Harvard Can’t Fight Dirty if Its Hands Aren’t Clean

In the classic telling of higher education’s biggest news story, President Donald Trump purchased Columbia University’s allegiance for $400 million. Rightly, administrators now worry about the size of Harvard’s price tag.

The narrative that Columbia sold out to a pugnacious government certainly contains some truth but misses important context. Trump’s stipulations include several justified requests, supported by many Americans, which schools would look foolish to fight. To preserve their credibility, Harvard and other institutions should preemptively accede to the most reasonable demands so that they can more forcefully attack the remaining ones.

The primary question universities currently face — whether to confront or conform to the ultimata of an increasingly belligerent Washington — has no easy solution. Rebuffing Trump carries the risk of devastating financial loss; yielding, on the other hand, would set a precedent that elected officials can extract political concessions from schools by force.

Opposing Trump is, in theory, the most honorable option. Schools could conceivably mount a public messaging campaign attacking Trump for targeting universities while defending the tangible public goods they produce. They might also concurrently adopt an aggressive legal strategy, suing the White House for intervening in its affairs. Though this approach may anger Trump and trigger further reprisals, hurting universities in the short-term, it would discourage future hostilities over time.

The main problem with this strategy is that it has low odds of success, in part due to self-inflicted wounds. Schools’ reputations have become so diminished that the status quo is hard to defend in the American public’s eyes.

Consider the last year and a half. At Columbia, masked protesters marched through campus, clamored for an intifada, voiced support for Houthi terrorism, chanted heinous antisemitic tirades, openly embraced violence, disrupted classes, and, at one point, forced the university to shift to virtual instruction. A discipline process for students who flagrantly occupied and vandalized an academic building trudged on for nearly a year, concluding only after the White House froze Columbia’s federal funding.

Viewed in this context, many of Trump’s preconditions for negotiations with Columbia — mask bans, enforcement of existing rules, reformed disciplinary proceedings — were quite fitting.

This is the insidious genius of Trump’s war on higher ed. Reasonable requests — like asking schools to enforce its rules — were paired with dangerous demands — insisting an entire department be placed under academic receivership — and then presented in a threatening manner befitting a fascist dictator.

By abstaining from instituting common sense reforms for so long, Columbia accomplished the amazing feat of ceding their moral high ground to an aspiring autocrat.

Harvard may soon face a similar dilemma. After faculty repeatedly interfered in disciplinary proceedings, changes are warranted in Harvard’s processes. If Trump urged Harvard — as he did Columbia — to fix its rule enforcement body, administrators would have to defend an obviously broken Administrative Board, unless it conceded to Washington.

As the Department of Justice continues to probe Harvard, administrators must implement sensible changes before the White House preempts them and makes any future reforms resemble submission to Trump. Moreover, by pursuing intelligent changes now, Harvard can ensure any demands Washington might impose are extreme, denying Trump the cloak of reasonableness in which he disguised his assault on Columbia.

There are many simple solutions the University can adopt. For one, it can admit that, while time, place, and manner restrictions on speech were largely ignored in the past, these speech limitations exist for a reason and will be enforced in the future. If the University is uncomfortable strictly holding students to its existing speech guidelines, then it should revise them and notify the campus community that future rules will be strictly enforced.

Second, given faculty calls for amnesty for those who broke campus rules and the Ad Board’s historic reluctance to administer discipline to students, Harvard would be well justified in reforming the Ad Board to consist exclusively of administrators, with faculty providing input in a non-voting capacity. Finally, other forms of governance, like the FAS’ vote to confer degrees upon seniors, should also be reformed given past abuses of the current system.

For many Harvard affiliates, these proposals might seem truly radical. But I would argue, it is much more sensible than the current status quo. Large majorities of Americans support punishing students who participated in rule-violating encampments: What is the purpose of time, place, manner restrictions if they are not enforced and what is the purpose of the Ad Board if students can find faculty who will intercede on their behalf, allowing them to trample rules with impunity?

It is naïve to suggest that Trump’s war on universities was avoidable: The populist appeal of targeting elite institutions combined with the autocratic desire to defang universities is a potent political combination that would exist even had universities played all their cards right.

Yet, while universities’ blunders might not have caused the current onslaught on academia, they have drastically narrowed schools’ options to respond. By refusing to course-correct earlier, universities must now defend their wildly unpopular reputations and patently unreasonable policies or else create the appearance of submitting to Trump.

Trump has been itching to embarrass Harvard and defund the country’s oldest university. Harvard must be wise enough to put its house in order. Otherwise, Washington will tear it down.

Jacob M. Miller ’25, a former Crimson Editorial chair, is a double concentrator in Mathematics and Economics in Lowell House.