Yes, Harvard Deserves Due Process

Why imposing an orthodoxy to break an orthodoxy is just... orthodoxy.

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Harvard on May 2, 2025. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images.)

On May 5, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent Harvard University a letter declaring that the school “should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided,” effectively rendering Harvard ineligible for government funding for any new research. It was the latest volley in what has been a contentious battle between Harvard and the Trump administration, which in March convened a task force to review grants and contracts as part of its “efforts to root out anti-Semitism and to refocus our institutions of higher learning on the core values that undergird a liberal education.”

On April 11, the task force issued a draconian list of demands requiring Harvard to shutter all DEI programs, ban masks, overhaul governance, conduct third-party audits of “viewpoint diversity” in each department, immediately report international student conduct violations, and discipline anyone alleged to have stoked campus protests. When Harvard refused, the government froze $2.2 billion and threatened even more—a process Harvard rightly dubbed an attempt to “coerce and control.” Since then, the administration has threatened to freeze an additional $1 billion, to limit the school’s student visas, and even to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, all signaling the president’s intent to pursue extraordinary punishment for what the administration considers Harvard’s “[failure] to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.”

And that’s the thing: Harvard has absolutely earned everyone’s scorn. For years, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has been criticizing Harvard for creating an ideological monoculture, cultivating an environment hostile to viewpoint diversity, and failing to address the problem of anti-Semitism on its campus.

However, the administration’s actions towards Harvard pose a far greater threat to higher education and the principles of academic freedom than any of the sins committed by Harvard itself.

Harvard has real problems with groupthink and anti-Semitism

There is no question that Harvard has struggled with ideological homogeneity and viewpoint-based discipline against faculty in recent years. Its campus culture has punished professors like the economist Roland Fryer and the biologist Carole Hooven for their honest research, and the law professor Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson because Professor Sullivan had a dislikeable client. Its ideological monoculture (just 6% of faculty members identify as conservative, according to a FIRE survey) has created a fertile ground for campus anti-Semitism and stifled vigorous debate.

Harvard’s preferred monoculture is intersectionality, and intersectionality is exceptionally vulnerable to anti-Semitic ideas. It flattens categories like race, gender, and disability status into a binary lens of privileged vs unprivileged, and then layers them in order to examine networks and intersections of privilege. Through that lens, all people with power are bad, all people without power are good, and all struggles are connected. This is the perfect home for anti-Semitism, much of which is tied to conspiracy theories that Jews secretly run everything.

In the wake of the protests following the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, Harvard created task forces to study anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on its campus. The resulting anti-Semitism report reveals why the federal government might well be concerned about the experience of Jewish students. It has a section on the ties between intersectionality and anti-Semitism, including a line that borders on dark humor in its wild understatement: “Harvard’s campus may be particularly susceptible to this trend.” It notes that 26% percent of Jewish Harvard students it surveyed feel physically unsafe to at least some extent. It documents the October 2023 assault of a Jewish student who tried to film a protest, and the campus support for his attackers. It quotes messages on Sidechat (an app that protects anonymity but requires a campus email address to join) that blamed Jews for the resignation of then-president Claudine Gay last year. And it documents how posters of Israeli hostages were defaced with statements like “Israel did 9/11”—and how many, many swastikas have been spotted around campus from the 1980s onward.

The government task force’s demands violate due process

So, yes, Harvard has work to do. But it is beginning that work. While many in and around the Trump administration would love to take credit for it, efforts to increase viewpoint diversity and break the monoculture were underway before Trump took office. The federal government has a role in this work. We have long urged amending Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, to explicitly prohibit harassment on the basis of religion. The problem of anti-Semitism on campus is real and deserves a firm, lawful response.

But the administration has instead chosen to flout established procedures for Title VI enforcement. Under the Act, allegations of discrimination in federally funded education programs must trigger a multi-step process. First, there must be a Department of Education investigation, followed by an effort to reach a cooperative “resolution agreement.” If attempts at voluntary resolution fail, the college receives an administrative hearing, and—only then—the Education Department must notify both chambers of Congress and provide 30 days’ notice before terminating program funds. At no point may the Department simply cut all university grants unilaterally.

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And yet that is precisely what the administration has done, ignoring the statute’s built-in safeguards and trampling all over due process.

This isn’t the first time the Civil Rights Act has been misused in this way. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, the Departments of Justice and Education issued Title IX enforcement letters pressuring universities to rewrite sexual misconduct procedures and to adopt unconstitutionally overbroad definitions of sexual harassment. It was wrong then to use enforcement letters to make unconstitutional demands of institutions, and it is wrong now. If the government believes it has the power to do this through ordinary processes, it should use them. If the government does not believe it has that power, it shouldn’t.

What the government could do is to tie new funding to oversight conditions set out in advance, letting universities decide whether to accept or decline them. Might Harvard be found in violation of Title VI (or, for that matter, Title VII or Title IX) for its handling of discrimination or campus conflict? Yes—but only after the Department follows the processes laid out by Congress: investigation, voluntary resolution, hearing, findings, and notice. To do otherwise amounts to extralegal strong-arming.

Imposing an orthodoxy to break an orthodoxy is just orthodoxy

Furthermore, the administration is targeting not only anti-Semitism, but Harvard’s intersectional monoculture itself. The April 11 letter proposes having the federal government audit Harvard programs “that reflect ideological capture.” One of Trump’s Truth Social posts said Harvard should be taxed “if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness.’” In another message, the president said that “Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains.’”

The biggest problem with campus groupthink is that it eliminates dissent. Without dissent, doctrine becomes dogma, which jeopardizes our ability to differentiate between what is true and what is merely expected of us. Campuses become vulnerable to bad ideas—if everyone agrees on a topic, there’s no one to caution against mistakes and excesses. The beauty of intellectual diversity lies in creating the freedom to dissent from mainstream thought, and through that dissent to either reveal new truth or reinforce the wisdom of existing truth by testing it against a wrong idea.

But that’s the catch-22. If the value of intellectual diversity is the ability to dissent, you can’t achieve it by making it mandatory. If a government were to, for example, limit the ways in which a school could talk about DEI efforts, it would not have freed the school from intellectual capture; it would have just captured it for a new ideology. It’s the philosophical equivalent of “war-for-peace.” We cannot mandate ourselves into intellectual freedom; we need institutions to buy into intellectual diversity as a core value, and we need to buy into the institutions that do so with our enrollment and gifts.

Defending Harvard is about defending everyone

Our free speech and due process principles aren’t about Harvard’s popularity; they’re about the rights of every institution—and every individual—to due process.

There’s no contradiction here. We should hold Harvard accountable for its failures while insisting the federal government respects its legal limits. Criticism of Harvard’s campus culture and criticism of unconstitutional federal overreach are two sides of the same free speech coin. We cannot pick and choose which principles to uphold based on personal distaste for an institution. That path leads straight to the dismantling of academic freedom.

And there is no indication that the administration intends to limit its bully tactics to higher education. It has already expanded to shaking down law firms in yet another unprecedented threat to constitutional rights and norms. There are even reports that it is considering viewpoint-based revocation of nonprofit status for charitable organizations.

And after that…?

If we abandon due process now, there will be no defense left when your own institution, or mine, finds itself in the crosshairs. That’s one of many, many reasons why the Trump administration’s egregious actions towards Harvard require strong, principled, and concerted opposition.

Greg Lukianoff is the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Adam Goldstein is Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

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