Harvard Fights in Court but Retreats on Campus

When Harvard sued the Trump administration two weeks ago, it took up the mantle of defiance — issuing a full-throated defense of academic freedom, invoking the Constitution, and rallying elite academia to its side.

But even as it takes the White House to court and insists that it won’t be coerced by federal pressure, Harvard is rolling out changes that seem to concede to some of the very demands that it claims are unconstitutional.

Just four days after suing the White House, Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced a process to convene a faculty panel to oversee cross-school protest cases and centralize disciplinary authority under the Office of the President. Garber framed the change as a response to inconsistent disciplinary outcomes across schools — but the timing was hard to ignore.

The Trump administration had called on Harvard to create “a disciplinary process housed in one body that is accountable to Harvard’s president” less than two weeks before in its April 11 letter to Massachusetts Hall.

Then on Monday, Harvard proceeded to rename its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to “Community and Campus Life” and announced that it would not fund affinity group celebrations during Commencement — decisions that closely aligned with the White House’s long-standing crusade against DEI and a directive the Department of Education issued in a Dear Colleague letter in February.

And on Tuesday afternoon, Garber paid a visit to Capitol Hill as his deputies back in Cambridge released long-awaited reports from Harvard’s task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia, which described a campus rife with religious and political tension and urged changes — some in line with the Trump administration’s demands.

The moves, all in quick succession, suggest that even as Harvard publicly rebukes the demands — in court filings, campus messaging, and a primetime television interview — it has simultaneously begun adopting some of the less extreme ones.

A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment for this article.

They are also a sign that Harvard is attempting to walk a precarious middle line: resisting federal overreach in principle while selectively conceding to pressures it deems reasonable, manageable, or strategically worthwhile.

In March, Harvard appeared to be pursuing that same middle path. The University ousted personnel at its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended programming focused on Israel and Palestine at the Harvard Divinity School, and terminated its partnership with Birzeit University — the oldest and largest university in the West Bank. All of those changes came quietly, without official explanation, but they bowed to long-standing calls and criticism from top House Republicans.

That effort, however, did little to defuse political pressure. On March 31, the Trump administration announced it would review nearly $9 billion in federal funding flowing to Harvard, and just days later, on April 3, the University received its first formal set of demands from the White House.

Though Harvard drew a red line after receiving the April 11 demands, it hedged for weeks before then, giving no public sign that it would defy the federal government. The White House, too, remained in a holding pattern — taking no action against Harvard even as it cut hundreds of millions of dollars to other schools.

That could have left a path open for a deal, especially if Harvard decided it was open to accepting the more moderate April 3 demands.

Now, a middle-path strategy is unlikely to stave off financial pain or keep Harvard out of Trump’s crosshairs. With a $2.2 billion freeze in federal grants and contracts still in effect — and Harvard opting not to seek a temporary restraining order that could have paused it — the aim is no longer to avoid confrontation or to reinstate the frozen funding.

Instead, Harvard may be making changes in the hopes of strengthening its legal footing, positioning itself as acting in good faith, not in brazen rebellion.

Several higher education lawyers said that Harvard’s decision to give into some of the demands since it filed the lawsuit could woo a judge in its favor when oral arguments began in July.

Marc Brenman, who worked in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for more than two decades and led an investigation into Harvard in the late 1980s, said the moves could be a sign of “affirmative defense” — a legal strategy that shows a party took reasonable steps to comply, even while challenging the rules themselves.

“It says, not only are we not discriminating, but we are actually benefiting the people you say were discriminating against,” he said.

Peter F. Lake ’81, a law professor at Stetson University, said that a court could interpret Harvard’s moves as proof that it is willing to engage in good-faith efforts to protect students from discrimination and abide by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — which the White House has repeatedly alleged Harvard has violated.

“It’s a way to show kind of reasonableness and voluntary compliance to a certain extent, but also isolate the Trump administration’s demands down to things that are less likely to withstand scrutiny,” he said.

Lake added that Harvard’s willingness to adopt some of the White House’s demands could narrow the scope of the legal dispute — and ultimately work in the University’s favor in court.

“The field is trying to figure out just how much to try to comply with what’s going on and how much to fight it,” Lake said. “It’s going to be a game of inches and yards.”

So far, Harvard has defended its more contentious decisions by saying they are justified on their own terms, not concessions to external demands. Earlier this month, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra defended the removal of CMES leadership as necessary to meet “the needs of our academic units.”

And with recommendations emerging from its own task forces, Harvard may now be able to pursue some of the Trump administration’s orders as its own institutional priorities.

In its Tuesday report, Harvard’s task force on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias recommended that the University prohibit mask-wearing at protests and bar staff and non-ladder faculty from launching “partisan projects” under the University’s name — proposals that echoed two demands issued in the Trump administration’s April 3 letter.

While neither policy has yet been accepted by Garber or implemented, the report reflects an endorsement within Harvard’s own gates to ideas it just weeks ago denounced as interference with academic freedom.

In an introduction to the report, the task force discouraged “external parties” from attempting to compel adoption of its proposals — even as its members urged Harvard to listen.

“The experiences set out in this report and its recommendations come from

Harvard,” they wrote. “So, too, must the resolutions and the reforms.”

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.

—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.