I would call it a modest proposal, but Swift did not really mean his to be taken straight. I do think Harvard University, preeminent symbol of American education, intellect, striving, and continuity, should be prepared to go out of business. So should Columbia University, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, and dozens of others on the “hit list” of universities “under investigation” by the Department of Education for questionable reasons.
What I mean is that there are stands to be taken for causes more important than corporate well-being, employment, or even the vital missions of education and research. As a “leader in the industry/field” (as the marketers would have it), Harvard enjoys the highest level of prestige and all that comes with it. But if prestige is to mean anything, it must use its social and financial capital to defend the bases for its own existence. Since the first step in resisting federal budget coercion was taken by Harvard this week, let it continue to lead, and let others join it in whatever comes.
The White House has gone after U.S. universities hard by withholding billions in federal funding, nominally in return for ideological concessions, though those may lead not to resolution but to more demands. (That appears to be happening with the law firms Trump has extracted promises of pro bono work from.) The threats and coercion are nominally about DEI or campus antisemitism but might be seen as mere power-plays or populist virtue-signaling.
Neither are they necessarily about austerity and the deficit. If federal funding for university research has become unmanageable, it could be scaled back more gradually after careful analysis, or financial priorities could be changed, or taxes could be raised on corporations and the wealthy (many of whom went to the best universities). Instead, a cut-your-own-foot-off approach is being used, as with the cuts to Health and Human Services agencies such as the NIH, CDC, and FDA, not to mention to other agencies and programs that preserve American lives, such as FEMA, the FAA, et al.
The funding cuts also are not merely a new direction for the arrangement between the federal government and academic institutions by which research and applied technology was developed so successfully that it made the United States first in the world since WWII. No plan for a privatized version of that relationship has been explained, as far as I know.
What they are at the deepest level is anti-intellectualism, anti-science attitudes, “replacement theory” suspicions, a very narrow view of “entitlement,” religio-state control over the education of the body politic, and sticking it to the (liberal, not conservative) “elites.” U.S. News & World Report quoted me on some of this in 2015, a more innocent time, when Louisiana was trying to be a successful model in several areas for what the right only hoped to do nationwide. Governor Bobby Jindal was a proto-Trump with his eye on the presidency and was willing to serve these values, in part by decimating state funding to universities and colleges. (An earlier attempt against higher ed was made in 2011 in Pennsylvania.)
U.S. News reported: “‘What many other places around the country do have in common with Louisiana is conservative politicians playing to populist sympathies in a fragile economy,’ John Griswold, an assistant professor at a Louisiana public university, wrote…. ‘All it takes to head down this road is to think of higher ed as just another business.’
“Griswold, who writes for Inside Higher Ed…says he’s concerned Louisiana’s higher education troubles could catch on in other states with conservative governors. And it appears his fears may come true.”
With Trump, higher ed’s troubles have multiplied in ways the right could only dream of then.
On Monday The New York Times reported, “A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is ‘viewpoint diverse,’ among other steps.”
The “other steps” included “plagiarism checks on all current and prospective faculty members,” another reference to Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard; “[s]haring all hiring data with the Trump administration, and subjecting itself to audits of its hiring…at least through 2028”; “[p]roviding all admissions data to the federal government, including information on both rejected and admitted applicants, sorted by race, national origin, grade-point average and performance on standardized tests”; and “[o]verhauling academic programs that the Trump administration says have ‘egregious records on antisemitism,’ including…the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Public Health and the Medical School, among many others.”
Harvard, which has America’s largest university endowment at some $53 billion, might be seen as best-suited to defend its autonomy from federal demands, but then that is one of the very reasons it is a primary target.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday. Republican lawmakers have also floated the idea of taxing endowments at rates up to 8.6 percent, which could “hurt Harvard more than any of the previous financial penalties combined,” The Harvard Crimson says.
Endowments, like most other organizational monies, often have specific-built purposes and cannot just be used for other funding shortfalls. The federal cuts for Harvard are currently at $2.2 billion. Harvard’s annual operating costs are $6.4 billion. Big pockets or not, I anticipate Harvard will find a “compromise” with the White House. This will be a disappointment to many, but was it Noam Chomsky who said university administrators are not known for their moral courage?
Harvard has a chance, even a responsibility, to teach a greater lesson to American society by standing up for its institutional values, no matter what. The university has power, influential alums, wealthy donors, and I do not expect it would actually go out of business. But a friend suggested a thought experiment: What if resistance led to no more institutions of higher learning in the US beyond two-year trade programs? What would that mean to America? What about a scenario in which Trump offered only two choices to universities: endowment taxes so large that they were compromised permanently, or else they must agree to be be satellites in a “national Trump university,” where everything including curricula was dictated?
Other universities should stand with Harvard, and if one or all fail, at least they will show that the modern corporate university did not exist only to serve business and political parties, and that we are not a nation with a paltry imagination and weak spirit. This is as important as the independence of the courts, an apolitical military, and a free press. What is the point of a Harvard without academic freedom of speech and inquiry, any more than an America without due process and rule of law?
“Veritas” is on the Harvard shield; let it stand for a truth we can all find inspiration in.
