Trump’s war on Harvard

To fight back, universities should fight smart

It’s hard to keep up with events in Trump’s Washington.

I’d been contemplating a post that would compare and contrast the phenomenon of white shoe law firms mostly surrendering to the Trump administration’s demands with Columbia University, which also mostly surrendered to Trump’s demands.

I was going to say that the law firms’ behavior struck me as morally outrageous and clearly motivated by avarice, whereas I thought Columbia and other institutions of higher education faced a more complicated calculus. But before I could actually write the article, the terms of battle flipped. Trump went after Harvard University, and it seems like university officials initially were inclined to engage with the administration, à la Columbia. But the process eventually came to a head with a list of demands that was much more far-reaching than anything Columbia agreed to and that university leadership rejected. The administration has responded by pausing or terminating billions in grant money, imperiling important research and setting off a legal fight over whether it’s okay to cancel legally valid grants in order to coerce unrelated policy changes.

And the fight is set to expand.

Trump is musing about having the IRS cancel Harvard’s tax status. In normal times, you would say, “Well, he can’t do that.” But one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration has been asserting extremely strong forms of unitary executive theory such that there’s nothing that “can’t” be done on the president’s say-so. Of course, we still live in a constitutional republic, so anything the IRS does will be subject to litigation, and the administration will almost certainly lose in court if they do this.

Part of Trump’s point with these threats, though, is that if you lose a bunch of money in the short term and then need to fight costly legal battles to get your money back, that’s still significant financial losses for you and your stakeholders.

By contrast, it’s not like Trump has to pay out of pocket to defend his own illegal actions in court.

But while Harvard will ultimately have the legal high ground on the grants and IRS issues, lurking in the background are more plausible legal cases conservatives have against many universities related to the fallout of the 2023 Students for Fair Administrations case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that college affirmative action programs were unconstitutional. It is, of course, difficult to know exactly what happens in the black box of college admissions. But Harvard and most other elite schools do not appear, in practice, to have dramatically altered their admissions practices, which means it’s conceivable that they’ll lose enforcement cases, if they are brought.

That was why in the piece I wound up not writing, I was going to say that Columbia had valid reasons to engage in this process. But Trump, as is often the case, decided he wanted the fight rather than the win. Rather than taking his real leverage and getting to yes on an agenda of modest-but-meaningful higher education reforms, he’s trying to smash his enemies in a way that’s much riskier for him, and for the long-term future of the country.

Harvard’s united front