Harvard’s $500 million surrender to Trump heralds an end to US academic freedoms
I was never fortunate enough to attend Harvard. Yet after the school’s stunning surrender to President Trump’s $500 million shakedown on Monday, I’m not sure the nation’s most venerated university has much to teach anyone.
Back in April, Harvard President Alan Garber drew praise from civil society groups for urging the university to “stand firm” against Trump’s brazen extortion scheme. Harvard’s resolve didn’t even last the summer. Harvard’s elite administrators may think it’s easier to simply pay off the strongman at their gates, but giving the bully your lunch money only invites him to demand more.
Harvard’s full-on retreat is the latest in a string of high-profile payments the White House has extracted from institutions it views as left-leaning, and its half-billion-dollar protection payment won’t be the biggest or the last. With a $53 billion endowment and towering cultural standing, Harvard had plenty of resources to challenge Trump’s lawless demands in court and in the press. Instead, university leaders kept the cash and sold out the students, teachers and administrators who had been counting on them to take a stand.
Americans across the political spectrum are realizing that for-profit universities and media outlets are anything but “independent,” despite what they might claim in press releases. That’s driving a historic collapse in public trust for the media and higher education — and making it easier for Trump to divide and conquer what were once the nation’s most-trusted safeguards of free expression and critical thought.
It’s hard to blame the 56 percent of Americans who have lost confidence in higher education as a positive force in our culture. After all, if the best-funded independent university in the world can’t or won’t defend itself against blatant Republican authoritarianism, what good is its alleged independence?
From the beginning it’s been clear that Harvard didn’t actually violate any laws, but institutions seen as left-leaning by the MAGA movement don’t need to do anything wrong to be targeted. Just ask Columbia University, which sent Trump a $221 million payoff after he threatened to cut off their federal funding, or Paramount, whose browbeaten executives gave Trump $16 million for airing news that offended him.
But the size of Harvard’s payment boggles the mind. Half a billion dollars. For what?
Trump has deployed his claims of antisemitism on college campuses against any university that criticizes him, regardless of truth. If pressed in court, there was a strong chance Harvard would have emerged victorious and provided a framework for future university resistance to government extortion. Instead, they chose to pay up and avoid the headache. That those hefty payments were voluntary only strengthens Trump’s bogus claim that those institutions knew they were doing something wrong.
The American experiment is grounded in the founding myth that we can and should trust strong institutions to protect us from the turmoil of political passions and extremism. The Constitution was a triumph not because it was a compromise, but because that compromise favored a strong government of laws and institutions that were meant to outlast any single administration and any single lifetime.
Our founders praised the free press and free academic inquiry as on par with free elections in safeguarding the republic. Some, including Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, Virginia’s George Wythe and New Jersey’s John Witherspoon, were themselves respected academics and classroom professors. They spoke with passion about protecting universities from federal pressure because they understood that the first act of an autocrat is to exert state control over the production of ideas. What’s unfolding at Harvard represents perhaps their worst nightmare — an American president trampling the intellectual freedom of his own people.
As Trump’s pressure campaign against higher education shows, that threat is just as real today as it was when Rush used his academic post at the University of Pennsylvania to promote controversial ideas like the emerging science of vaccination. Prominent academics today are right to wonder whether their universities will stand behind them if their research angers the White House. The result will be a chilling effect that makes our country less intellectually dynamic and more susceptible to Trump’s dangerous illiberalism.
In the 160 years since the end of the Civil War, American institutions have largely fulfilled their job of protecting our republic by serving as vibrant, free spaces of intellectual thought, cultural criticism and political accountability. Harvard’s massive concession to Trump is a sign that the long era of American academic independence is drawing to a close.
The cost of freedom — academic or otherwise — is constant vigilance. Harvard gave up the perception of its independence without a fight. More serious universities should resist the urge to follow their humiliating lead.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.