The Trump administration’s campaign against higher education has proceeded on so many fronts, and at such breathtaking speed, that it is hard for individual elements of it to capture the news cycle for long. But one especially notable development occurred in the first week of May, when Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote a letter to the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, announcing that his institution would be cut off from future government grants. This followed the extraordinary list of demands that the administration issued (by mistake?) to Harvard a month earlier.
The more recent McLetter is worth reading for a few reasons. First, because the style is highly reminiscent of McMahon’s boss; it reads like a “truth” composed by Trump himself, and encapsulates the distinctive tone of the Trump era in many ways. But more importantly, unlike the prior letter which laid out a number of measures which the administration urged Harvard to take, this one does not enter the policy weeds and instead spends most of its word-count laying out justifications for the Trumpian animus to Harvard—and, by extension, elite universities generally. Beyond announcing that “Harvard should no longer seek Grants from the federal Government,” the rest of the two-page document consists of a list of grievances against the university and of grounds that McMahon believes vindicate this decision. It has the ring of something like “submitting facts to a candid world”: It is the government’s attempted Declaration of Independence from an institution that long predates it.
Given that the Trump administration has not, so far as I am aware, issued a statement of general principles regarding its higher-ed policy, and instead appears content to proceed by designing bespoke penalties and requirements for various institutions, this is as good a place for insight into the Trump II approach to higher education as we can find. I leave aside here questions of legality; I assume, following more expert commentators including some determined conservative critics of higher education, that the administration is likely eventually to lose in court on this and other dimensions of its assault. While of course no institution has a right to federal monies, it is at the least legally questionable whether the executive branch can issue an open-ended, non-time-limited refusal to consider any grant requests at all from researchers at a particular university prior to any official finding of wrongdoing. Likewise, while the letter of May 5 presents the preceding April demands as simply having insisted that Harvard “comply with long-settled Federal Law,” this is not a full picture of what the administration was asking or how it was proceeding. Nevertheless, if the legal footing of the latest missive is dubious, its content still has a lot to tell us about the politics of higher education in Trump II.
The letter begins by asserting that Harvard has “a systemic pattern of violating federal law.” The specific nature of this violation is not detailed, but from other actions and pronouncements of the Trump administration it is clear that they mean violations of antidiscrimination law under Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act. Universities, the Trump administration has alleged, have engaged in unlawful discrimination in hiring and admissions under the guise of affirmative action and DEI, and have failed to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation. The letter accuses Harvard of a lack of transparency, particularly regarding how it selects its “‘students’” (the scare quotes are McMahon’s), and makes special reference to concern about international students (“where do they come from?…how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country?”) Continuing a trend visible since the controversial student deportations began, the letter demonstrates that the Trump administration finds in foreign students’ purported “violent behavior” and “contempt for the United States” a way of conjoining two of its central ambitions: immigration restriction and the curbing of academic radicalism.
Sandwiched between these opening laments is the assertion of a general principle: that receipt of public funding “is a privilege, and not a right.” At this level of abstraction, this is a principle that almost no one denies, and that liberals themselves have asserted against universities time and again in conditioning access to funding on government directives, including when the Obama administration threatened to withhold federal monies unless universities adopted a radically new approach to Title IX enforcement that was at odds with longstanding notions of due process and presumption of innocence. (Overeager compliance from universities with the notorious Dear Colleague Letter of 2011 led them to getting bludgeoned in court.)
McMahon lays another charge against Harvard: that it has abandoned “rigor.” She cites the college’s recent widely derided institution of a remedial math course, and alludes somewhat confusingly to its having “scrapped testing requirements and a normalized grading system.” (Harvard did shamefully drop the SAT requirement, along with many other universities, but had already announced its reintroduction before Trump’s second victory; and it is not obvious what is meant about a “normalized” approach to grading.) Although this seems entirely orthogonal to the question of receipt of research grants (many less academically demanding universities than Harvard receive public research money), on the substance of the issue McMahon has Harvard dead to rights. Grade inflation at Harvard and the other top Ivies would be comical if it weren’t alarming, making a mockery of the very idea of pushing students to excel. It is well documented that across higher education, including the most prestigious schools, students work less diligently than before and increasingly do not even bother to read material which would have been standard for prior generations; employers, furthermore find recent graduates less able to contribute than in the past. Broader technological and social factors, of course, are contributing to educational decline, which has afflicted primary and secondary education as well. But it surely does not speak well of elite higher education that it has simply conceded to these trends by steadily making college easier.
