Trump comes for higher education. Harvard must fight back. | Opinion

Eerily sunny weather appeared at Harvard on Wednesday as professors canceled classes and students reeled from former President Donald Trump’s re-election.

With Trump’s renewed ascension to the presidency, higher education faces a weapon, and our university—despite its new institutional voting rights policies—cannot remain silent.

The threat Trump poses to Harvard and higher education is no secret—it is evident in his actions last term and clear in his campaign promises. In 2017, Trump introduced a sweeping tax bill that taxed university endowments for the first time in American history. Apparently convinced that the government hadn’t held universities down enough, Trump’s veep pick – who gave a speech in 2021 titled “Universities are the Enemy” – introduced legislation that would reduce that $1.4 tax would have increased to 35 percent.

Project 2025, a vast collection of policy proposals written by numerous former Trump staffers, advocates dismantling the Department of Education. And Trump’s compatriots in Congress have been investigating Harvard for months, threatening its federal funding in a painfully obvious display of political theater.

The last time Trump came to Harvard, the university fought hard against the government. After Trump severely restricted immigration from a number of Muslim-majority countries, Harvard joined seven other institutions in filing an amicus brief in a lawsuit challenging the policy. They took similar action when Trump tried to revoke student visas during the Covid-19 pandemic. And for years, Harvard bravely defended its race-conscious admissions practices until the Supreme Court — packed with Trump-appointed justices — rejected affirmative action.

Although the University is rightly committed to institutional neutrality, it cannot allow this policy to prevent it from defending its core principles. The text of the policy explicitly allows the university to speak out when issues affecting its “core function” are at risk. We expect the University to interpret this clause liberally as Trump will threaten Harvard in the coming years.

Harvard must combat politicized attacks that threaten its endowment and federal funding. They must resist congressional investigations that lambast Harvard for supposed “wokeness” and hamper free speech on campus.

Additionally, Harvard must promote the well-being of its students. With LGBTQ+ freedoms, reproductive rights, and undocumented immigrants under attack by the White House, Harvard cannot abandon its students on grounds of neutrality. The purpose of the Institutional Voice Policy—to ensure that the university is a safe haven for academic freedom—means nothing if Harvard members cannot learn and research without their fundamental freedoms being compromised.

It is not enough to mount a strong defense against Republican attacks: Harvard must recognize why it is being attacked in the first place. A lot of people hate Harvard. Protecting the university’s interests requires a rethink.

To successfully combat Trump’s attacks, Harvard must go on the offensive with a charm campaign that shows people the immense social good it—and higher education at large—continues to create.

While Harvard maintains its status as the world’s most highly cited academic institution, it has provided substantial scholarships and unparalleled resources to numerous disadvantaged students. In just as many years, two more Nobel Prize winners were added. And its researchers continued to solve problems across disciplines, from developing a one-shot vaccine against Covid-19 to new machine learning techniques in bioengineering.

Harvard is not alone in the fight for higher education: Other institutions are also under congressional control and subject to endowment taxes. By working with its peers, Harvard has the opportunity to play a leading role in defending higher education—not just for the sake of its survival, its research, or its veritas, but for the sake of democracy itself.

This editorial reflects solely the majority opinion of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the result of discussions at regular editorial meetings. To ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who express opinions and vote at these meetings are not involved in reporting articles on similar topics.

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