Can Harvard ever be Harvard again?

Harvard is doing its best in a tough fight it might not win.

By Marvin Kalb

The question itself is mindboggling: Why would an American president want to destroy Harvard, one of the oldest, most esteemed universities in the country? The answer seems equally mindboggling, if not flat-out “weird,” to pull an adjective from the 2024 Democratic campaign.

Donald Trump argues that his motivation is benign. He says, believe him or not, that he is really trying to protect Harvard from two dreadful diseases now infecting the once-glorified world of higher education. One disease is identified by the call letters “DEI,” standing for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” regarded by Trump loyalists as a contagion that can be deadly. It used to be regarded as a slogan for democratizing not only higher education but most other major institutions. The other, more potent disease is the old curse of “anti-Semitism,” which is truly a contagious sickness but hardly one now descending on the Cambridge campus administered by Alan Garber, a noted Jewish scholar.

Buried somewhere in Trump’s twisted vision of patriotism is the cockeyed notion that Harvard has become a dangerous, elitist bastion of bigotry, ideological indoctrination, and financial greed, an ugly world of woke undermining America’s traditional greatness. For this reason, months ago, soon after returning to the White House, Trump launched a vicious campaign to bring Harvard and other institutions of higher education into line. That this campaign has already begun to undermine America’s leading role in stimulating global research into science, medicine, history, and the creative arts seems to bother Trump loyalists not one bit. Quite the contrary; they hail this shameful setback as further proof of Trump’s managerial genius.

Regardless of the incalculable cost to the nation, the president, undaunted, marches on. Just this week, on top of huge cuts in promised federal funding and disturbing official threats against Harvard’s enrollment of thousands of foreign students, the White House charged that Harvard has violated civil rights law by “harassing Jewish students,” all of which allegedly took place during the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli protests on many college campuses following the brutal Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Reaching for hyperbole, Trump officials claimed that Harvard had a “commitment to racial hierarchies” that “enabled anti-Semitism to fester.” Unless Harvard immediately instituted “adequate changes,” which were not defined, it would lose “all federal financial resources.” This was pushing the envelope to extremes.

Harvard had no recourse but to quickly respond by acknowledging the obvious—that anti-Semitism was indeed “a serious problem” in many places and Harvard was “far from indifferent on this issue.” Then, the university clung fiercely to its argument that it was not in violation of any civil rights law.

Back and forth, for several months, these charges, denials, more attacks, and fresh denials flew between the Trump administration and Harvard in an increasingly contentious struggle over the fate of higher education in the United States. One could argue it’s an unfair fight on an uneven field of battle, a super-power in one corner, a university in another. Still, on the ivy-covered walls of Harvard, there is the image of the gallant academic warrior, courageously fighting the Trump administration on behalf of all of higher education, which is now under increasing pressure to conform to White House diktat. Only this week, President James Ryan of the University of Virginia had to quit, accused by the White House of supporting DEI. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) angrily labeled the firing “outrageous” and sadly concluded that if it could happen in Virginia, “it could happen anywhere” in the United States. Garber probably felt the same way about Trump’s war against Harvard. It can’t happen here; yet here it is.

Harvard is doing its best; but it is a tough, perhaps unwinnable, fight. There are senior voices in Cambridge who believe Garber was wrong to even try to negotiate with Trump. They say Trump is totally unprincipled; that he’ll take one position on a Monday and an opposite position a week later. As an example, they cite the president’s comments on June 20, when he praised Harvard for acting “extremely appropriately during these negotiations and appear to be committed to doing what is right.” For a moment, one hoped an agreement between Trump and Garber might not only be possible but near. But then, on June 30, Trump jumped in the opposite direction, accusing Harvard of violating civil rights laws, which, of course, Harvard denied.

There is another problem, too. In any negotiation, Trump plays to win, not to strike a fair deal. People who have negotiated with him, including foreign leaders, law firms, network chiefs, and newspaper publishers, have all learned that even after reaching an agreement with Trump, the negotiation is not over. Trump has a way whenever he chooses of changing the ground rules and asking for more. In the Trump/Garber negotiation, Harvard is still insisting on holding fast to its core values, namely choosing its own courses, its own faculty and staff, and determining its own educational guideposts. Trump seeks the ultimate power at Harvard and elsewhere in higher education to determine courses, set hiring standards for faculty, and alter the ideological direction of the university.

Harvard might reach some kind of compromise with Trump, believing that it has saved the university from further embarrassment and financial heartache, thinking it’s now in position to build on its historic legacy of teaching, researching, and learning. But it will then learn that the price was the loss of its soul.

Can Harvard ever be Harvard again? One must hope the answer is yes, but, looking ahead, I must admit I see no roadmap for this journey.

Marvin Kalb, Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, is a former network correspondent and author of 18 books, most recently “A Different Russia: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course.”

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