What Harvard Learned From Columbia’s Mistake

If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why give in to the Trump administration’s demands?

April 14th, 2025, The Atlantic

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The richest university in the world has decided that some things are more important than money.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration threatened to revoke $9 billion in federal grants and contracts if Harvard did not agree to a long list of demands, including screening foreign applicants “hostile to the American values and institutions” and allowing an external body to audit university departments for viewpoint diversity. (How screening international students for their beliefs would contribute to viewpoint diversity was not specified.) Today, Harvard announced that it would not agree to the Trump administration’s terms. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” the university’s lawyers wrote in a letter to administration officials. “Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”

In making this decision, Harvard appears to have learned a lesson from the Trump administration’s tangle with another Ivy League school—just not the lesson the government intended.

When the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia—ostensibly because of the school’s handling of campus anti-Semitism—it outlined a set of far-reaching changes as a precondition for getting the funding back. These included forbidding protestors from wearing masks, giving the university president direct control over discipline, and placing an entire academic department in “academic receivership.” Columbia swiftly acquiesced to the demands, with only minor changes. “The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular,” Katrina Armstrong, then Columbia’s interim president, told faculty, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The university was publicly pilloried. Faculty accused Armstrong of setting a risky precedent. One professor called the concessions “a giant step down a very dangerous road.” And even after suffering those reputational blows, Columbia still has not gotten the $400 million back. On the contrary, the Trump administration seems to have taken the capitulation as permission to make more demands. When Armstrong appeared to waffle, the government demanded that she reaffirm her commitment to meeting its demands. (She did so, and then resigned a few days later.) Now the Trump administration is reportedly planning to pursue federal oversight of the university.

With its escalating punishments, the government was trying to send a message about what happens to “woke” schools that defy Donald Trump’s will. For a time, Harvard seemed to take that message to heart, attempting to avoid trouble by preemptively making moves in line with the administration’s priorities. In January, it settled two anti-Semitism lawsuits brought by Jewish groups and agreed to adopt a controversial definition of anti-Semitism that included some types of criticism of Israel. And late last month, it dismissed the faculty leaders for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which had faced criticism that its programming was biased against Israel.

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