Harvard is accused, as well, of being badly managed financially. Relying almost entirely on the testimony of Bill Ackman, the letter arrives at the conclusion that Harvard has not demonstrated sufficiently responsible stewardship to warrant continued receipt of taxpayer funds. In particular, it alleges that Harvard is not as wealthy as is often assumed, and that the public estimate of its evaluation as worth $53 billion is “overstated.” This may well be true, but one wonders how it supports an indefinite refusal of federal grants. If Harvard in fact has fewer resources than it seems, couldn’t that equally supply a reason to continue funding it, especially given that most of those grants go to medicine and the hard sciences? McMahon tries to have it both ways here: Harvard is less rich than it appears (or than it ought to be, seems to be the implication), but also it is exactly as rich as the topline estimate suggests, which is why it should not gripe about being cut off from the government dole given its “approximately $53 billion head start.” Further, the letter bespeaks no understanding of the fact that most of an academic endowment is tied down to specific purposes, and that in fact there are many good reasons universities have more limited financial flexibility than for-profit corporations.
Nevertheless, the broad critique here does have some merit, even if (again) it is not exactly clear what weight it is supposed to have in justifying the banning of all Harvard researchers and labs from grants. It is quite shocking that—far from what most of the public imagines—only 14 percent of Harvard’s endowment is invested in public equities, compared to 71 percent in hedge funds and private equity, with an additional 5 percent in real estate. (These proportions, I have been told, are not atypical for elite universities today.) This contributes to the uncertainty around the actual value of the endowment (the value of private equities is harder to determine), and in fact partly undercuts the purpose of an endowment. Given how hard many of these assets are to liquidate, it puts out of reach the university’s wealth precisely at the times when the university might most need to access it. A university endowment is meant not solely to get as big as possible over an indeterminate time-horizon, but to provide a financial cushion to keep education and research going when times turn hard. When former President Barack Obama said that universities should neither capitulate nor go into austerity mode but draw on the endowment in the face of the Trump assault, he expressed a sensible understanding that “this is what the endowment is for”; but he missed that universities have not been treating their endowments in this light for some time. Furthermore, the letter gets in a fair shot at how Harvard specifically has handled its endowment. The heads of the Harvard Management Company make enormous sums for questionable performance, with returns that are not any better than my Vanguard account. And as the letter points out, as Harvard (like its peers) has gotten richer this has translated into a larger bureaucracy above all, with administrative growth vastly outpacing increases in students or faculty.
“FIRE ranked Harvard dead last among universities for freedom of speech.”
The letter also accuses Harvard of partisanship. McMahon personalizes this with attacks on specific individuals in the Harvard orbit, but there is no doubt that she is on strong footing here. Harvard, like many other Ivy League universities, is close to being an appendage to the Democratic Party. Sectors that are perceived as friendly to the right, like the military or energy, feature vastly more Democrats than Harvard has conservatives. Moreover, Harvard and units within it issued numerous public statements during the Great Awokening that aligned the organization with left-wing causes (a practice which Harvard has since ended). Self-censorship is generally prevalent on campuses across the nation, but is much higher among conservatives, who rightly sense that the university is largely hostile to their views. And as far as McMahon’s specific target here is concerned: The nonpartisan advocacy group FIRE ranked Harvard dead last among universities for freedom of speech two years running
Moreover, the Trump team is on firm ground here politically. A clear majority of Americans view higher education as in thrall to a political agenda, and it is the greatest criticism that Americans have of the sector, beating out both the high cost and a perceived failure to prepare students for the job market. Harvard President Alan Garber has released two generally impressive letters in response to McMahon, but one of their weakest points is the attempted refutation of the “claim that Harvard is a partisan institution”—a rebuttal that rings especially hollow coming right after he himself concedes the “need for greater intellectual diversity” and a more “pluralistic” community. I hope that Harvard will be nonpartisan going forward, and there are good signs in that direction; but to assert that it has lived up to that ideal so far this century is not credible.
