Harvard versus Trump is the new battle for independence

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The world’s richest university. The world’s most powerful figure. A struggle for advantage between two titanic forces, each with contempt for the other, both with their historic legacies on the line.

This collision between Harvard University and Donald Trump – and this week’s freezing of US$2.2-billion in federal funds after the university defied the President – is the latest confrontation in a season of contention in the United States. At stake in this fight is the independence of a university and the inclinations of a president.

Neither can afford to lose. Neither is likely to emerge with a clean victory. Each has been eyeing the other, irresistible forces facing immovable objects, for months. Their clash has consequences for both.

For the Trump forces, Harvard – alma mater of eight presidents – is an irresistible target. It is a symbol of elitism (the admission rate for the class graduating this June was 3.4 per cent), established power and wealth (an endowment of US$52.3-billion) and liberalism (it is located in Massachusetts, the only state that voted for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972 and the state that sent Edward M. Kennedy and Elizabeth Warren, two towering progressives reviled by conservatives, to the Senate).

For Harvard, Mr. Trump is a symbol of resistance to reason, intellectualism and the rule of law. Democratic candidates were the recipients of 94 per cent of contributions by members of the Harvard governing boards and faculty last year.

This struggle between Harvard (founded 1636) and the President (born 1946) is no ordinary American political contretemps, even for the tumultuous Trump era. “What Harvard does, and what happens to Harvard, affects all of American higher education,” said James Mullen, who was president of four colleges before taking the helm of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y.

On the surface this is a conflict over whether the country’s oldest university is doing enough to fight one of the world’s oldest prejudices. But this is far more than a clash over whether Harvard has sufficiently battled against antisemitism in its verdant squares and storied classrooms. It is about whether a university gets to set its own policies – and whether a president gets to impose his will.

Harvard believes it is, in the words of an awkward phrase that has tumbled around Cambridge, Mass., for a generation, a tub on its own bottom. Mr. Trump believes that an American president has the prerogative to shape the country and its institutions, and he has chosen university education as a vital element of his effort to do so.

Much as Mr. Trump’s comments about Canada are an assault on its sovereignty, the attack on Harvard and other universities is an assault on their independence. In both cases, the Trump offensives have assaulted long-standing traditions and challenged the established order, pleasing his supporters but unsettling the targets of his forays into areas that no president before dared approach.

The Harvard funding freeze endangers research into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes, initiatives on artificial intelligence and work on quantum science and engineering – all areas far from the Trump administration’s concern about antisemitism. Citing its “Veritas” motto, Harvard president Alan Garber said the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” He further asserted: “The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority.”

As this episode unfolds, university officials may take note that Harvard Yard, on the eastern edge of Massachusetts’s Middlesex County, sits 17 kilometres from Lexington Green, where, 250 years ago this week, American patriots fired the first shots of their battle for independence and where, in the telling of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s well-loved poem, the silversmith Paul Revere rode through “every Middlesex village and farm,/For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

This coincidence of consequence is a metaphor for the continuing American struggle around self-rule, a conflict that today includes universities, forums examining controversial issues such as climate change and, this month, the ability of states such as Maine to promulgate their own regulations regarding matters such as support for transgender people.

The pretext for the Trump administration’s campaign against Harvard and, Monday night, its contracts and grants, is what the President believes is its insufficient effort to protect Jewish students. Some Jewish and university officials, however, believe that the Trump campaign against leading universities is, as Michael Roth – who is Jewish and the president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. – wrote in The New York Times, “a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people.”

Last week, the American Jewish Committee issued a searing statement, saying, “The broad, sweeping and devastating cuts in federal funding that a growing number of American research universities have been subjected to in recent weeks, under the auspices of combating antisemitism, will damage America’s standing as a center of innovation and research excellence.”

Along with antisemitism, this struggle with Harvard, and the freezing of its federal funding, is also about the school’s refusal to do what Columbia University and many of the country’s leading law firms have done: bend to the will and demands of the President.

“This episode is a powerful reminder of how essential institutional independence is to the strength and integrity of American higher education,” said Barbara K. Mistick, the former president of Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., who now leads the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “Federal intrusion into academic and curricular matters has no place in a system built on autonomy, inquiry and academic freedom – and we applaud Harvard for standing firm in defence of those principles.”