Harvard’s languid winter recess gave way to a three-alarm fire on January 20, when Donald J. Trump, president again, launched a sweeping attack on any hint of diversity and equity within federal reach. Two months later, as this is written, it’s clear that the administration is pursuing a multifront assault on higher education (see “In the Crosshairs,” this issue). Given the threats, Harvard and peer institutions need to respond aggressively, affirming anew the irreplaceable value of their work. Herewith, a roadmap to only the most prominent priorities.
Updated April 14,2025, 8:30 p.m.: Read about the federal government’s March 31 threat to Harvard research funding and President Alan M. Garber’s response; the April 3 list of federal demands concerning governance, admissions, hiring, discipline, diversity, and more; and the government’s sweeping April 11 list of specific demands, including four-year audits of Harvard across a broad range of internal academic matters—and President Garber’s April 14 letter rejecting the government’s claims on grounds of academic freedom and Constitutional and statutory protections.
• Making the case for higher education. When Lawrence S. Bacow was elected Harvard’s president in 2018, he said he came out of retirement because he was concerned about the deteriorating climate for teaching and research institutions—particularly the spreading doubt about the very value of pursuing a higher education. How quaint that seems now.
Given the threats to higher education, Harvard and peers need to respond aggressively, reaffirming the irreplaceable value of their work.
Selective colleges and universities are at the center of the second Trump administration’s cultural populism. In executive orders and Department of Education (DOE) guidance, the administration has interpreted the June 2023 Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in admissions to mean that any consideration of racial, ethnic, or gender diversity—in campus culture, research on the health needs or economic conditions of distinct populations, and far more—is verboten. Moreover, DOE and Department of Justice investigations suggest that many universities are now seen in officialdom as tolerant of antisemitism. Either purported infraction provides a pretext for wholesale attempts to cut off federal research funding and to invade academic prerogatives: a startling use of the budget as a cudgel to kneecap an entire sector of civil society that the administration apparently despises.
Beyond protecting their own (large) immediate interests, the affected schools need to forcefully assert their worth: the value of teaching, discovery, and educating leaders of all political stripes—the functions the Trump administration chooses to devalue. Clearly, Harvard has an important role, and a vital stake, in making that argument—even in a raucous environment where the people running the federal government have no incentive to listen, and even when the University itself is very much at risk.
• Shoring up the financial model. As part of its assault, the administration has attempted to tear up long-term policies (supported by statute and contracts) on paying for the indirect costs of research—including current legal agreements worth nearly $200 million annually at Harvard and far more at the affiliated hospitals (see harvardmag.com/finances-risk-25). If upheld by the courts, this action would curtail research at the best-endowed institutions—and probably bring it to a halt at public universities.
In the case of investigations into how institutions define and address antisemitism, the proposed stop orders for existing research are clearly meant to be damaging, if not existential, for places like Columbia. (American Enterprise Institute polemicist Max Eden in December called indirect cost funds a “slush fund for diversity” and suggested that the U.S. secretary of education should take “a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” Mission accepted, if not yet quite accomplished.) Harvard was among the other institutions since named of interest to federal investigators—and since targeted. In early March, the University joined peers in imposing a hiring freeze and constraining enrollment of graduate students this fall—and more austerity is certain across academia (see harvardmag.com/hiring-freeze-25).
The proposed sharp increase in the excise tax on endowment earnings (part of the congressional effort to offset large reductions in corporate and personal taxes) worsens the financial outlook substantially.
Harvard adapted following the market collapse and ensuing Great Recession in 2008 and after. As a precaution, it tightened its belt in 2020 when the pandemic threatened to upend budgets. But the current crisis differs in origin, making higher education finances unusually volatile and vulnerable, quite possibly for a far longer period. At best, conditions have deteriorated alarmingly since 2025 began; at worst, the assumptions that have underlain academic budgets for everything from financial aid to basic research during the past seven decades are kaput.
• Supporting diversity. Since the 1960s, Harvard has championed the educational values of diversity: finding talent wherever it arises and bringing people together to learn from different life experiences and perspectives. On consideration of race in admissions, of course, the University went down swinging in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision. Since then, it has officially remained quiet on most admissions matters: assuring one and all that it still values diversity but of course upholds the law. Early indications are that Crimson classes are less diverse. Other institutions have seemed more aggressive, at least publicly, in stepping up outreach to prospective applicants in underrepresented parts of the country, deploying (Harvard-created) tools to identify pockets of talent within areas of socioeconomic and educational deprivation. Meanwhile, Harvard has continued to uphold legacy and other questionable admissions preferences. And in important respects, the College had until recently (see “Back to Basics,” this issue) fallen behind as other institutions boosted financial aid.
There have been plenty of pressing distractions, to be sure, and the funding constraints are real. But, however the University’s administration adapts formal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs or policies, there are compelling reasons for Harvard to remain the leader in articulating the educational case for diverse student bodies and faculties—in all senses—and for acting on those principles.
