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Harvard faculty, Democrats praise school for rejecting Trump’s ‘dangerous’ demands
Harvard's rebuff of the Trump administration should serve as a template for other institutions, elected officials and faculty members said.
Elected officials, faculty members, students, and outside observers waited the past few days with bated breath for Harvard University’s leaders to announce how they would respond to a series of demands from the Trump administration. So when President Alan Garber announced Monday that the nation’s oldest—and richest—university would not cave to Trump many here in Massachusetts let out a sigh of relief and heaped praise on the school.
Gov. Maura Healey extended her “congratulations and gratitude,” saying in a statement that “complying with the Trump Administration’s dangerous demands would have made us all less safe and less free.”
Even former President Barack Obama chimed in. In a statement posted to X, he urged other institutions to follow Harvard’s lead and praised the school’s willingness to reject an “unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect.”
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With the White House appearing to target the nation’s elite institutions in an effort to ostensibly crack down on antisemitism, