The Journal. - Inside the Harvard vs. Trump Battle

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

President Donald Trump has been on an escalating campaign to reorder elite higher education. The administration’s Anti-Semitism Task Force has frozen billions of dollars in federal funding after Harvard refused to comply with their demands. WSJ’s Douglas Belkin on the showdown between America’s most prominent university and the U.S. president. Jessica Mendoza hosts.   Further Listening: - Trump's College Crackdown  Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past couple months, the Trump administration has been targeting higher education, homing in on some of the nation's top universities. The Trump administration making good on its threat to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University. The federal funding freeze at the University of Pennsylvania. The Trump administration is pausing nearly $200 million in funds. The Trump administration freezes $1 billion in funding for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern University.

And now, the administration has set its sights on its most high-profile target yet, Harvard. The Trump administration is threatening to withhold $9 billion in funding to Harvard, one of America's most prestigious universities. Why does it matter that it's Harvard University? Harvard is the wealthiest university in the nation with endowment of about $53 billion. So if anybody has the wherewithal to stand up and fight the Trump administration, it's going to be Harvard University.

— That's my colleague Doug Belkin, who covers higher education. — The forces that are at play here are a university system across the country that has moved to the left, and the president is attempting essentially a course correction by what the university sees an invasion of their independence. So this is the culmination of forces

that have been heading toward each other, toward a collision for two generations. This is sort of the most dramatic moment in higher education, probably in my lifetime. It's been building and building. And this is really a perfect storm of politics, finance, power, coming together and crashing and it's all being manifest between Trump and Harvard. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, April 23rd. Coming up on the show, the battle over higher education has come for Harvard. Set. Go! Go! Riding a bike in the Ride to Conquer Cancer is like being part of humanity's greatest. The money you raise, the time you spend, the energy that you give is helping people live.

It's giving people hope. And that's just so beautiful. Care of the fire for cancer research. Join the ride at ridetoconquer.ca. In many ways, Doug says, the fight between the Trump administration and universities traces its roots back decades, all the way to the 1970s. As the schools begin to integrate,

and there are more kids who are black and Latina and Asian coming on campuses than Jewish, we move from this sort of Western civilization curriculum to criticism of the West. And so you've got a lot of sort of critical theorists saying the West is colonialist, imperialistic, racist, patriarchal, and faculty move in that direction. — Surveys from multiple universities have shown that in recent years,

a greater percentage of faculty identify as liberal rather than conservative. And when it comes to public perception, polls say that Americans believe colleges generally lean left. Conservatives argue that it's become an echo chamber where they're no longer allowing the discussion of other points of view. And that's where the friction really grinds the gears of the conservatives. Fast forward to 2023. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Israel struck back, and the war in Gaza began. In the U.S., protests erupted on college campuses over Israel's treatment of civilians in Gaza. These protests riled up a lot of conservatives who saw them as

anti-Semitic and an attack on America's historic support of Israel and on Western values. And so where does Trump come into all of this? So he, as the frustration rises, Trump seizes on this, just as he seizes on the frustration with immigration. And conservatives are angry at universities, And so he articulates their anger. And he says, the universities have been taken over by, you know, Marxists, progressive, radical, leftist professors, and I'm going to stop it.

We are going to choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilization itself. The president didn't waste much time. Soon after taking office, his administration put together a group, the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The White House said the task force was specifically created to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and college campuses.

The group's members come from a range of backgrounds, from the Acting General Counsel of the Health and Human Services Department to a former Fox News commentator to a government official who spent much of his career in finance. Last month, the task force turned its attention to Columbia University. The Trump administration froze $400 million in federal funding at the university and demanded a series of changes, things like banning masks and empowering campus police. Columbia agreed to the demands, though negotiations are ongoing.

And Harvard looks at this and say, we don't want to be in the situation. And so Harvard reaches out to the task force. The task force comes back with kind of a broad list of demands. Harvard received that list in early April. It included the request to review programs that, quote, fuel anti-Semitic harassment. But it also took on university culture more broadly. Like, the task force wanted Harvard to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI, or else lose federal funding.

But the task force didn't specify what Harvard needed to do to actually meet those requests, so Harvard asked for more direction. And on April 11th, the university got a letter back. So the letter says, we want to make sure who you're hiring, who you're admitting, what they're teaching, how it's being looked at. And Harvard sees this list as tremendous overreach. They are trying to determine what can be taught, what can be researched. This is how Harvard sees it.

What viewpoint diversity should consist of. And then it needs to be audited by an external party. And why were these demands such a non-starter for Harvard? So what makes the United States higher education system so effective and what makes it different from others is that we have a very ground-up, decentralized system. The federal government gives a lot of money to these universities, but they also give them a tremendous amount of independence. We have a system of accreditation which helps the universities really maintain their independence and regulate themselves. From the university perspective, that unique academic freedom is crucial to creative and

innovative output. If you get to follow your own curiosity, if researchers get to decide what they want to figure out and study and follow, they're in the best position to figure out, because they're closest to their work, where that should go. And so innovation on American college campuses is stunning. So Harvard and other universities are feeling like if you start to tell us what to do, that innovation is going to die because we are the ones who know what the work looks like. We're the ones who know where that money should go. Right.

