Trump Is Coming for Higher Ed. Harvard Must Fight Back.

Uncannily sunny weather shone down on Harvard Wednesday as its professors canceled classes and students reeled from former President Donald Trump’s reelection.

With Trump’s reascension to the presidency, higher education is staring down the barrel of a gun, and — despite its new institutional voice policies — our University cannot remain silent.

The threat Trump poses to Harvard and higher ed is no secret — it’s manifest in his actions last term and explicit in his campaign promises. In 2017, Trump shepherded a massive tax law that taxed university endowments for the first time in American history. Apparently convinced the administration had not kneecapped universities enough, Trump’s veep pick — who delivered a speech in 2021 entitled “The Universities Are the Enemy” — introduced legislation that would have raised that tax from 1.4 to 35 percent.

Project 2025, a behemoth set of policy proposals authored by numerous former Trump staffers, advocates dismantling the Department of Education. And Trump’s compatriots in Congress have probed Harvard for months, threatening its federal funding in a painfully obvious display of political theater.

Last time Trump came for Harvard, the University fought the administration with full force. After Trump severely restricted immigration from a number of Muslim-majority countries, Harvard joined seven other institutions in filing an amicus brief in a suit against the policy. They took similar action when Trump attempted to revoke student visas during the Covid-19 pandemic. And for years, Harvard valiantly defended its race-conscious admissions practices until the Supreme Court — packed with Trump-appointed justices — struck affirmative action down.

While the University has, rightly, committed itself to institutional neutrality, it cannot allow this policy to prevent it from defending its fundamental principles. The text of the policy expressly permits the University to speak out when issues affecting its “core function” are threatened. We expect the University to interpret this clause liberally as Trump imperils Harvard in the years to come.

Harvard must fight politicized attacks that jeopardize its endowment and federal funding. They must resist congressional investigations that lambast Harvard for perceived “wokeness” and impede on campus free speech.

More than that, Harvard must promote its students’ wellbeing. As LGBTQ+ freedoms, reproductive rights, and undocumented immigrants come under attack from the White House, Harvard cannot forsake its students for the sake of neutrality. The institutional voice policy’s purpose — to ensure the University is a safe haven for academic freedom — means nothing if Harvard affiliates cannot learn and research without threat to their basic freedoms standing in the way.

Mounting a strong defense against Republican attacks is not enough: Harvard must recognize why it’s being attacked in the first place. Many people hate Harvard. Securing the University’s interests requires it change their minds.

To successfully combat Trumpian attacks, Harvard must go on the offensive with a charm campaign that shows people the immense social good it — and higher education writ large — continues to create.

While retaining its status as the world’s most cited academic institution, Harvard has given scores of disadvantaged students substantial scholarships and unparalleled resources. It has added two more Nobel laureates in as many years. And its researchers continued to solve problems across disciplines, from the development of a single-shot Covid-19 vaccine to new machine learning techniques in bioengineering.

Harvard is not alone in the fight for higher education: Other institutions find themselves under congressional scrutiny and subject to endowment taxes too. Joining forces with its peers, Harvard has an opportunity to play a leading role in the defense of higher education — not just for the sake of its survival, or its research, or veritas, but for nothing less than the sake of democracy itself.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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