In a summer of relentless news for Harvard, the biggest development arguably took place some 200 miles away, in Morningside Heights, New York, at a different Ivy League university.
Toward the end of July, Columbia—another major target of U.S. President Donald Trump—signed a sweeping settlement with the government. Excoriated by some as a shakedown, hailed by others as a template for higher education in the Trump era, the three-year agreement left both sides claiming they had won. The government extracted hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple promises for institutional reform. Columbia’s leaders said they retained their independence and academic freedom. At a time when free speech, civil rights, and the financial costs of resistance were front and center, the obvious question arose: will Harvard make a deal of its own?
And on the heels of that question came another one: has Harvard actually been on Columbia’s path all along?
At first glance, Columbia’s settlement was the road not taken for Harvard. Both universities had faced government charges that they violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students and that their campuses were ideologically lopsided. Both were first attacked with a withdrawal of federal grants and contracts—worth more than $2 billion, in Harvard’s case—that funded science and medical research. Both entered negotiations with government officials. But in early April, when the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard with a list of draconian demands—purportedly by mistake—the University halted the talks and sued. The message: Harvard, reluctantly but driven by principle, was stepping up to fight a bully.
Many Harvard faculty, alumni, and advocates cheered the move. At Commencement, President Alan M. Garber got a hero’s treatment—the kinds of ovations that aren’t always showered on soft-spoken, understated academics. But the Trump administration continued its multipronged assault, and the potential for pain became increasingly acute for the nation’s richest university. The U.S. Department of Education ruled that Harvard had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and challenged the University’s accreditation. Congress passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its tax hike on college endowments that will cost Harvard an estimated $200 million per year, on average. The U.S. Department of State issued an effective travel ban on Harvard’s international students, who make up a large proportion of many of its graduate schools.
Harvard responded to each move with statements that emphasized its compliance with all relevant laws and, in one case, with more legal action, filing a second federal suit challenging the travel ban. As the cases wound through the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, the hearings and incremental rulings seemed to signal that Harvard’s constitutional defenses, and legal prospects, were strong. Judge Allison Burroughs issued a preliminary injunction to halt the travel ban in late June, accompanied by a scorching 44-page memorandum that called out “the government’s misplaced efforts to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints.” A few weeks later, during a July 21 hearing in the federal funding case—over which she is also presiding—Burroughs voiced a practical question at the heart of the dispute: if the Trump administration has legitimate concerns about campus antisemitism, how does punishing a long list of labs that haven’t been accused of antisemitic behavior do anything to solve that problem?
This was all welcome news to the Harvard supporters who cheered outside the courtroom (including one man who came dressed as an exaggerated version of Trump, with small Trump heads embedded in his massive orange wig). Still, these were early rounds in a battle that could well make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with an uncertain outcome and massive financial hardship along the way. In a letter to the Harvard community in July, Garber announced that the administration stood to lose $1 billion per year. A hiring freeze was extended; layoffs took place across many graduate and professional schools. And while the University had announced a $250 million bridge fund to continue critical research in certain labs, many braced for deep cuts or closure.
Faced with similarly dire stakes, Columbia opted to stanch the bleeding. In exchange for the restoration of $400 million in federal grants, Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the government and $21 million to Columbia employees to settle an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation. And it agreed to a set of sweeping reforms that included the appointment of new faculty members who would broaden the viewpoints in Jewish studies; review of academic programs, particularly those focused on the Middle East, for ideological balance; the transfer of disciplinary proceedings from the purview of the faculty senate to the provost’s office; the sharing of admissions data so that the government could ensure that race was not a factor in decisions; and a ban on face coverings at protests except those donned for medical and religious reasons.
Some compared the agreement to appeasing a mob boss who will never be satisifed.
Some compared the agreement to appeasing a mob boss who will never be satisfied. Others saw it as a corrective to a campus culture that had spiraled out of control. Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers posted on X that the deal is “an excellent template for agreements with other institutions including @Harvard…this may be the best day higher education has had in the last year.” Days later, Brown University, which faced three federal investigations, announced its own deal with the government, agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. Brown also gave the government access to admissions data, pledged to avoid unlawful racial discrimination in admissions or university programming, barred transgender athletes from competing on Brown teams, and banned puberty blockers and gender-affirming surgeries for minors at Brown-affiliated hospitals. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed the terms of his victory: “There will be no more Anti-Semitism, or Anti-Christian, or Anti-Anything Else! Woke is officially DEAD at Brown.”
WHAT the public rhetoric didn’t always point out was how many of the terms of the Columbia deal, in particular, resembled actions Harvard has already taken, in unrelated court settlements and through internal actions pursued quietly during the previous year and this summer. In March, the University dismissed the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, accused by some of foisting a one-sided view of the Israel-Palestine conflict on their students, while the T.H. Chan School of Public Health suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University, whose West Bank campus had been linked to terrorist support. In April, the University announced efforts to make disciplinary procedures for campus protests consistent across the College and professional schools and renamed its office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging to the Office for Community and Campus Life.
In July, the College closed its offices for women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ students and created a new Office of Culture and Community. That same month, the University announced a series of new relationships strengthening its ties to Israel, from a partnership with Ben-Gurion University to a new Harvard Medical School fellowship aimed at Ph.D. graduates from Israeli universities. On July 30, the University announced the appointment of Rabbi Getzel Davis as the director of Interfaith Engagement—a new presidential initiative to promote religious literacy and dialogue across faith and non-faith traditions.
Together, these moves paint a picture of a university at work—to reform a broken campus culture that Garber continued to acknowledge, or to escape the federal government’s voracious desire for punishment, or both. The two explanations aren’t incompatible, though many at the University have voiced dismay at the prospect of allowing Trump or his allies to dictate the bounds of campus culture. At a faculty meeting in April, when Harvard’s countermoves were just beginning, some professors voiced fears about “capitulation.” In July, days after the Columbia settlement was announced, the alumni group Coalition for a Diverse Harvard wrote a letter to Garber, demanding a reversal of the University’s DEI-related decisions and repeating its call that Harvard “should not preemptively submit to federal administration directives to dismantle higher education as we know it.” And some Harvard alumni serving as Democrats in Congress threatened the University with a “rigorous” investigation if it settles with the Trump administration.
At Columbia, Acting President Claire Shipman walked the same tightrope Garber faces and urged her university’s many constituencies to view the settlement outside the bounds of winning and losing. “I completely understand the desire for a simple narrative: capitulation versus courage, or talking versus fighting,” Shipman told The New York Times after Columbia’s settlement was announced. “But…I really would argue that protecting our principles, slowly and carefully while we stabilize the institution, requires courage too, and is far from capitulation.”
Harvard has been caught up in that binary—by circumstance, and to some degree by design. The risk of a resistance posture, after all, is that if you do make a deal, some will believe you have caved. The University’s stance in the spring served it well with many peer institutions and proud alumni, some of whom, in letters to this magazine, declared that a smaller Harvard would be preferable to a changed Harvard. But what would a smaller Harvard actually mean? The University seems loath to find out.
