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EVERYONE LOVES…HARVARD  
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Joyce Vance
May 29, 2025
Civil Discourse
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_ Harvard became the first university to push back and sue
Trump over his intrusions into academia. Before
Harvard, Columbia folded. As with the law firms, the question is,
who will bend the knee and who would tell the tyrant-in-the-making NO!
_

Harvard graduation 2025, screen grab

 

Today, students graduated from Harvard in an often rowdy celebration,
while the school was in court challenging the Trump administration.
The graduates celebrated their president, Alan Garber, with wild
applause.

In other parts of the country, people celebrated along with them. Not
only Harvard grads, but Princeton and Yale alums. I’ve even heard
whispered confessions from graduates of other schools, saying they
::sotto voce:: have made donations to Harvard.

Matthew Yglesias, who writes the Substack newsletter Slow Boring (it
is neither!), a Harvard alum himself, has made a public practice over
the years of discouraging people from giving to his alma mater. He
broke down recently and posted this
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last week, I went to Harvard.edu, navigated to a giving page, and
forked over a $500 contribution to the new Presidential Priorities
Fund that Alan Garber has established
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help steer the university through its current confrontation with
Donald Trump.”

Suddenly, everyone loves Harvard. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Wall Streeters are bringing the tacos
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the party.

On April 21, 2025, Harvard became the first university to push back
and sue Trump
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his intrusions into academia. The lawsuit followed the
administration’s efforts to set conditions Harvard had to
“satisfy” if it wanted to continue to receive research funding
that the federal government had committed to provide its researchers
with. The Trump administration claimed it was concerned about
antisemitism and “ideological capture” (too many liberal
professors). The meat of the government’s demands was that Harvard
have an outside party “audit” campus viewpoints and that it hire a
critical mass of faculty and admit students to achieve “viewpoint
diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit”—to
the Government’s satisfaction as determined in the Government’s
sole discretion. They also wanted Harvard to terminate programs it
didn’t like. Harvard put the government’s demands this way in
their complaint: "Allow the Government to micromanage your academic
institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue
medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative
solutions.”

The complaint
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really worth your time. (There is now a recent updated version, here
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The introduction section that starts at the top runs for about five
and one-half pages (these are lawyer pages, not book pages, and much
shorter) sheds light on who the administration intends to punish if
Harvard doesn’t comply with their wishes. That would be all of
us—people who benefit from research and scientific breakthroughs.
Harvard concludes, “Defendants’ actions threaten Harvard’s
academic independence and place at risk critical lifesaving and
pathbreaking research that occurs on its campus.”

Before Harvard filed suit, Columbia
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And so, as with the law firms, the question was, who would bend the
knee and who would tell the tyrant-in-the-making no. The stakes are
serious. They concern academic freedom and the pressure on
universities to teach certain subjects and not others. What’s next?
Banning evolution? It’s far too reminiscent of nazi germany,
where, a report
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the 118th Congress in 2023 reminded us, “The Nazi regime quickly
targeted German universities—among the most elite in the world at
the time—for restructuring according to Nazi principles. While the
Nazi Ministry of Education initiated reforms, local Nazi organizations
and student activists worked to bring Nazi ideals to German campuses.
These forces, along with increasing antisemitism under Nazi rule,
transformed everyday life at German universities.”

Harvard echoed these concerns in its complaint, writing, “The
Government has not — and cannot — identify any rational connection
between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific,
technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save
American lives, foster American success, preserve American security,
and maintain America’s position as a global leader in
innovation…Nor has the Government acknowledged the significant
consequences that the indefinite freeze of billions of dollars in
federal research funding will have on Harvard’s research programs,
the beneficiaries of that research, and the national interest in
furthering American innovation and progress.” In other words, none
of this is being done to protect Jewish students. More than 100 Jewish
students at Harvard, in an act of bravery given the times and the
administration’s retaliatory actions, signed
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letter saying that the cuts actually harm them. They wrote, “We are
compelled to speak out because these actions are being taken in the
name of protecting us — Harvard Jewish students — from
antisemitism, but this crackdown will not protect us. On the contrary,
we know that funding cuts will harm the campus community we are part
of and care about deeply.”