And if you start to dictate to us, that's a slippery slope to fascism. That's authoritarianism. President Trump gets to tell universities how to think what the professors need to teach, and that sets off all sorts of alarm bells. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said that because the funds come from the federal government, quote, we want to make sure that you're abiding by federal law. She added that the administration is not trying to take away academic freedom. And then Harvard made an unexpected move.

Harvard takes the letter and publishes it with a note saying, this is overreach. This cannot stand. After the break, the fight escalates. The all-new all-electric Can-Am Pulse motorcycle is your cheat code for the city. Light, agile, and stylish for all you smart commuters. Find your Pulse today. Learn more at CanAmMotorcycles.com. Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember, big. You got it. The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on. How's that?

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Visit your Toronto area Ford store or ford.ca today. On April 14th, the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, published the Trump administration's letter to the school's website. In a message, Garber, published the Trump administration's letter to the school's website. In a message, Garber wrote that the university would not accept the administration's demands. Trump's anti-Semitism task force was furious. Its members said that they made clear that they wanted to keep the discussions with the university private. Harvard disputes that there was any agreement about confidentiality. The task force reacted quickly.

They crack down. They had threatened to freeze a bunch of money. They move forward and do freeze $2.2 billion. And that's not all. They also made the first moves to revoke Harvard's tax exempt status. Almost all universities, all the universities that you think of when you think of a university, a flagship, a public flagship, a big private, they're all tax-exempt.

There are for-profit schools that are exceptions, but yeah, I mean, most of the schools in the United States are tax-exempt. And being tax-exempt is a big deal to these universities? Yeah, it's really important to the business model of the university. So, first of all, they don't pay property taxes, so that's a big deal. If you write a check for $100 billion to Harvard, then you get to knock off what you're going

to pay on taxes, so there's a huge incentive for donors to give. The task force also threatened to challenge whether or not Harvard could continue to enroll international students, whose tuition is a critical part of the university's income. All said, what's at stake for Harvard here is losing tons of funding. Alan Garber, the university president, has said that the consequences would be severe, that it would impact research related to childhood cancer, infectious disease outbreaks, and easing the pain of soldiers wounded in battle. On Monday night, Harvard took the dispute to court.

What are sort of the main reasons that Harvard gives for suing? Well, the two big ones are freedom of speech, that when the Trump administration wants to tell the university who to hire, what to study, what to research, that is infringing on the university's First Amendment freedom of speech. Academic freedom is connected to that. And so they don't have the wherewithal to do that. The second case is that if they want to pull this money, there's a process that they need to follow

according to the law that's time consuming and takes a long time. They can't just willy nilly pull this money out. And so they're saying this is a capricious move and the damage could be very, very long-lasting. And so you don't do this sort of thing quickly. In the suit, Harvard asks the court to halt the funding freeze. It also wants the court to declare that both the freeze and the demands asked of the university are illegal.

And has the Trump administration responded to the lawsuit yet? They've essentially said see you in court. They've said that Harvard University needs to address the civil rights violations on their campus and when they get their house in order, then they'll be entitled to federal funds. Well, one of the things that the government says is, you know, if they don't want to make the changes we have, which the government believes means treating everybody fairly on campus, protecting everybody equally on campus, if they don't want to do that, then they can operate without federal research funding.

In response to the lawsuit, a White House spokesperson said, quote, taxpayer funds are a privilege and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege. Can Harvard survive without this money? Harvard has a $53 billion endowment and maybe they can live without the money for a little while. You know, they don't have to start firing people immediately. They can tap their endowment.

They have an option to. And so they're a little bit unusual in that situation. So they're sort of, they're the alpha in the higher education on that front. Harvard has also raised money recently from its alumni as well as by issuing bonds. And there's been a huge surge in donations since Harvard said they would stand up. So they have a lot to gain from their supporters. Other universities are responding positively to Harvard's position on this? Yeah, there's been a lot of, there was just a letter signed by a couple hundred college presidents saying we are behind Harvard, so they want to defend it.

When people ask me what I cover and they ask me to distill higher education, I say universities posture toward the federal government for a long time has been, leave us alone. But by the way, we need a lot of money from you guys to make this work. The mistake the university made was they allow themselves, I think, to get to be perceived as no longer working for the majority of Americans and that made them low-hanging fruit for a political administration. What could it mean for higher education if Harvard loses? This will change the course of higher education absolutely. Universities, especially research universities around the country, absolutely depend on federal

dollars to operate and to do the research that Americans depend on, that the economy runs on. If that stops, then a system will change. We don't know exactly how, but this is what's at stake right now. If Harvard did win, would things just return to a status quo? Or I guess what could the outcome be? This administration is very, very aggressive. I can only imagine that they would figure out different levers to come at them. They want this address. They want this whole worldview shifted.

I don't think they're going to stop. That's all for today, Wednesday, April 23rd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Sarah Randaizo, Brian Schwartz, and Liz Esley White. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.