2 weeks Ago By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Harvard is having a moment. The refusal by the world’s wealthiest university to bow to interference and overreach from President Donald Trump has garnered praise across the political pundit spectrum, from the The Washington Post to The Wall Street Journal . The New York Times ’ editorial board praised university president Alan Garber as having “brilliantly illuminated” the principles of academic independence.
Even former President Barack Obama, who generally stays out of the political fray, commended his law school alma mater for setting “an example for other higher-ed institutions.” The acclaim is deserved. Harvard rejected Trump’s effort to take “control of academic decision-making” under the guise of stamping out antisemitism and suppressing diversity efforts and the teaching of racism at Harvard.
And the university fought back this week, suing the Trump administration for threatening to cut billions of dollars in research funding in a bold and essential step. But the truth is that it took university leaders a very long time to find their spines. Trump made no secret throughout his 2024 presidential campaign of his intention to target elite colleges .
Harvard should have made clear then that it wasn’t going to bow to his intimidation. Michael S. Roth April 11, 2025 Instead, Garber and the Harvard Corporation – the board that picks the president and runs the school – engaged in back-channel talks with Trump-friendly intermediaries after he came to office in a frantic effort to avoid the cutoff of federal funds and investigations that other Ivy League schools such as Columbia, Cornell and Princeton have faced, according to reporting by the New York Times.
Harvard even hired lawyers who had helped prominent law firms targeted by Trump make concessions and cut deals with the president. Apparently, as recently as early April, Harvard’s leadership thought they were on the road to a compromise. After the Trump administration initiated a review of more than $8 billion in federal research funding to Harvard, Garber wrote to the campus community that “we still have much work to do” to satisfy the government’s demands.
So when the Trump administration sent a harsh letter on April 11 demanding that Harvard “immediately” shut down all programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion; that the university audit “viewpoint” diversity; that the government review admissions of overseas students, it came as a shock. Senior board member Penny Pritzker reportedly viewed it for what it was – a federal takeover – and rallied fellow board members to stand up and fight. In truth, they had no choice.
Had the university caved, it would have ceased to be a world-class research and teaching institution and would instead have become “Trump U.” On April 14, Garber rejected the government’s outrageous demands. This week, he brushed off Trump’s threat to revoke Harvard’s nonprofit status and filed suit against the government.
Harvard is now basking in praise for its bravery and enjoying a surge in donations from supportive alumni. The irony is that until last week, Harvard had largely ignored calls from faculty and students to stand up for academic freedom and resist government overreach. Yolanda Watson Spiva April 16, 2025 As the wealthiest, oldest and most influential university in the U.
S., Harvard has a singular responsibility to defend American education at all levels. Harvard’s failure to resist sooner almost certainly emboldened conservative activists and Republican politicians who want to reshape academia.
It shouldn’t have taken this long for Harvard’s leaders to wake up. Last month, 600 faculty members urged the university to resist the government’s threats. They didn’t listen.
Before Pritzker and Garber stood up, a group representing Harvard faculty had filed its own lawsuit April 11 protesting a federal task force that tied demands for eliminating Harvard’s DEI programs to billions in federal funding to the university. This foot-dragging is only the latest example of years of inertia – or worse – from Harvard leadership. Nearly two years ago, some of us rallied in Harvard Yard as part of the 30-state Freedom to Learn National Day of Action , which I helped organize.
We called on Harvard to protest the assault on education from Republican leaders in red states that had imposed limits on teaching race, gender, sexuality and entire chapters of American history. But Harvard’s leadership remained silent. On Dec.
5, 2023, Harvard’s first Black woman president, Claudine Gay, was one of three female leaders of selective universities who were questioned in a congressional hearing about student protests over the war in Gaza and reports of antisemitism on their campuses. Days later, more than 700 faculty signed a letter urging the university’s leadership “in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures” to remove Gay. But within a month, Gay was out .
At the same December hearing, Republican members of Congress also assailed Harvard’s teaching, spinning a false narrative that studying racism and promoting DEI initiatives stoke antisemitism. Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, falsely smeared a graduate course I teach on racism and racial inequality in America as an example of an “ideology” that promotes “rabid antisemitism.
” A committee spokesperson even smeared me as “a race agitator,” a term long used to diminish Black thought leaders and activists. Last February, I published an Op-Ed documenting how Harvard failed to publicly defend those like me in the faculty, administration and staff whom Foxx and other powerful politicians targeted and disparaged. “We should be leading the resistance to these assaults on higher education, not bowing to them,” I wrote.
Harvard’s failure to robustly defend faculty like me who were falsely accused of antisemitism without a shred of evidence has had a profoundly chilling effect on professors from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and those who study colonialism or human rights. Bernie Steinberg, a former longtime executive director of Harvard Hillel, spoke out against right-wing groups “ weaponizing antisemitism ” in an effort to silence criticism of Israeli and U.S.
policy. Ross Haenfler April 3, 2025 Yet instead of fighting back over the last year, Garber and the board for too long adopted an appeasement strategy. Within hours of Trump’s inauguration, in a blow to free speech and academic freedom, Garber, as part of a settlement in a lawsuit , adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism that can be interpreted as conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Harvard also dismissed faculty leaders from its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Meanwhile, at least one of my colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government resigned after Garber adopted a new policy of “ institutional neutrality” that effectively censored administrators and many faculty leaders from speaking on political matters based on their own scholarship. All research at the Kennedy School, a public policy school where I was a tenured professor for nearly a decade, is inherently political.
Both Garber and Pritzker are Jewish, and I commend them for at last standing up to Trump’s efforts to cynically weaponize antisemitism as an excuse for attacking the university. “As a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism,” Garber said in announcing the lawsuit against the White House. But he noted that the university has plans to address the issue, and the law requires the government to engage with Harvard before it can take punitive action.
Instead, Garber said, the administration sought “to control whom we hire and what we teach.” Finally, Harvard is standing up to fight a critical battle for academic independence that will affect campuses across America. But there’s a larger lesson.
When Harvard, the country's most powerful university, compromises its values and ignores many of its own constituents, it only encourages more oppressive steps from a government that wants to bring colleges to heel. For education to survive the relentless attacks from the Trump administration, Harvard will have to lead a collective resistance – no matter the cost. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a visiting professor at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the inaugural professor of African American studies and public affairs at Princeton University.
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