Moral Failure and Government Intrusion at Harvard

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

To understand the crisis in American higher education, it is necessary to hold two thoughts at once. American higher education remains the envy of the world, with seven of its universities in the top 10 of Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. Yet the behavior on many campuses has caused public confidence in higher education to plummet. With a recent drop of 21 percentage points, only 36 percent now express a lot of confidence, while 32 percent have little or no confidence. Among those dissatisfied with higher education, politicization stands as a major cause of their dismay. Significantly, though, the public does not seem happy about the attacks on higher education coming from the administration, with only 27 percent approving. Those mixed messages may be the fingerpost for finding a solution.

Harvard has been among the worst offenders, with cancellations, shout-downs, disruptive encampments, and egregious antisemitic conduct. It makes a poor example of an innocent victim of unjust governmental persecution, as shown below. But whose interests are served if the cancellation of a $60 million federal contract and nearly $3 billion in grants and revocation of tax-exempt status cripple one of our country’s great research hubs? While the government is rightly concerned about apparent civil rights violations, discrimination, and campus behavior that violates the law, the treatment Harvard is receiving from the Trump administration is neither measured nor reasonable nor, according to many legal scholars across the ideological spectrum, within statutory authority. Yet worse is the federal government’s apparent willingness to accept the damage being done to American scientific progress. The administration’s indiscriminate cuts have impeded research to combat tuberculosis, HIV, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.  

The administration needs to take stock of the perilous precedent of intrusion beyond statutory authority into higher education governance. The federal government’s shot over the bow, so to speak, can be a catalyst for an overdue course correction. But putting that cannonball through the hull, while at the same time exceeding legal authority, would be an incalculable act of harm to the nation.

Harvard, however, must be honest about its failings, ready to apply remedies, and be energetic in its implementation. It is fair to start with recent items from Harvard’s rap sheet. On December 5, 2023, then Harvard president Claudine Gay notoriously tried to hide behind the pretext of “context” when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules against bullying and harassment. Less well known, but highly illuminating, is her silence, not long after the October 7 terrorist massacre, as a mob on Harvard Yard surrounded a student wearing a kippah, blocking his path and shouting “shame.” It does not speak well for Harvard that one of the perpetrators, whom the Suffolk County Court punished for misdemeanor assault, received, one year later, a $65,000 stipend from the Harvard Law Review for work “in the public interest.” The other convicted student was selected as a class marshal by his graduating class at the Divinity School. Harvard’s secretive governing board, the Harvard Corporation, stuck by President Gay, even as evidence of her serial plagiarism mounted, until the scandal ultimately forced their hand. She returned to the faculty with compensation of approximately $900,000.

President Gay’s failures are only part of a tawdry history of professional and ethical failures at Harvard.

On June 29, 2023, the same day that the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard that race-based admissions violate the US Constitution and that Harvard was out of compliance with the law, Harvard declared, “We will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values”—that is, Harvard would find ways to use race as a factor in admissions. A previously optional prompt for application essays became mandatory: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” Harvard appeared ready to use this question to find demographic information about applicants.

Harvard has had scant place for those who dissent from its progressive policies. Seventy-seven percent of the faculty now self-report as liberal or very liberal, and only 3 percent as conservative: The maintenance of its monoculture has been willful, and its treatment of those who violate it is brutal. In 2019, Harvard removed Professor of Law Ronald Sullivan and his wife from their positions as faculty deans of Winthrop House after it came to light that he served, as lawyers are wont to do, on the legal defense team of someone accused of a heinous crime—in his case, Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, who had enjoyed a distinguished teaching career, was shunned and ostracized when a student director of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) found her insistence that male and female are valid scientific terms “transphobic,” even though Dr. Hooven had unequivocally confirmed her support for transgender rights. The dean of arts and sciences at that time was Claudine Gay. Neither Dr. Gay nor anyone in Dr. Hooven’s department came to her aid, and no graduate student would work with her once she was labeled with the scarlet letter of transgressing DEI standards. Economist Roland Fryer’s meticulous research showed that blacks were not more likely than whites to be the victims of police shootings—although blacks were more likely than whites to be subject to unwarranted police stops. This was heresy for the woke. It was not long before Harvard took its revenge under the pretext of punishing Professor Fryer for jokes told by and to colleagues in his laboratory. The Office for Dispute Resolution had recommended “workplace sensitivity training” to resolve the contretemps. But with Dean Claudine Gay as a key participant in the final adjudication by a panel of tenured faculty, the recommendation of the Office for Dispute Resolution rose to a two-year suspension without pay and the permanent shuttering of his laboratory.

