Trump’s Assault on Harvard Is an Astonishing Act of National Self-Sabotage

The revocation of Harvard’s ability to certify visas will lead to a mass exodus of talent.

Memorial Hall, Harvard, 1900. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group.)

The best way to understand Donald Trump’s administration, Ivan Krastev told me a month ago, is as a “revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court.” And the most important thing about revolutionary governments is that they quickly develop an unstoppable dynamic of their own, one in which the logic of events pushes its originators to ever more radical actions which they themselves might not have anticipated taking a few months or weeks ago. “You’re not running the revolution,” Krastev remarked with his inimitable lucidity, “the revolution is running you.”

In no field of public policy is this insight more applicable than in the administration’s attacks on some of the country’s—and the world’s—most eminent universities. Since taking office, Trump has targeted universities in a bewildering variety of ways: by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation; by significantly reducing the percentage of federal grants which flows to universities, allowing them to maintain laboratories and other key research facilities; by attempting to deport international students who engaged in pro-Palestinian activism, irrespective of whether it was violent or peaceful; by threatening to increase taxes on returns from the endowments of “woke” universities; and by singling out particular institutions, including Columbia and Harvard, with threats that they would no longer be eligible for any federal funding at all.

Even among this litany of increasingly radical attacks on higher education, the Trump administration’s latest broadside against Harvard stands out for the extent of its cruelty. In a letter she promptly posted on X, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, informed Harvard that, “effective immediately,” she was revoking the institution’s ability to certify foreign students and visitors for visas. Unless courts intervene or the administration makes a U-turn, this will force the vast majority of Harvard’s 6,793 international students, over a quarter of its overall student body, to leave the university. Some might be able to transfer to other American institutions; most would in a matter of days or weeks have to abandon their studies and return to their countries of origin.

Trump’s action would deeply disrupt the lives and the careers of thousands of talented young people, the vast majority of whom have done absolutely nothing to provoke the administration’s ire against their institution. It would have a highly negative impact on important research happening across the university, with some leading labs in fields from medical research to quantum physics effectively ceasing to function. It would lastingly damage America’s hard-earned reputation as the world’s most coveted destination for ambitious researchers. In short, it would lead to the most remarkable—and the most distinguished—exodus of talented students in the history of American higher education.

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Universities are such a tempting target for the Trump administration in part because they have over the past decade squandered the trust of big segments of the American public. As late as the mid-2010s, a clear majority of Americans still reported a great deal of trust in institutions of higher learning; in the latest polls the share of Americans who feel that way has fallen to about a third.

The reasons for this decline in trust are many, and—let’s face it—they are real. Universities have spent ever more money on fancy dorms, state-of-the-art sporting facilities, and an ever-growing army of administrators, all contributing to a steep increase in tuition costs. They have allowed their staff and their faculty to become ideological monoliths, making many campuses deeply hostile to all forms of conservative thought, and turning some fields into self-parodying producers of arcane nonsense. They have been deeply inconsistent in their commitment to free speech, punishing students for micro-aggressions against some groups while turning a blind eye to macro-aggressions against others. And there is even good reason to think that some universities have simply defied a recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, continuing to give some applicants a big advantage on account of their race even after this practice was ruled illegal. (Lawyers for Harvard, for example, claimed that the number of its black students would plummet if the university were no longer allowed to engage in affirmative action; and yet the number of black students in the first class admitted after the decision was only slightly smaller than before, though with a large drop for Harvard Law School.)

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Are you in or near London? Join me for a free community meet-up at The Perseverance on Lamb’s Conduit Street on Wednesday, June 4th, from 6pm! I’m excited to meet many of you there! — Yascha

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As I have long warned university administrators, both in public and in private, that situation is untenable. Institutions that are deeply dependent on public largesse, as even the most affluent private universities in America now are, cannot expect that taxpayers will keep funding them if they come to be widely hated. The root of the current assault on higher education is, in large part, of the universities’ own making.