• Upholding the humanities. The actual and emotional disinvestment from the humanities has long been dissected and lamented, in these pages and elsewhere. Who wants to spend eight years earning a literature doctorate, followed by a career as an adjunct, when an undergraduate computer science degree yields six-figure starting offers—and maybe a company fleece to boot? Now, the pressures are greater. Academic leaders have every incentive to highlight the economic benefits of discoveries emanating from their scientists’ labs (whether federally funded or not). And some of the fiercest critics of recent campus ructions pin the blame on humanities professors (and some social scientists) who study identity, colonialism, and other subjects.
Of late, both protesters and their angriest opponents have been more interested in raising their voices than in sympathetic listening or persuasive discussion. Their behavior is the enemy of reasoned discourse. So just when the nation and the world most need the lessons and practices embedded in humanistic study and learning, they are least in use. It will take far more than lip service to bring them back—from the way such disciplines are pursued in departments and taught in classes, to be sure, but also in the place they occupy in universities and in their wider civic roles.
• Sustaining speech. Much of the University’s agenda in recent months has focused on defining the limits of free speech through fresh guidance on the time, place, and manner of permissible protests; a new policy on institutional neutrality and voice; and regulations on chalking messages on campus and other small-bore matters. This past winter, in settling lawsuits, the University agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and part of the United Nations’ working definition of Islamophobia as standards for its nondiscrimination and anti-bullying policies, provoking some concerns about whether speech is being constrained and how the standards will be applied (see harvardmag.com/antisemitism-lawsuit-settlement-25). At the end of the day, Harvard must continue to be a beacon for robust speech and academic discourse (see “Back to Basics,” this issue)—and firmly assert why these are essential. It is a sad measure of the times that on any given day, opining on any given incident, the critics within and beyond the University who disparage Harvard and its values can seem more influential than the vast majority who have a hopeful stake in its success.
No single set of leaders at this or any university can master this agenda. The number and scale of the challenges make this an all-hands-on-deck affair, here and across higher education, now and for years to come. President Alan M. Garber, other academic leaders, and their successors need all the help they can get from engaged deans, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and others who care about higher education, the creation of intellectual capital, and the nation’s future.
It is essential to recognize the vast difference between advocating sensible reform and joining those who aim to demolish much of academia
In that light, it is essential at this moment, while necessary self-criticism proceeds within colleges and universities, to recognize the vast difference between advocating sensible reform and casting one’s lot with those who aim to demolish much of academia—the source of so much that has truly made America great.
Selective colleges and universities cannot win battles about their purportedly pervasive biases; that’s why the politicians driving this fight frame it in these terms. But Americans and the wider world can only lose if the debate ignores the real import of teaching, research, and, yes, civic and moral education. So it is incumbent on Harvard and those who understand it to vigorously make the case for the values the University embodies: to put its best foot forward. But that is something it appears to have forgotten how to do, especially of late.
It seems like a long time since the morning of October 3, 2015, when Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Mike Smith roamed the Sanders Theatre stage before a full house for the Harvard College Fund Assembly. In less than an hour, he wowed the crowd by highlighting the University’s rising academic prowess, and aspirations, in engineering and applied sciences. On stage and in video recordings, brilliant scientists presented their work, from building robotic exosuits that restore stroke victims’ mobility to tracing environmental toxins to implanting materials that train the body’s immune system to attack cancers. At the rousing conclusion, Smith invited several of the professors and their postdoctoral researchers and graduate students to the stage, a vivid demonstration of the teamwork and talent that make breakthroughs possible. Their work, he made clear, “isn’t about getting an app that brings pizza quicker to your door. It is about a humanistic approach to science and engineering that improves the quality of people’s lives.”
Why dwell at such length on a fundraiser from 10 years ago? In retrospect, the morning resonates because it simultaneously represents a high point (those who saw the work showcased in Sanders were left rapt) and, perhaps, a path forward now.
The University obviously has an urgent need to explain itself to a skeptical, even hostile, public. The easy cases, like those from the 2015 event, are utilitarian: discoveries that advance therapies, enable businesses to better serve customers, or enhance sustainable development. But the value of libraries and collections that encompass much of civilization, the availability of scholars who can interpret them, and the effects on students who encounter them matter no less. All deserve to be in the spotlight—but few are now.
In a long March dispatch, New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller ’06 (a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at this magazine) recalled visiting Harvard’s home page as a high school student exploring colleges and finding it full of information about the place and its mission. “When I looked recently,” he wrote, “[n]owhere on the home page was there any information about the academic institution.”
At this time of severe challenges to academia, who will make the case for Harvard? On the evidence, stunning research and effective learning occur on campus daily. But the University has been in a defensive crouch for too long. Harvard leaders and supporters must start playing offense, to convey the worth of the community’s learning and research to its many publics. For anyone who cares to enlist, Mike Smith and colleagues had the playbook that October morning just 10 years ago. Time to dust it off.
—John S. Rosenberg