The next point on which McMahon hits Harvard is racial discrimination, citing as evidence of the institution’s “ugly racism” an alleged failure to abide by the Students for Fair Admission decision and the recent revelations about Harvard Law Review’s racial preferences. This is the strongest arrow in the administration’s quiver, and returns us to the letter’s opening allegation of lawlessness: Harvard is now under EEOC investigation for discriminatory hiring practices, and the evidence that taking demographic factors into account was part of official university policy is unignorable. Many have called for the higher education sector to band together to “resist” the Trump administration more strongly. One reason why I suspect this has not happened is that many general counsels understand that the identitarian craze of recent years led to many practices of very dubious legality which have left universities dangerously exposed before the law. As I have mentioned before, many academics seemed to believe that their commitment to (their interpretations of) diversity and social justice licensed them to act according to a law higher than that of the land. On this front, it is hopeless for universities to persist in denial; they should admit their mistakes, not in the hopes of placating the Trump administration (likely impossible), but as a first step toward regaining public trust.
(It’s worth noting as an aside that the Harvard Law Review reference is the second in the letter to a story broken by the Washington Free Beacon journalist Aaron Sibarium. It’s arguable that Sibarium’s stories have done more damage to Harvard than anything since a nearly ruinous 1764 fire. It’s a testament to just how partisan the Pulitzers have become that a reporter who has fundamentally altered the relationship between government and higher education is ignored.)
The final body-slam from this former pro wrestling executive comes in the crescendo of the letter, which charges Harvard with being unpatriotic: Harvard’s greatness “was made possible by … living within the walls of, and benefitting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of America and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.” Purple prose, certainly. But there is a grain of truth here, too. Beyond the anti-American imagery and rhetoric that made headlines over the past year, college-educated Americans are indeed less patriotic than their peers. As with the accusation of partisanship, the trouble here for Harvard and other universities is that the public seems to regard this matter roughly as Trump does; people who work with donors (or, after Oct. 7, ex-donors) note that the perception of a diffuse sense of dislike or ingratitude toward America on campuses is one of the main sources of concern they hear. Furthermore, one does not need to be a supporter of heavy-handed attempts to force the celebration of the United States into the curriculum to observe that university programming is tilted toward highly negative and critical portrayals of America.
Reading McMahon’s letter, then, gives us a look into the politics of higher education in 2025. The core message is that the Trump administration believes significant financial pain and withdrawal of government support is required to address what it considers the deteriorating standards, problematic financial management, left-wing partisanship, illegal demographic discrimination, and anti-Americanism of Harvard and other elite universities.
The overarching rhetorical gambit of the document is that cutting off Harvard from federal grants is simply returning the latter to the status of a private university. “Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution,” the letter proclaims. It must be admitted by even the staunchest Trump opponent that this is rather shrewd. In 2009, Democrats mercilessly mocked a woman at a Tea Party rally for saying “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” Someone outside the academy would be forgiven for hearing in universities’ recent cries something similar. For in fighting back, universities have not just touted the marvels of modern science coming from their labs or the brilliant feats that their former students have gone on to achieve; they have often presented themselves as defenders of democracy who show neither fear nor favor. But “we need to continue receiving all the taxpayer-funded subsidies we’ve been getting, otherwise we cannot be the independent critics of government we are meant to be,” as some anti-Trump writers have argued in respect to other moves by the administration, is unlikely to inspire much of the public, especially given the alarming recent result of a survey in which more Americans (including more Independents) identified the Ivy League as an “enemy” than as a “friend.” A liberal state must tolerate institutions that attack it, or else it ceases to be liberal; but it is surely a bridge too far to expect even an impeccably liberal-minded public never to question subsidies to institutions which it feels are at odds with its core values.
Winning the rhetorical battle is also difficult for universities because of the problem of selective appeals to grand ideals. The congressional hearing in late 2023, which led multiple leaders of prestigious universities to lose their jobs, is a case in point. The actual values which the Harvard, Penn, and MIT presidents invoked in Washington were largely laudable ones. They spoke of academic freedom and the need to debate unpopular views rather than simply to silence them. Why then was this event such a monumental disaster, which hastened higher education’s ongoing slide in public esteem? The reason was that, given how these institutions had behaved in preceding years, many Americans judged that these values were being invoked simply as a shield against outside scrutiny. A similar challenge confronts university spokesmen who now assert their unwavering commitment to institutional autonomy. Even if it is correct (and I think in several ways it is) to say that Trump is overreaching, the average American could be forgiven for asking why we are only concerned to defend our autonomy when a Republican administration is attacking our funding, and not in the face of the many violations of university autonomy and academic freedom encouraged by the left in recent memory. If Democratic governments and left-wing social movements hadn’t been pushing on an open door when they made demands of the university for so long, it would be more straightforward for universities to stake out a convincing public defense now.