In light of these problems, there are significant forms of federal action that seem to me to be perfectly reasonable from a philosophically liberal perspective (including some now pursued by the administration). The government could legitimately push back against forms of ideological coercion, such as the requirement at many universities for job applicants to submit “diversity statements” which are effectively graded on the extent to which they comply with the core tenets of critical race theory. It could legitimately investigate universities that seem to be breaking federal law by discriminating in their hiring and admissions practices. It could legitimately raise the tax on market returns from the endowments of especially wealthy universities, especially if these also charge unusually high tuition.

In fact, the federal government could even incentivize universities to concentrate on their core academic missions in more innovative ways. Here’s one idea: it could make the eligibility for federal funding conditional upon “unbundling the university.” On this model, institutions would need to offer all students the option to enroll into core academic programs without being forced to live on campus, participate in an expensive meal plan, subsidize fancy facilities like gyms, or pay for an army of administrators hired to meddle in all kinds of aspects of student life.

But the Trump administration has not chosen to focus on measures that are actually directed at remedying the genuine problems on campus. For the most part, it has not even tried to redress the ideological imbalance in many institutions of higher learning. Instead, it seems to have concluded that universities will always remain hostile to the MAGA movement—and elected to treat them as enemies to be weakened or, ideally, destroyed by any available means.

From a purely partisan perspective, there is a certain logic to this decision. Given how quickly and thoroughly educational polarization has come to be the principal dividing line in American politics, it is probably true that even universities that were significantly less ideologically homogeneous than they are today would still remain a bulwark of progressive sentiment. To a ruthless practitioner of realpolitik categorizing various key institutions of American society into those (like police unions and evangelical churches) more likely to favor the populist right, those (like major corporations and blue-collar unions) that are genuinely cross-pressured, and those (like many major foundations and cultural institutions) certain to favor the left, it wouldn’t be hard to recognize universities as much more likely to be an “enemy” rather than a “friend.”

But, quaint though it may be to insist upon this point, American presidents are supposed to care about more than their partisan self-interest. They are also meant to be constrained by the rule of law and guided by the broader interests of the country. And the manner of the administration’s attacks on Harvard and other universities makes it painfully clear that its leaders care not one whit about what, no doubt, they would dismiss as such “cuckish” considerations.

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The administration claims to be fighting for free speech. But in her correspondence with Harvard, Noem has made a number of requests that are themselves deeply inimical to academic freedom. For example, she requests “any and all video footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years.”

The administration has a legitimate interest in ensuring that universities take prompt action against violent protests that harm or intimidate members of the academic community, something they have often failed to do over the course of the last years. But note that this demand for video footage covers “any protest activity,” including those that were perfectly peaceful. And it comes against a backdrop of the administration threatening to deport some foreign students, who had legally been in the country, for supposed outrages—to name but one case that occurred a few miles down the road from Harvard, at Tufts University—no worse than co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization that has been highly critical of Harvard’s own record on free speech in the past, is right to point to the hypocrisy of Noem claiming that her actions aim to “root out anti-Americanism.” As Will Creeley, the organization’s legal director, wrote in response to the attack on international students at Harvard: “Little is more un-American than a federal bureaucrat demanding that a private university demonstrate its ideological fealty to the government under pain of punishment.” But what’s truly striking is that the administration is not only indifferent to due process and academic freedom; it also has strikingly little regard for the contribution which America’s ability to attract the best and the brightest from around the world makes to the country’s greatness.

Yes, universities have made genuine blunders that predictably led to a widespread loss of trust. And yes, some corners of just about every American campus, including Harvard, are now subsumed by ideological hogwash. But like other leading institutions that have come under massive attack, Harvard does also remain at the forefront of research in extremely important fields, from semiconductors to artificial intelligence. If Trump was serious about wanting America to outcompete rivals like China over the course of the next decades, he would recognize that it is a very bad deal for the country to turn its advanced capabilities in the industries of the future into collateral damage in a fight against woke professors in, say, the Department of American Studies.

Anybody who is actually interested in “Making America Great Again” should be able to keep two truths—that universities have in the last years betrayed their mission in key ways, and that they nevertheless remain hugely important national assets—in mind at the same time. But in a bitterly ironic echo of the postmodern theories that its leading members purport to hate, the administration appears only to be interested in one form of Veritas: that which serves the whims and the wishes, the personal predilections and the partisan interests of its leader.