Then came October 7, 2023. The next day, while Israel reeled from the immensity of the Hamas assault, 34 Harvard student groups celebrated Hamas and blamed Israel for the terrorist attack it suffered. President Gay needed three days to condemn the atrocity and distance Harvard’s leadership position from the student groups. How serious was Harvard about restoring order after the campus was overtaken by encampments that interfered with classes and co-curricular activities? When students occupied a building on campus, the deans brought them burritos and Twizzlers. On May 10, acting on his threat to the students occupying Harvard Yard, interim president Alan Garber put 20 students on “involuntary leave” after they refused his attempt to negotiate an end to the encampment. Four days later, he reversed that decision when the protesters agreed to disperse.

Harvard’s report on antisemitism, released on April 29, is searing. For example, it reproduces a graphic used in four sections of a required Harvard Graduate School of Education course. The “Pyramid of White Supremacy” places the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League in the category of offenses just below hate crimes. There is significant evidence of anti-Israel dogma appearing in official Harvard classes. Harvard’s decision to release the antisemitism report simultaneously with its report on anti-Muslim bias sends a strong signal that Harvard is still incapable of addressing directly and purposefully the increasing campus antisemitism that then president Lawrence Summers identified and decried already in 2002.    

Harvard’s other self-inflicted wounds can only serve to offend the sensibilities of the public. Harvard’s “Red Book,” General Education in a Free Society, written in the spirit of the West’s emergence from World War I, called for learning “the general art of the free man and the citizen” and suggested a course called “Western Thought and Institutions.” Now what stands is a tepid requirement with a menu of some 20 courses, including “Ethics of Climate Change.” By 1975, even students majoring in history faced no requirement for a course on the history of our nation in the curriculum for the major.

Enumerating the sins of Harvard is not difficult, and Harvard will need to be more transparent and specific than it has been about the way it will measure the effectiveness of its reforms. Moving forward will not be easy, and if it is to happen, both Harvard and the Trump administration will need to adjust their positions and their rhetoric. There is every reason to do so.

Harvard can justifiably remind the nation of the breakthroughs, especially in health sciences, that its partnership with the federal government has yielded. In 2014, with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Harvard’s Douglas Melton generated functional human pancreatic insulin-producing cells from stem cells, putting us on the way to a type 1 diabetes cure. In 2024, Harvard’s Gary Ruvkun, funded by NIH, was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of microRNA (miRNA). The discovery underpins therapies for cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, strokes, alcoholism, and obesity. The list of federally funded grants to Harvard that help us live longer and better is very long.

A wholesale assault on university-level research signaled in the freezing of grants to Harvard will be catastrophic for the well-being of America. Harvard has begun layoffs. Speaking of freezing, biodata from 350,000 individuals, representing 45 years of research, are in jeopardy of loss without funding to maintain the massive freezers that store them. The samples have led to the discovery of the dangers of trans fats, the link between obesity and breast cancer, and that between cigarette smoking and coronary disease. Ongoing research into the early detection and treatment of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) under government contract with Harvard Medical School is under work stop.  