The insistence of the Trump administration that universities are effectively an arm of their partisan opponents also exposes just how reckless universities have been in allowing massive disparities in political allegiance among faculty and administrators to develop and in dismissing the real limitations on discourse this has created. Yet many academics are still unwilling to confront the extent of the problem. One counterargument I have heard insists that there is nothing exceptional about today’s situation, because many ideas and lines of inquiry were stigmatized or treated as unacceptable in the much more conservative atmosphere of the pre-1968 university system. What has changed is simply that whereas the boundaries of academic discourse more or less matched the limits of acceptable discourse in the country at large then, today there is a misalignment between the views of ordinary Americans and a large segment of academics.
“‘Sociological legitimacy’ depends on public confidence.”
There is some truth to this line of thought. But just because universities have always fallen short of their professed values doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways of falling short that are much worse in the eyes of the public than others. Enforcing orthodoxies on campus that correspond roughly to societal consensus, bad as that is from the perspective of academic freedom, and enforcing orthodoxies that are remote from societal consensus are quite dissimilar phenomena. There is something especially perverse about the fact that universities became more distant from American public opinion precisely over the same period that they were becoming increasingly dependent on government subventions.
As the response of universities to Trump’s moves—hiring freezes, closing labs, and other austerity measures—reveals, even institutions that jealousy guard the label “private” are in fact incapable of operating without government subventions; in such a condition, even the most shortsighted person ought to be able to see that (to use Max Weber’s phrase) their “sociological legitimacy” depends on public confidence that all major social and ideological groupings will be included and receive fair play. Of course, it would be wrong to say that academia must exactly reflect the distribution of opinion in the country; there would be no way of achieving this without significant truncations of academic freedom. But there is a degree of ideological skew that looks indistinguishable from systematic exclusion of, and contempt for, a significant portion of one’s countrymen, and that is something a democracy cannot be expected to abide forever. In a country with a strong legal culture, an institution or industry can be wildly unpopular and still hope to be treated no worse than others. But as universities are finding out, it is pushing it too far at once to occupy effectively a different ideological territory from the rest of the country and to expect to continue to receive more support and privileges, legal and financial, than other parts of society.
None of the foregoing is to say that the Trump approach is right—just that universities have put themselves in a weak position to defend themselves. In conjunction with the prospect of a substantial endowment tax, not to mention the many other losses the government wants to inflict on higher education, it increasingly looks like the administration simply wishes to impoverish the sector, or to mete out endless punishments. Is the goal to tame the excesses of a university system which it believes has behaved lawlessly, and to push universities to reopen themselves to the full spectrum of beliefs and constituencies in our pluralistic society? Or is it just to ruin Harvard and its peers? How exactly would it be Making America Great Again to reduce the greatest research university in the world to a liberal arts college? The response from certain conservative critics that somehow what America needs is to make Harvard more like Hillsdale is unserious in the extreme. Liberal arts colleges do much good work, but they cannot bear the educational and research burdens that a great modern nation must meet, and it is fanciful to think that we can maintain scientific, technological, and economic primacy in the world without great research universities. And great research universities are very expensive propositions.
The Trump administration is completely within its rights to enforce the law, including civil rights law, as it understands it; and it is even within its rights to condition federal funding on support for free speech or nondiscrimination or viewpoint diversity, just as Democrats have done by inserting DEI requirements into various aspects of the funding structure. (These conditions would need to be very thoughtfully crafted to avoid doing more harm than good, though.) But waging an open-ended war with no clear end articulated and with what sometimes seems like a nihilistic glee at bringing what are, for all their faults, some of the country’s most valuable institutions to the abyss does not fit well with the broader project of American renewal to which the Trump administration claims to be devoted—a discordance the public is beginning to notice.