Trump administration's efforts to defund Harvard divides conservatives
President Donald Trump's targeting of Harvard University and other elite schools has been met with both praise and pushback among conservatives and free speech advocates.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board accused Trump of exceeding "his power under the Constitution" in his demands to Harvard.
The Trump administration announced it would be freezing $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts on Monday after Harvard University president Alan M. Garber announced the same day that the school would not be complying with the Trump administration's demands to combat antisemitism.
"Few Americans will shed tears for the Cambridge crowd, but there are good reasons to oppose this unprecedented attempt by government to micromanage a private university," the editorial board wrote. "The Administration runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce 'governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.'"
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The administration asked the university to make changes to adhere to "merit-based" hiring and admissions practices and reform its recruitment of international students to "prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
Other requested reforms included ensuring "viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring," changing programs with "egregious records of antisemitism or other bias," and discontinuing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and initiatives.
"These reforms may be worth pursuing, but the government has no business requiring them. Its biggest overreach is requiring ‘viewpoint diversity,’ which it doesn’t define. Does this mean the English department must hire more Republican faculty or Shakespeare scholars? An external monitor will decide such questions," the WSJ editorial board wrote.
"Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose. President Trump has enough balls in the air without also trying to run Harvard," the editorial board continued.
National Review's editors also took issue with some of Trump's efforts, writing that the administration was "indulging in the Trumpian habit of making loud and explicit what was previously done with more subtlety."
They wrote, "Obama and Biden administrations were relentless in using federal law to influence or outright dictate how universities were managed."
The editors argued that the government shouldn't have the power to monitor how universities are governed.
Nico Perrino, the executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told CNN that though Harvard has a bad track record of protecting free speech on campus, the Trump administration’s push to punish the institution tramples on its rights.
"This is a loaded gun. These same tools that the presidential administration is using right now to get some outcomes that maybe conservatives like, are the same tools that can be used by a liberal administration to get outcomes they don’t like once the power changes hands," Perrino told CNN host Audie Cornish.
FIRE's chief counsel, Robert Corn-Revere, said in a statement, "President Trump suggested revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status because of what he called ‘political, ideological, and terrorist-inspired’ ideas being expressed on campus. But retaliating against a university because of its curriculum or the views expressed by its students and faculty would violate academic freedom and the First Amendment. The president can't use the machinery of government to dictate which ideas are acceptable in higher education."
CNN political commentator Scott Jennings argued during a panel on Wednesday that Harvard was going to have to deal with the president because they receive federal money.
"There's no diversity of thought among the faculty there," he said. "They take federal money. They have a $53 billion endowment. They take federal money. If you want to continue to take federal money, you‘re going to have to listen to the people who dole it out. And that’s the Trump administration who are standing up for these Jewish students. If they want to give up the federal money, you can create, I guess, the culture of all the culture of hate that you want, and that’s fine. But right now they’re entangled with the federal government, and they’re going to have to deal with the president."
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Politico Magazine's Evan Mandery, a Harvard alumnus, praised his university for fighting back, but noted that Harvard is "an engine of economic inequality in America."
"If Harvard and its peers emerge reasonably intact after this episode, they should seize the chance to broaden their appeal and reform themselves to serve the public interest — not Trump’s personal interest — by providing opportunity to many, rather than a privileged few," Mandery wrote.
The Manhattan Institute's Chris Rufo applauded Trump's actions and said Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status, which the president asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to remove on Wednesday.
Heather Mac Donald, also a Manhattan Institute fellow, deemed the Trump administration's efforts "clumsy" in a piece for the City Journal.
"The administration is growing ever bolder in its crusade against the institutions responsible for left-wing ideology—whether elite law firms or universities. That crusade is unquestionably justified. Its targets deserve little sympathy. But a question arises: Is the administration more interested in maximal disruption or in achieving its long-term goals? The two aims may not be compatible," Mac Donald wrote.
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Liberal commentators have been largely critical of Trump's efforts, arguing that the demands go way beyond combating antisemitism on college campuses. However, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews suggested Tuesday that the president was "smart" to target elite institutions in light of the widespread anti-Israel protests that occurred across college campuses following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel.
Matthews argued that students paying Harvard's tuition had a right to go to class, and that the school had to be told to do this in the wake of these protests.
"And the fact that they had to be told to do this, they had to be told to let students go to school, which is what this is about, that they had to be told to do, that they had a problem in their own heads. So I think the elite universities are taking a beating right now. It’s probably a smart move," he added.
Matthews also said that the move would not hurt the president politically.
"It’s Trump going after the elites. He knows what he’s doing. Politically, it’s not going to hurt him. I think these universities have enough money to cover their legacies. They’ve got a lot of money to handle it. So they’re going to be able to take care of themselves. I don’t want to be loose about this, but I think Trump targeting these universities is probably not the worst move he ever made," he said.
Fox News' Gabriel Hays and Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.