Leaders who once helmed the nation’s most prestigious universities are homing in on a message for their successors: resist, defend and litigate.
Ivy League Pushback Against Government Pressure
That formula, they argue, is the only way to survive an administration eager to extract fundamental concessions from schools that go far beyond addressing stated concerns about antisemitism. In the three months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has demanded that some of these private institutions end diversity programming, change admissions requirements, toughen student discipline policies and audit some academic programs.
The sustained scrutiny and public browbeating of Columbia University, Harvard University and other institutions has forced many schools to accept that academia’s relationship with Washington has fundamentally changed — and it will be costly.
That nascent pushback, showcased by Harvard’s decision to reject several proposals from Trump this week, is a notable turnaround from a year ago, when universities appeared more timid about their response to pro-Palestinian campus protests. But what’s unclear is how long even the wealthiest universities can weather a White House and conservative movement so committed to having a public spat with institutions easily branded as elite, exclusive and wealthy.
“Issues of antisemitism and other kinds of discrimination absolutely should be dealt with. But the way in which the government is using that… is really an abridgment of academic autonomy and that needs to be defended,” former Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said. “And I think the way you do that is to go to court.”
Since Trump started his second term, he has punished elite universities for what his administration says is inadequate action on campus antisemitism and weaponizing diversity initiatives. His administration cut more than $2 billion in federal funding to Harvard University and at least $400 million to Columbia University. Columbia has agreed to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Departments and the Center for Palestine Studies under the authority of a new senior vice provost, among other concessions, in an effort to restore their funding. The administration is also reviewing or halting federal funding to other Ivy League schools and prominent campuses.
Bollinger said the universities should consider a collective action and mobilize their defenses in court. But the leadership of the Ivy League has faced significant turnover in recent years, giving the newest presidents little time to find allies within their institutions to help them fight the federal government.
Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill resigned after public pressure campaigns to step down following a high-profile House antisemitism hearing. Columbia has seen two leaders resign in recent months: Minouche Shafik and Katrina Armstrong. Cornell’s Michael Kotlikoff was officially appointed in March after serving as the interim president since July. And Yale President Peter Salovey stepped down in June and was replaced by Maurie McInnis in July.
Harvard has refused to agree with Trump’s requests, teeing up a fight for their money, while Columbia decided to accept the administration’s demands — though the administration has yet to reinstate their funds. The latter position won’t win, say former leaders of Harvard, Dartmouth College and Columbia.
Some leaders are calling on their institutions to fight and others are advocating for a collective resistance. While they agree higher education should address concerns of discrimination, the leaders are urging current presidents to refuse to cave to demands that imperil their core values.
Faculty unions have stepped up to battle the administration in court, and now university leaders could potentially face their own legal battles to protect what they say is academic freedom.
Harvard University President Alan Garber this week announced he has no intention of complying with Trump’s demands, despite the risk of $9 billion in federal funding. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has also signaled he will refuse to capitulate to the administration. Columbia’s interim president has hinted that the university may not be willing to agree to any demands it believes infringes upon its autonomy.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard’s lawyers told the Trump administration on Monday. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
The Trump administration immediately responded to Harvard’s letter by pulling roughly $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in contracts from Harvard. Trump, in a social media post Tuesday, also suggested the institution should lose its tax-exempt status. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday canceled $2.7 million in grants to Harvard and demanded records on its “foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities” by April 30 or risk losing its ability to enroll international students. The university has 6,793 foreign students enrolled, making up roughly 27 percent of its total enrollment.
A senior White House official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive matter, told POLITICO the institutions aren’t as “respected as they used to be.”
“The president is trying to make higher education great again and bring it back to its core focus and mission which is to be the leaders not just in America but the world when it comes to academics, research, science and developing the future,” the official said.
Trump on Wednesday railed against Harvard in a lengthy social media post after the university refused to agree to his administration’s demands.
“Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called ‘future leaders,’” Trump wrote, adding that “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.”
One of the university’s former presidents believes the institution is well equipped for a clash with Trump.
Harvard’s unmatched assets — a roughly $53 billion endowment and powerful network of alumni — means it is in the best position to fight the administration to protect its values, former Harvard President Larry Summers told a group of students and alumni last week.
“When you see systematic attacks on Congress’s power of the purse through interference with funds,” Summers said, “and when you see demands to use entirely extralegal processes to micromanage under threat, unrelated to the process contained in law, what happens in great universities, I think it is the place of institutions like Harvard to respond vigorously and strongly.”
While he agrees Harvard shouldn’t be weighing in on national politics, Summers said the institution’s neutrality policy shouldn’t stand in the way of vociferously protecting its values.
“Harvard shouldn’t be endorsing a candidate for president. It shouldn’t have an opinion on the budget deficit. It shouldn’t have an opinion on the Ukraine war,” he said. “It’s not our place to be commenting on the political controversies of the day. It is our place to occupy a central role with respect to broad values issues that are central to our values as a university.”
Phil Hanlon, the former president of Dartmouth College, said former university leaders from a variety of institutions are speaking out because they know sitting presidents are in a tough spot. But they also want to defend higher education’s partnership with the federal government, which has contributed to the nation’s competitive success for decades.
“We understand that to break that partnership would be devastating to U.S. competitiveness,” he said. “Any kind of collective action to support that partnership or to make the case for the value of that partnership, I certainly would support.”
Jon Fansmith of the American Council on Education told POLITICO schools should work with the federal government to the extent that the administration is “using legal authorities to investigate legitimate cases of discrimination or other concerns” — as they have done with every administration.
But the administration’s demands go far beyond “anything that’s related to preventing antisemitism,” he argued. The administration is targeting hundreds of millions of dollars in research on causes like cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
“Unfortunately for Columbia, their good faith efforts were not met by the Trump administration in equal good faith,” Fansmith said. “If you are at another campus and you look at what happened, that Columbia attempted to negotiate and the funding still wasn’t restored — and just more demands were piled on. You get to see…what’s really at the heart of what the administration is doing.”
Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, recently confirmed that no agreement with the Trump administration has yet been reached, but she said the university is continuing “good faith discussions” with the administration’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. She maintained the university would reject “heavy-handed orchestration from the government” that dictates “what we teach, research, or who we hire.”
Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford University professor, pointed to an “academic social contract” between universities and the federal government. Universities receive funding and support from the government in exchange for contributing to the public good via research, education and innovation.
Over the last 25 years, that relationship has changed amid growing skepticism that elite universities are meeting expectations that include being at all relevant to Americans who will never enter them, he said. Institutions like Stanford — which is not in the Ivy League but is among institutions the administration is investigating — and Harvard also have rivals in the research space, like Microsoft and Amazon, as well as the pharmaceutical industries who don’t receive the same tax subsidy the universities do.
The Trump administration has raised the possibility those subsidies might go away, in part because it’s a message that resonates with voters who do not have four-year degrees, Stevens argued.
“What the universities are coming to terms with is the fact that the federal government might be their foe, not their friend — that’s new,” he said.
One of the big challenges university leaders face is how long their institutions can survive in the “form that we now know them if the federal spigot were to be cut off,” he added.
“Harvard and Stanford and Columbia without federal subsidy is like metropolitan Phoenix without water from the Colorado River — it might exist but it certainly wouldn’t exist in the same way,” Stevens said.
University leaders are in a moment for which they have no script to draw from — and will eventually have to navigate a new chapter in their relationship with the federal government.
“Sitting presidents are in a really difficult spot,” Hanlon said. “On the one hand, they of course want to protect the core values of their institution. On the other hand, they see some of their peers being singled out with really huge reductions in funding … I think that those who understand the value that higher education brings to this country should speak out.”
