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Have American colleges and universities finally found a wartime leader?
On Monday, Harvard president Alan Garber told the Trump administration his university would not comply with calls for draconian crackdowns on student speech and diversity initiatives. Garber was blunt: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he said in a statement.
The announcement came after Harvard seemed destined to follow Columbia and many other universities in fully capitulating to the Trump administration, which has waged war against the pro-Palestinian movement on campuses. Officials have also launched a full-scale, if vague, fusillade against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, targeting schools that seemed too friendly to social-justice causes. The cudgel has been federal cash — in the case of Harvard, about $256 million in federal contracts and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.” At the time, the administration said Harvard hadn’t done enough to combat antisemitism on campus but offered few other details.
Garber is not the first university president to explicitly stand up to Donald Trump — the president of Wesleyan, Michael S. Roth, denounced attacks on academic freedom, as did Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber — but his outspokenness could, at the very minimum, galvanize more in academia to take a stand. So far, many college presidents and high-ranking administrators have hoped to appease Trump, saying little or, in the case of Columbia, fully acceding to the Israel hawks who hold great sway in his administration. Columbia, in addition to doing little to resist the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, agreed to ban masks on campus, empower security officials to arrest protesters, and install an outside monitor on the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department.
That final concession, in particular, was disturbing. It was a true strongman tactic, and a reminder that any genuine authoritarianism will spring from federal threats and bureaucratic cowardice in equal measure. Trump was not ordering the National Guard to Columbia or whisking away professors who spoke ill of MAGA. He was illegally pulling federal funding from one of the world’s wealthiest universities. Columbia could have gone to court or fundraised aggressively to make up the deficit Trump was trying to blow in its budget. Instead, in true quisling fashion, it pledged allegiance to its new overlords.
Not since George W. Bush’s war on terror — or even the McCarthy era, perhaps — has the federal government been so invested in violating First Amendment rights. What makes this second Trump administration all the more disorienting is that the dark logic behind these fresh assaults on speech is hardly a logic at all. At least Bush, disingenuously, could point to 9/11 for his deportations of suspected terrorists and suppression of dissidents. It was all grievously wrong, but many Americans were supportive and they were still terrified of another mass-casualty attack.
Is there even a bad-faith argument for deporting Khalil? He is a legal resident and former student accused of no crimes. He led a nonviolent protest movement that was targeting a foreign government. Not that it would matter if Khalil and his allies were opposing any domestic actions — First Amendment rights apply to immigrants, too — but it’s all the stranger that he could lose his livelihood over criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza. If Jewish students, throughout the past year, have felt unsafe and alienated over the large campus protests against the surging civilian death toll in Gaza, the answer to their fear is not deportations and virulent attacks on free speech. The answer is not the end of academic freedom as we know it. The campus protests against the Vietnam War were far larger; colleges survived, and the First Amendment was preserved.
The pro-Palestinian protest leaders are not bound to Hamas, which is not plotting terrorist attacks on America, anyway. Students for Justice in Palestine, the oft-targeted student group, has no weapons cache and does not maraud about, launching indiscriminate physical assaults. They simply hold viewpoints on the Middle East that many supporters of Israel find detestable. That is what the First Amendment was created to protect and America is supposed to be about: tolerating and respecting views we may furiously disagree with and oppose with all of our might. Trump, at least, has dropped his mask. The smattering of intellectuals who believed a vote for Trump was a vote for free speech — many were exasperated by the social-justice left’s litany of excesses — has been proven delusional. This is an administration that has disdain for anything approaching free expression.
Now it will be up to the university presidents to build a united front against Trump. He is not as powerful as Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler; he is a democratically elected president with a steadily falling approval rating. He can be battled in the courts and in the public square. There’s no grand, popular yearning for curtailing speech in the name of Israel. Even the MAGA base can only care so much.
Since Trump has targeted largely wealthy, world-renowned universities and not poorer junior colleges or struggling four-year schools, these presidents should understand the leverage they wield. There’s no excuse to shirk from a fight. Trump feeds off weakness. Columbia’s leaders never understood that the institution was built to outlast him. Harvard, at least, woke up to that realization. A university founded in 1636 that is as famous as Trump himself is, at the very minimum, an equal co-combatant. Now’s the time to hit back.