Garber became Harvard’s president in January of 2025. A physician
and health economist, he wrote
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Forward_ that "Addressing antisemitism “effectively requires
understanding, intention, and vigilance,” noting that “Harvard
takes that work seriously. We will continue to fight hate with the
urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the
law. That is not only our legal responsibility. It is our moral
imperative.” He established task forces to combat antisemitism, as
well as anti-Israel, anti-Muslim, anti-arab, and anti-Palestinian bias
on campus, which produced reports and action earlier this year. He
called them “painful” and said the school would “welcome and
embrace” concrete plans to implement their recommendations.

That the government proceeded, using claims of antisemitism
nonetheless, laid bare that this is about taking away academic
independence. Anything else is pretext. Then, the government took
additional action, which led Harvard to file a second lawsuit.
That’s the case that was in court today, in a vivid split-screen
with the graduations.

The dispute in _Harvard v. DHS_ (and a bunch of other federal
agencies and their chief executives) is over the government’s
recent decision
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“abruptly revoke[] that certification without process or cause, to
immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa
holders.” It is the effective end of the international students
program that has allowed Harvard and many businesses and institutions
in this country to flourish, as well as building “soft power”
influence abroad. Beyond the substance of the matter, there are
procedural hoops the government has to jump through before revoking
Harvard’s program. In an implicit acknowledgment that they had
failed to do so, the government filed a notice ahead of today’s
hearing identifying steps that would be taken. The judge ordered that
the temporary restraining order she put in place earlier this month
remain in place until the parties confer and get back to her with
their views on whether a preliminary injunction is still appropriate
and necessary while the litigation proceeds.

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So while we take some comfort from the courts and the progress in
lawsuits, we need to understand it in the long term context of what
it’s going to take for us to stabilize this country, it’s going to
take more than just the courts, especially since the temperature read
at the Supreme Court is still pretty tepid following their decision
walking back _Humphrey’s Executor
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the case about whether a president has the ability to fire agency
employees at will. We need a Congress that will do more than roll over
and show Trump its belly. In my opinion, it’s never too early to
start talking with friends and family about the next election.

Students, of course, are collateral damage in this whole sorry affair.
They suffer the consequences of the president’s whims. None of the
losses we are experiencing along with them can be undone as easily as
Trump flipped the crazy switch here. And to underline, it’s not
about antisemitism. Trump is scapegoating Jews, just in a new way.

For an excellent explanation of why the administration’s complaints
about giving taxpayer money to schools like Harvard are bunk, read
historian Julian Zelizer's excellent piece
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how higher education has been an investment made by the federal
government that has paid off, and not an unnecessary gift to already
well-endowed schools. That strawman, launched by conservatives,
ignores the benefits of decades of research, trained scientists, and
better outcomes experienced by the American people.

Many years ago I spent a summer at Harvard’s debate program. We
joked that the school’s motto, Veritas, meant “Crush the Weak,”
at least in its application to rival debate teams. I think I still
have the T-shirt somewhere. But in reality, Veritas means “Truth.”
And that’s what Harvard is trying to bring to the country in these
troubled days and these two lawsuits. Those of you who are “Gilmore
Girls [[link removed]]” fans will remember
when Rory disappointed her mom’s lifelong vision by going to Yale
instead of Harvard. This week, she just might have made a different
choice.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

_Thanks for sticking with me, in what has proven to be a week full of
complicated legal issues and court proceedings. I appreciate everyone
who reads Civil Discourse. It’s our commitment to saving the
Republic that will get us through this._

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* Harvard
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* universities
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* Academic Freedom
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* First Amendment
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* Donald Trump
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* international students
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