The Fight for Higher Ed Is Just Beginning

“The Administration made Harvard an offer it couldn’t not refuse.” Jeannie Suk Gersen explores the stakes of Trump’s mounting war against academia. And Emma Green reports on the schools that are moving away from D.E.I. and toward a new form of pluralistic community life—and trying to fend off outside political control. Plus:

Ian Crouch
Newsletter editor

When the Trump Administration sent Harvard a letter late last week, demanding a series of policy changes and culture-war-coded reforms, it seemed possible that the university would follow Columbia’s example and show a willingness to make significant concessions. The Administration’s threats to withhold billions in promised funding appeared to be an existential challenge to the school’s basic functioning. “There’s no university in the country that could survive the loss of federal money,” a law professor at the University of Chicago told The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller earlier this year, when he was reporting on the atmosphere of crisis surrounding Harvard and American higher education as a whole.

So it came as a “thrillingly delightful surprise—and that’s understating it,” Jeannie Suk Gersen writes, when Harvard chose instead to resist Trump’s threats. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard’s lawyers wrote, in a letter to the Administration. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” Gersen, a law professor at Harvard and a contributing writer to this magazine, provides essential analysis of the government’s aims and of the stakes of the fight. She traces the demands back to threats by both Democratic and Republican Administrations to withhold university funding, in which “civil-rights laws have been reduced to cudgels for coercing universities into subservience.” But the nature of Trump’s demands, she cautions, represents a new and chilling exercise of power. “The real point of the Administration’s moves is not to combat antisemitism, racism, or sexism, or even to promote free inquiry and the diversity of political viewpoints,” she writes. “The goal is rather to bring the university, as a representative of major institutions of civil society, to its knees.”

Many institutions of higher learning have already begun reforming their policies—spurred on in part by political pressure, but also by an internal realization that campus culture had reached a breaking point. In a deeply reported piece in this week’s issue, Emma Green explores how some schools are pivoting from diversity programs to an alternative framework known as pluralism, which “emphasizes everyone’s ability to thrive, with all their differences fully respected.” The pivot on notions of identity and community, however, is happening as “the mood in higher ed has shifted from introspective to panicked”—and it has elicited skepticism from all sides, with some on the right wary that pluralism is just D.E.I. 2.0, while others on the left see it as a “capitulation to the regime.”

Yesterday, the Trump Administration announced that it had frozen more than two billion dollars of funding to Harvard. Former President Barack Obama called the government’s demands “unlawful,” in a social-media post. The president of Stanford also issued a statement of solidarity with Harvard, and sixty current and former academic presidents signed a letter defending the institution. The fight, on campus and in the halls of political power, is just beginning.

Read or listen: Jeannie Suk Gersen on Harvard’s fight, Emma Green on what comes after D.E.I., and Nathan Heller on Harvard’s free-speech turmoil.