Harvard Says It’s Standing up to Trump. Is It Really?

For almost all of the past 65 years, I have been a part of Harvard — from that day in 1960 when I walked up the steps of Thayer South to begin my freshman year, to my time at Harvard Medical School, both as a student and a professor. But never, in all that time, have I been so deeply ashamed of the University, nor as fearful about its future, as I am now.

Just a few weeks ago, Harvard School of Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli dismissed professor Mary T. Bassett ’74 — an internationally respected, award-winning public health physician and scholar — from her role as the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, a center the Trump administration had previously targeted for alleged antisemitism. Professor Bassett is now the second Black woman at Harvard to lose her leadership position under intense pressure in nearly as many years, the first being former Harvard President Claudine Gay.

When President Donald Trump first began his assault on Harvard, and on other American colleges and universities, it was not clear how Harvard would respond. Some at the University may have believed there was some hope that his attacks on DEI practices would backfire. After all, they were being made by someone so blatantly racist, who referred to Manhattan district attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. ’95, who is Black, as an “animal,” Haiti and African countries as “shithole countries,” and many Mexican migrants as “drug dealers” and “rapists.”

Others may have hoped Trump’s crusade against Harvard for its alleged antisemitism would also fail, given his own antisemitic history — hosting Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and saying that some neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” were “very fine people.”

But those hopes were dashed when the Trump administration sent its second list of extreme demands to Harvard in April, threatening the loss of major federal funding to the University if those demands were not met.

Three days later, Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 replied — using language that could have been written by Thomas Jefferson — refusing to comply and emphasizing the University’s “conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity.”

The move was applauded not only at Harvard, but by many around the world. Harvard apparently had the guts, unlike some other universities, to take a stand against tyranny and preserve its independence and integrity.

But couched in Garber’s letter was an assurance to President Trump that Harvard had already fought antisemitism at the University and that it planned “to do much more.”

Now, it has become clear what he meant. Despite Gaza lying in ruins, with its hospitals destroyed and more than 50,000 Palestinian children reportedly killed or injured according to UNICEF; despite there being an arrest warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, Harvard has, in effect, quietly been doing Trump’s bidding.

The University suspended the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Divinity School, dismissed the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and paused the research partnership between the FXB Center and Birzeit University. And it has now removed Bassett.

The pattern is clear. All of these programs and centers were criticized for alleged antisemitism in their programming on Palestine. Then Harvard suspended them or removed their leaders, often with vague references to shifting their focus. These actions are not only shameful, they are intellectually dishonest, hardly what one would expect of Harvard. They appear to accept the bad-faith reasoning that conflates any criticism of Netanyahu’s brutal campaign or any concern for the Palestinian people with antisemitism.

There is another issue deeply shameful to me. As Harvard’s federal funding was being threatened, more than 100 staff people across several of its schools and affiliated centers were fired for budgetary reasons. And Harvard allowed several vital research projects to be shuttered, rather than supporting them so they could continue. This, despite seeing close to $4 billion of growth in its endowment, which now includes nearly $450 million invested in a portfolio tracking Bitcoin — a risky investment that is environmentally unsustainable, with Bitcoin mining’s massive carbon emissions, high levels of air pollution, and vast demands on water for cooling.

Harvard may say that all these endowment funds have been spoken for, but former University President Lawrence H. Summers argued in April that in an emergency, there are ways Harvard can use its endowment, even earmarked funds. Is this not now an emergency for Harvard?

In all of these decisions, the role of the Harvard Corporation — formally the President and Fellows of Harvard College — is often overlooked. Harvard says it has two “governing boards,” but its second, the alumni-elected Board of Overseers, serves largely in an advisory role. By contrast, the Corporation, which directs finances and steers the University’s strategy, is self-selected and self-perpetuating.

I find it hard to believe that the decisions discussed above were made without its stamp of approval, if not by the Corporation itself. Corporation meetings are almost always closed-door, and the decisions it makes are not meaningfully accountable, as in other corporations, to its stakeholders — to Harvard faculty, students, or even alumni.

These recent decisions have brought disgrace and dishonor to the University and raise questions as to whether Harvard’s Corporation form of governance should be allowed to continue.

Eric S. Chivian ’64 is a former Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 as a co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.