indian Express

24-05-2025

On May 23, a federal judge issued an injunction against the Trump administration's order to prevent Harvard University from admitting international students. This order, which the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, had conveyed in a letter to Harvard's International Office, was the latest missive that the university had received from the administration. In the letter, the Secretary accused the university of '… perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' policies.'
Earlier, in April of this year, the Trump administration had frozen as much as $2.2 billion in federal research funds awarded to Harvard in competitive processes. Much of this funding had been allocated to the university's T H Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School. Both organisations are now reeling from the effects of these abrupt budget cuts on a wide range of research programmes, including a host of ongoing clinical trials now in serious jeopardy.
Harvard's troubles began in earnest during a Congressional hearing last year in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas, when the Chair of the House Republican Conference, Elise Stefanik, grilled Harvard's then-president, Claudine Gay, on charges of antisemitism on the university's campus. Stefanik and all her Republican colleagues on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and even some Democrats, commented that Gay's responses were both anodyne and legalistic. Subsequently, owing to her failure to address the issue of anti-Semitism more forthrightly, followed by charges of plagiarism in some of her academic writings, she was forced to resign from the university presidency.
Despite Gay's resignation, Harvard remained in Republican sights. Soon after Donald Trump took office for the second time, his administration issued a series of demands intended to dramatically curtail the university's institutional autonomy. These demands included governance and leadership reforms, revised hiring criteria, changes in admissions procedures for both domestic and international students, reforms in the arena of viewpoint diversity, and an external audit of university units accused of 'egregious … antisemitism or other bias'.
On the face of it, many of these expectations appeared innocuous. However, had Harvard decided to acquiesce, it would have amounted to the university relinquishing its intellectual, academic, and administrative independence. More to the point, Alan Garber, the university's new president, had forthrightly agreed to address the issue of antisemitism on campus long before the administration issued this strongly worded warning.
What seems to have placed Harvard directly in the administration's crosshairs is its refusal to buckle under the government's threats. Columbia University, another Ivy League institution faced with massive losses of federal grants, after initially resisting, had decided to comply with the Trump administration's similarly intrusive demands in the wake of its own handling of protests on its New York City campus. Although it is a wealthy university, Columbia's endowment is a fraction of the size of Harvard's, and its administrators decided that the threatened loss of $400 million in federal research funds was more than it could bear.
The Trump administration's hostility toward universities is not confined to the Ivy League, even though its member institutions have borne the brunt of these attacks. What explains the bellicosity of the administration toward storied institutions of higher education? In considerable part, this hostility stems from a belief on the part of many within the administration that these educational institutions are bastions of political liberalism. Worse still, they also believe that, under the guise of academic freedom, most universities are hostile to conservative ideas and are in the business of indoctrinating students.
Given that this is a deep-seated and widely shared belief among its personnel and its supporters, the administration has made every effort to demonise universities amongst the American electorate, significant numbers of whom did not attend college. It has also quite deftly expropriated and exploited some legitimate grievances that many American taxpayers share. For example, in the last several decades, tuition costs have skyrocketed across the entirety of American higher education (in fairness, at state universities, this is in part due to declining state subsidies to higher education). At the same time, universities, both public and private, have seen significant administrative bloat and some of their departments, especially in the humanities disciplines, have increasingly focused on issues of class, race, and gender.
Addressing shortcomings and flaws is justifiable. However, the Trump administration does not seem to have a thoughtful, imaginative, or meaningful strategy for tackling these ills. Instead, it appears intent on exploiting them for political ends. Its reckless wielding of the budgetary axe threatens to undermine one of America's greatest assets — higher education. This is a sector that has contributed in great measure to America's innovative capacity and its intellectual standing. The administration's ostensible goal of addressing the shortcomings of US higher education is now placing all those achievements at risk.
The writer is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University