Trump's war on academic freedom: how Harvard fought back

The Trump administration has declared war on America's universities, said Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker. Last month, the Department of Education wrote to 60 of them warning that they faced being stripped of federal funding if they did not do more to protect Jewish students on campus. Then it withheld billions in funding and research grants from Columbia, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern, in an apparent effort to force them into compliance.

Columbia has since agreed to make a range of changes – including bringing in a new internal security force, and banning the wearing of face masks for the purposes of concealing identity. But last week, Harvard, America's oldest university, became the first to say that it would not be bowing to the administration's demands – citing the right of private institutions to determine their own teaching and hiring practices. The administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in grants to the Ivy League college and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status. Harvard is now suing it in response.

Harvard had no choice but to stand firm, said Musa al-Gharbi in The Washington Post. Columbia's partial concessions haven't got it anywhere: its funding is still frozen. And Harvard couldn't possibly have complied with all the administration's demands, which include "reducing the power" of staff who seem "more committed to activism than scholarship"; hiring staff and admitting students based on merit alone; screening international applicants to root out those who may be "hostile to American values"; and submitting to an external audit of students and staff to ensure "viewpoint diversity". The administration says it is simply trying to force the university to uphold civil rights, said Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. But its real aim is "to bring Harvard to heel", as part of its efforts to subdue those institutions that might challenge Trump's agenda.

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The public may side with Trump in this clash, said Evan Mandery in Politico. Harvard is widely regarded as a bastion of unacceptable privilege, owing to the way it offers preferential access to the children of alumni. This policy does help perpetuate inequality, said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. And some of Trump's other beefs with elite universities are also valid: "there is a strain of antisemitism" among some left-wing academics, and a lack of ideological diversity in some academic departments. But this does not justify this attack on the universities' independence. Harvard is protected by its $53.2 billion endowment, but the federal funding freeze will hurt it – and not only it: most of the frozen funds pay for research work at its medical school.

Trump should trust the market to protect academic freedom, said Carine Hajjar in The Boston Globe. Dismayed by last year's pro-Gaza encampments, and students spouting pro-Hamas rhetoric, donors had already "wreaked havoc on Harvard's bottom line by withdrawing donations". And Harvard had been taking steps to change its culture. Trump's heavy-handed tactics risk killing off these reforms.

Worse, they risk damaging the reputation of America's higher-education sector, said Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post. Fees from foreign students generated more money for the US last year than natural gas and coal combined. The US' ability to attract international academic talent has helped put it at the cutting edge of scientific research and generates a wealth of soft power. But "what international student in their right mind" will want to study in the US now, when officials are slashing research funding and seeking to deport foreign students "accused of wrongthink"?