Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard

On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security stripped Harvard University of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, instantly jeopardizing the visas of nearly 6,800 international students—27 percent of the student body.

But the Trump administration’s attack didn’t end there. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s letter announcing this move also doubled as a request for documents, instructing Harvard to deliver five years of video or audio of “any protest activity involving a non-immigrant student,” plus disciplinary files, before the ban will be reconsidered.

The next morning, Harvard sued and won a temporary restraining order.

The letter represents the Trump administration’s latest assault in its war on Harvard, in which the government is effectively trying to nationalize a private university. It began with an April demand letter in which a multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism froze $2.2 billion in research grants to the school and threatened to freeze more unless Harvard abolished its DEI offices, banned masks used to conceal students’ identities during protests, audited each department for “viewpoint diversity,” and routed every foreign-student misconduct allegation directly to the DHS. A lawsuit from Harvard led the government to retaliate further, and President Donald Trump threatened in early May to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

[Rose Horowitch: Trump’s campaign to scare off foreign students]

If you’re wondering what governmental or executive process led to the freezing of these funds and the subsequent demands made by the Trump administration, none appears in evidence. The government first sent an official notice of an intent to withdraw Harvard’s student-visa certification on Wednesday, beginning the process a week after informing Harvard of the outcome.

The administration justified its actions by invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law that prohibits colleges and universities from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. However, the proper enforcement of Title VI requires an investigation, an attempt to negotiate a resolution, a formal hearing, and 30 days’ notice to Congress before a single dollar is yanked.

The Trump administration took none of those steps before announcing the intended outcome.

This is one among many reasons these moves are so egregious and unconstitutional. The government’s demand that Harvard turn over five years of footage of protests—a time frame that, tellingly, is not limited to the Gaza protests since October 7 that got out of control or involved illegal behavior—is one of the more chilling things I’ve seen in my almost-25-year career defending free expression on college campuses. These actions threaten not just Harvard, but every institution of higher education on American soil. That’s true regardless of your criticisms of Harvard, and I have plenty of those.

Harvard occupies an almost comically outsize place in our collective imagination, playing a starring role in films such as Good Will Hunting and Legally Blonde. Harvard has produced presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Fortune 500 CEOs, and other figures who have shaped the daily lives of Americans.

The reality, though, is that Harvard has a lot of problems, especially when it comes to free expression and academic freedom on its campus. The university scored dead last two years in a row on the College Free Speech Rankings (produced by my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE), which rates schools according to undergraduate attitudes about and experiences with free expression on their campus.

One serious issue with Harvard is that it has cultivated an intellectual monoculture. The student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, noted in a 2023 survey that only 2.5 percent of faculty identified as conservative; more than three-quarters identified as liberal. FIRE’s campus surveys found that 67 percent of Harvard students said it would be difficult to have an open and honest conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to our 2024 Faculty Survey, 84 percent of faculty have a hard time talking openly and honestly about that topic.

Harvard is less a marketplace of ideas than a company town.

The university has had a real problem with groupthink for a long time, leaning into a warped version of intersectionality, an ideology popular with the political left that measures moral worthiness by the aggregate power held by people who share certain demographic characteristics—the less power you have, the worthier you are.

Such intellectual oversimplification is in many ways anti-intellectual. But worse still, an ideology obsessed with power has been the perfect growth medium for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews run the world. The capture of Harvard by this belief has fostered and fed the very anti-Semitism that the Trump administration is using to justify its censorious actions.

To be fair, Harvard has made some promising recent moves, including adopting institutional neutrality. FIRE has applauded these developments and encouraged Harvard to continue efforts in that direction.

However, it would be dishonest to pretend that the federal government just woke up one day and decided to target this university out of nowhere. That needs to be acknowledged, even if the Trump administration’s actions are still egregiously unconstitutional and present a real threat to academic freedom on all campuses.

The administration’s attack on academic freedom will not end with Harvard. Noem has already said that this should “serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions.”  

The administration’s censorious pincer movement has already had clear and far-reaching implications for higher education. Even before Harvard found itself in the crosshairs, for example, the Trump administration threatened Columbia University with the cancellation of $400 million in federal contracts if it didn’t comply with the demands of the multiagency task force, which includes the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Education.

Rather than fight, Columbia caved.

That same joint task force has also threatened dozens of smaller colleges with grant freezes unless they toe the line. And the more of them that fall, the more academic freedom across the country will suffer.

Although the Trump administration often looks impulsive, its actions appear to have a discernible objective. The idea is to destroy the left’s institutional power centers—media, pro bono law practices, and higher education—to assert dominance and control. Each new executive order put out by the Trump administration swings that partisan wrecking ball a little wider, while Congress does nothing to stop it.

What makes this all the more egregious is that the Trump administration could deploy lawful and constitutional methods to get what it ostensibly wants. If Harvard were flouting Title VI and creating a climate on campus that was hostile to Jewish students, nothing would have stopped the government from opening a proper investigation first, issuing findings, and, if it couldn’t reach a negotiated agreement with Harvard, defunding the programs responsible for creating the hostile environment.

That’s how the process is meant to work, and the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in National Rifle Association v. Vullo makes this point quite clear. In that case, a New York State official told banks and insurance companies that they shouldn’t work with the NRA. The gun-rights group sued, and a unanimous Supreme Court found that “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.”

In other words, a state may not sidestep the First Amendment and unlawfully browbeat private actors into doing their bidding. Likewise, the government may not reject thousands of blameless foreign students, demand mass surveillance of political speech, or micromanage hiring and admissions on threat of bankruptcy.

The irony here is rich. Conservatism once warned against the dangers of unilateral executive power. But today’s Republican White House happily wields that very power to crush its cultural rivals.

[Rose Horowitch: What Harvard learned from Columbia’s mistake]

A Constitution shredded to own the libs is still a shredded Constitution, however, and all Americans pay the price for that.

Fans of the Trump administration’s actions shrug at the stakes here. But they should remember that rights are indivisible: If the government can coerce the richest school in America without due process, it can crush a community college—or a civil-liberties nonprofit—without batting an eyelid.

This is the primary reason, if Harvard loses, the precedent that loss will set won’t stay in Cambridge. Republicans who cheer today should take a moment’s pause from their schadenfreude and recognize that they might lament tomorrow, when a different president decides that, say, Hillsdale College or a Southern Baptist seminary are “too extremist” to keep their tax-exempt status.

More than two decades of protecting free speech on college campuses has taught me many things, and one of them is that the sword is always double-edged. That’s why we need to fight its improper use, no matter which way it’s slicing.