Other nations are hungry to gain a share of America’s global leadership in science and medicine. Americans have won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine than any other nation can boast. But according to a survey conducted by Nature, of the 1,600 scientists polled, 75 percent are considering leaving the country. The process of luring our scientists abroad has, in fact, started. France’s Centrale Supelac has allocated 3 million euros to finance research projects that were cut in the US. Aix-Marseille Université announced it is accepting applications for its Safe Place for Science program. It will support about 15 American scientists and appears to have received over 150 applications. The title of a May 2025 article in the Financial Times, “UK steps up efforts to woo scientists fleeing the US,” says it all.

Another potential victim in this contretemps is the law. The haste to punish Harvard, and other elite institutions, must end. Process matters. Title VI, which prohibits discrimination, has clear procedures for investigation and sanction (42 U.S.C. § 2000d). Revocation of Harvard’s tax-exempt status based on the factually very different 1983 Supreme Court case Bob Jones University v. United States is unlikely to survive legal challenge, but the specter of weaponizing the IRS should strike alarm across the political spectrum. A weaponized IRS will be an equal opportunity tool for future presidents to abuse, as if the matter of Lois Lerner was not sufficient warning. As Justice William Rehnquist noted in his dissent in Bob Jones University v. United States, the IRS must not arrogate to itself the making of policy that is the prerogative and responsibility of Congress. Muse on Cicero’s words, “It is impossible for a state without law to use its faculties. … We are slaves to the law, so that we can be free” (“Pro Cluentio,” 146).

What, then, is the way forward?

On April 11, 2025, the General Services Administration, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services sent a five-page letter to President Garber with the administration’s demands. Many of the demands are straightforward and reasonable, such as procedures to curtail disruption and deplatforming, a policy to control the wearing of masks, better student disciplinary codes, merit-based hiring and admissions, monitoring of donations from overseas, and ending DEI. Others, like the demand for changes in governance procedures, submission of admissions and hiring data to the federal government, and hiring a “critical mass” (unspecified) of new faculty to achieve intellectual diversity in each department, along with the admission of a “critical mass of students,” suggest a dangerous agenda of governmental control.

There is room for productive negotiation. There are even issues outside the April 11 letter that could meaningfully be addressed. Indirect cost rates that universities add to the cost of implementing a federal grant for their administrative expenses deserve scrutiny and transparency. (Harvard charges 69 percent on top of the project cost.)

For Harvard not to comply with the administration’s call for a policy curtailing the wearing of masks to conceal identity is senseless. All colleges and universities will benefit from a policy that forbids the wearing of facial coverings on campus, except for medical or religious reasons, and mask-wearers should always be ready to present ID to campus officers when asked. Such a policy has been implemented at three Virginia public universities (the University of Virginia, James Madison University, and Virginia Commonwealth University). Columbia University has signaled its intent to comply. Tighter policies to stop disruptions and student misbehavior are eminent common sense.

Moreover, a campus nearly devoid of faculty identifying as libertarian or conservative is prima facie evidence of ideological discrimination. Harvard will need more than verbal assurance of meritocratic hiring practices to convince anyone of its newly asserted ethic, though there are less intrusive ways to do this than the precipitous hiring demanded by the federal government.

Attempts to evade the Supreme Court ruling ending race-based admissions are unconscionable. At the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, the co-defendant in SFFA v. Harvard, the board of trustees resolved not only to ensure scrupulous observance of the decision but to extend race-blind practices to hiring and contracting. Nothing like that came from Harvard. Governing boards that, for good reason, do not want Leviathan’s intrusion into their campuses need to ensure fair admissions, fair hiring, and freedom from discrimination. This is their moment for strong, principled institutional governance. There are powerful figures within the Harvard community who understand this and are speaking out forcefully and eloquently.

But it must be said out loud: Limited government is a core value within the American concept of liberty, especially for classical liberals and conservatives. It is reasonable and wholesome in a free society for private institutions to challenge governmental fiat and intrusion into their operations. It behooves the Trump administration to respect such boundaries.

Holding two thoughts at once and recognizing complexity in crafting policy has not been a virtue demonstrated by either the Trump administration or by elite universities. It is time for that to change.

This piece was originally published by Law & Liberty on June 11, 2025.