Public Opinion Won't Save Harvard From Trump

Over the past year, the Trump administration has decided to make life as difficult as possible for the occupants of Massachusetts Hall. The good news is that this agenda has become increasingly unpopular. The bad news? It doesn’t matter.

Since January, the administration has launched an unprecedented campaign against Harvard — freezing billions in federal research funds, initiating an investigation into more than $8 billion in grants and contracts, and threatening the University’s accreditation, tax-exempt status, and even its ability to enroll international students. Yet, as Harvard has become a symbol of resistance to the Trump administration, there have been prominent calls for the University not to cut a deal.

The most recent form of the argument states that Harvard shouldn’t sign a deal with the administration because public opinion is on our side; there is no need to capitulate to an overreaching Oval Office that will be reined in by public opinion.

But this is to misread what the polls are telling us and why they matter. Simply put, Harvard’s recent boost in popularity is likely hollow, and the public doesn’t care that much about us.

For starters, it seems to be the case that much of the unpopularity of Trump’s higher education agenda stems from “thermostatic public opinion” effects — as it’s being implemented, any policy agenda will naturally decrease in popularity. Furthermore, Trump’s approval rating has been steadily declining since the beginning of his term; with that decline in popularity, it would make sense that he drags down the popularity of much of his agenda as the public turns on him.

Although Harvard may be temporarily relieved to see its popularity rise, it is likely that this has more to do with opposition to Trump than genuine support for Harvard and higher education. Because of such shallow support, public disapproval may recur as a thorn in Harvard’s side when Trump’s unpopularity leaves the spotlight.

However, there is a deeper problem with the stance that Harvard shouldn’t negotiate because Trump’s attacks are unpopular. For this argument to stand, public opinion must operate as a binding constraint on the Trump administration. Yet for public opinion to have this effect requires that the issue be salient: Voters have to genuinely care about it and be willing to punish their elected officials at the ballot box over it.

It’s a sad reality of American politics that Trump’s authoritarian shakedown of higher education simply doesn’t fit the bill.

When asked what are the most important issues facing America, respondents to a recent Associated Press poll overwhelmingly prioritize economic issues. By contrast, very few Americans indicate that education — let alone elite higher education — is their top issue. In the most recent YouGov/The Economist poll, only three percent of respondents said education was the most important issue facing America.

It would be ludicrous to expect voters are going to punish their elected officials at the ballot box for misalignment with public opinion on a subject of such unimportance to them — so trivial, in fact, that it frequently isn’t even listed in issue importance polls.

Rather, the MAGA crusade against higher education is largely a project led by MAGA insiders.

To the extent that it’s merely channeling broader resentment against the elite liberal establishment, it’s a force that’s undeniably here to stay. A decade after Trump’s 2016 victory, populist rage against the professional-managerial liberal class seems as red hot as ever.

The right wing intelligentsia’s decision to fight Harvard to the death — whether to entrench authoritarian power, or for more ideological reasons — is a manifestation of a larger trend that isn’t particularly responsive to public opinion, at least in the short term.

Thus, for now, Harvard seems to be stuck in this fight.

An institution that wants to last another 400 years should do its best to avoid existential conflict with a political coalition that has ruled for roughly half the time and presently has obvious authoritarian aspirations.

That doesn’t mean Harvard should sign a maximally conciliatory deal to replace the John Harvard statue with one of Donald Trump or tear down William James Hall to build another Trump Tower (although it would almost certainly be an aesthetic improvement). But it does mean that Harvard needs to think seriously about how to escape a quadrennial cage match with the Republican Party while making minimal compromises to its long-term interests.

Opposing the administration in court to blunt the impacts of Trump’s attacks has been a successful strategy — to date. But Harvard isn’t inherently entitled to billions of federal dollars, and in the long term it will have to convince Washington of its enduring value.

In the face of public backlash Harvard has faced a smattering of proposals for reform, some of which should be rejected outright. Affirmative action for conservatives, making significant cuts to international enrollment and imposing political litmus tests on faculty hiring, for example, all undercut Harvard’s ability to maintain its independent academic excellence — its raison d’être.

But some might make for good politics at little expense to Harvard’s core interests. It won’t kill us to crack down on grade inflation, protect free speech on campus while rigorously enforcing content-neutral time and place restrictions, and place a premium on diversity of thought in pedagogy.

What will kill us is having half the country’s political establishment treat eliminating Harvard as a defining political mission — especially since the public won’t be coming to the rescue any time soon.

Benjamin Isaac ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government and Economics concentrator in Quincy House.