Everyone Loves…Harvard

Today, students graduated from Harvard in an often rowdy celebration, while the school was in court challenging the Trump administration. The graduates celebrated their president, Alan Garber, with wild applause.

In other parts of the country, people celebrated along with them. Not only Harvard grads, but Princeton and Yale alums. I’ve even heard whispered confessions from graduates of other schools, saying they ::sotto voce:: have made donations to Harvard.

Matthew Yglesias, who writes the Substack newsletter Slow Boring (it is neither!), a Harvard alum himself, has made a public practice over the years of discouraging people from giving to his alma mater. He broke down recently and posted this: “But last week, I went to Harvard.edu, navigated to a giving page, and forked over a $500 contribution to the new Presidential Priorities Fund that Alan Garber has established to help steer the university through its current confrontation with Donald Trump.”

Suddenly, everyone loves Harvard. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Wall Streeters are bringing the tacos to the party.

On April 21, 2025, Harvard became the first university to push back and sue Trump over his intrusions into academia. The lawsuit followed the administration’s efforts to set conditions Harvard had to “satisfy” if it wanted to continue to receive research funding that the federal government had committed to provide its researchers with. The Trump administration claimed it was concerned about antisemitism and “ideological capture” (too many liberal professors). The meat of the government’s demands was that Harvard have an outside party “audit” campus viewpoints and that it hire a critical mass of faculty and admit students to achieve “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit”—to the Government’s satisfaction as determined in the Government’s sole discretion. They also wanted Harvard to terminate programs it didn’t like. Harvard put the government’s demands this way in their complaint: "Allow the Government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.”

The complaint is really worth your time. (There is now a recent updated version, here.) The introduction section that starts at the top runs for about five and one-half pages (these are lawyer pages, not book pages, and much shorter) sheds light on who the administration intends to punish if Harvard doesn’t comply with their wishes. That would be all of us—people who benefit from research and scientific breakthroughs. Harvard concludes, “Defendants’ actions threaten Harvard’s academic independence and place at risk critical lifesaving and pathbreaking research that occurs on its campus.”

Before Harvard filed suit, Columbia folded. And so, as with the law firms, the question was, who would bend the knee and who would tell the tyrant-in-the-making no. The stakes are serious. They concern academic freedom and the pressure on universities to teach certain subjects and not others. What’s next? Banning evolution? It’s far too reminiscent of nazi germany, where, a report from the 118th Congress in 2023 reminded us, “The Nazi regime quickly targeted German universities—among the most elite in the world at the time—for restructuring according to Nazi principles. While the Nazi Ministry of Education initiated reforms, local Nazi organizations and student activists worked to bring Nazi ideals to German campuses. These forces, along with increasing antisemitism under Nazi rule, transformed everyday life at German universities.”

Harvard echoed these concerns in its complaint, writing, “The Government has not — and cannot — identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation…Nor has the Government acknowledged the significant consequences that the indefinite freeze of billions of dollars in federal research funding will have on Harvard’s research programs, the beneficiaries of that research, and the national interest in furthering American innovation and progress.” In other words, none of this is being done to protect Jewish students. More than 100 Jewish students at Harvard, in an act of bravery given the times and the administration’s retaliatory actions, signed a letter saying that the cuts actually harm them. They wrote, “We are compelled to speak out because these actions are being taken in the name of protecting us — Harvard Jewish students — from antisemitism, but this crackdown will not protect us. On the contrary, we know that funding cuts will harm the campus community we are part of and care about deeply.”

Garber became Harvard’s president in January of 2025. A physician and health economist, he wrote in The Forward that "Addressing antisemitism “effectively requires understanding, intention, and vigilance,” noting that “Harvard takes that work seriously. We will continue to fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law. That is not only our legal responsibility. It is our moral imperative.” He established task forces to combat antisemitism, as well as anti-Israel, anti-Muslim, anti-arab, and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, which produced reports and action earlier this year. He called them “painful” and said the school would “welcome and embrace” concrete plans to implement their recommendations.

That the government proceeded, using claims of antisemitism nonetheless, laid bare that this is about taking away academic independence. Anything else is pretext. Then, the government took additional action, which led Harvard to file a second lawsuit. That’s the case that was in court today, in a vivid split-screen with the graduations.

The dispute in Harvard v. DHS (and a bunch of other federal agencies and their chief executives) is over the government’s recent decision to “abruptly revoke[] that certification without process or cause, to immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa holders.” It is the effective end of the international students program that has allowed Harvard and many businesses and institutions in this country to flourish, as well as building “soft power” influence abroad. Beyond the substance of the matter, there are procedural hoops the government has to jump through before revoking Harvard’s program. In an implicit acknowledgment that they had failed to do so, the government filed a notice ahead of today’s hearing identifying steps that would be taken. The judge ordered that the temporary restraining order she put in place earlier this month remain in place until the parties confer and get back to her with their views on whether a preliminary injunction is still appropriate and necessary while the litigation proceeds.

So while we take some comfort from the courts and the progress in lawsuits, we need to understand it in the long term context of what it’s going to take for us to stabilize this country, it’s going to take more than just the courts, especially since the temperature read at the Supreme Court is still pretty tepid following their decision walking back Humphrey’s Executor, the case about whether a president has the ability to fire agency employees at will. We need a Congress that will do more than roll over and show Trump its belly. In my opinion, it’s never too early to start talking with friends and family about the next election.

Students, of course, are collateral damage in this whole sorry affair. They suffer the consequences of the president’s whims. None of the losses we are experiencing along with them can be undone as easily as Trump flipped the crazy switch here. And to underline, it’s not about antisemitism. Trump is scapegoating Jews, just in a new way.

For an excellent explanation of why the administration’s complaints about giving taxpayer money to schools like Harvard are bunk, read historian Julian Zelizer's excellent piece explaining how higher education has been an investment made by the federal government that has paid off, and not an unnecessary gift to already well-endowed schools. That strawman, launched by conservatives, ignores the benefits of decades of research, trained scientists, and better outcomes experienced by the American people.

Many years ago I spent a summer at Harvard’s debate program. We joked that the school’s motto, Veritas, meant “Crush the Weak,” at least in its application to rival debate teams. I think I still have the T-shirt somewhere. But in reality, Veritas means “Truth.” And that’s what Harvard is trying to bring to the country in these troubled days and these two lawsuits. Those of you who are “Gilmore Girls” fans will remember when Rory disappointed her mom’s lifelong vision by going to Yale instead of Harvard. This week, she just might have made a different choice.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Thanks for sticking with me, in what has proven to be a week full of complicated legal issues and court proceedings. I appreciate everyone who reads Civil Discourse. It’s our commitment to saving the Republic that will get us through this.