How Not To Reform A University: Trump’s Harvard Obsession

The messy scrap between the Trump administration and Harvard University was always more than a touch bizarre. On June 4, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation claiming that the university was “no longer a trustworthy steward of international student and exchange visitor programs.” It had not pursued the Student Exchange Visa Program (SEVP) in good faith and with transparency, nor adhered “to the relevant regulatory frameworks.” The university had failed to furnish the government with sufficient information “to identify and address misconduct”, thereby presenting “an unacceptable risk to our Nation’s security”.

The nature of that misconduct lay in foreign students supposedly engaged in any number of scurrilous acts vaguely described as “known illegal activity”, “known dangerous and violent activity”, “known threats to other students or university personnel”, “known deprivation of rights of other classmates or university personnel”, and whether those activities “occurred on campus”. Harvard had failed to provide any useful data on the “disciplinary records” of such students. (The information on three miscreants supplied in the lists were not just inadequate but useless.) Just to make Trump foam further, Harvard had “also developed extensive entanglements with foreign countries, including our adversaries” and flouted “the civil rights of students and faculty, triggering multiple Federal investigations.” While the proclamation avoids explicitly mentioning it, the throbbing subtext here is the caricatured concern that antisemitism has not been adequately addressed by the university.

In various splenetic statements, the President has made no secret about his views of the university. On Truth Social, we find him berating the institution for “hiring almost all woke, Radical left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’”. The university was also hectored through April by the multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to alter its governance processes, admissions and hiring policies, and academic programs. The administration demanded via an April 11 letter to Harvard’s president that a third party be hired to “audit” the views of students, faculty, and staff to satisfy government notions of “viewpoint diversity” that would also include the expulsion of specific students and the review of “faculty hires”. Extraordinarily, the administration demanded that the audit “proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching unit basis as appropriate.” Harvard’s refusal to accede to such demands led to a freezing of over $2.2 billion in federal funding.

On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security cancelled Harvard’s means of enrolling students through the SEVP program or employ J-1 non-immigrants under the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP). In its May 23 filing in the US District Court for Massachusetts, the university contended that such actions violated the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act. They were “in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

The June 4 proclamation proved to be another sledgehammer wielded by the executive, barring non-immigrants from pursuing “a course of study at Harvard University [under the SEVP program] or to participate in an exchange visitor program hosted by Harvard University”. The university successfully secured a temporary restraining order on June 5 preventing the revocation from taking effect. On June 23, US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs granted the university’s request for a preliminary injunction, extending the temporary order. “The case,” wrote Burroughs, “is about core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech, each of which is a pillar of a functioning democracy and an essential hedge against authoritarianism.” The “misplaced efforts” by the government “to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints seemingly because they are, in some instances, opposed to this Administration’s own views, threaten these rights.”

On July 21, the parties again did battle, this time over the matter of restoring the money frozen in federal research grants. Burroughs made no immediate decision on the matter but barely hid her scepticism about the government’s actions and inclinations. “If you can make decisions for reasons oriented around free speech,” she put to Justice Department senior attorney Michael Velchik, “the consequences are staggering to me.”

Harvard’s attorney Steve Lehotsky also argued that the demands of the government impaired the university’s autonomy, going beyond even that of dealing with antisemitism. These included audits of viewpoint diversity among the faculty and students, and changes to the admissions and hiring processes. The demands constituted “a blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment.” The issue of withdrawing funding was also argued to be a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires an investigation, the holding of a hearing, and the release of findings before such a decision was made.

Velchik, very much in the mood for sophistry, made less on the antisemitism issue than that of contractual interpretation. Under government contracts with institutions, language always existed permitting the withdrawal of funding at any time.

If Trump was serious about the MAGA brand, then attacking universities, notably those like Harvard, must count as an act of monumental self-harm. Such institutions are joined hip and all to the military-industrial-education complex, keeping America gorged with its complement of engineers, scientists and imperial propagandists.

Harvard has also shown itself willing to march to the music of the Israel lobby, which happily provides funds for the institution. The heft of that influence was made clear by a decision by the university’s own Kennedy School to deny a fellowship to former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, in early 2023. While the decision by the morally flabby dean, Douglas Elmendorf, was reversed following much outrage, the School had displayed its gaudy colours. Little wonder, given the presence of the Wexner Foundation, responsible for sponsoring the attendance of top-ranked Israeli generals and national security experts in a Master’s Degree program in public administration at the university.

Trump is partially right to claim that universities and their governance structures are in need of a severe dusting down. But he has shown no interest in identifying the actual problem. How wonderful it would be, and most unlikely, to see actual reforms in university policies that demilitarise funding in favour of an enlightened curriculum that abominates war.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email:bkampmark@gmail.com

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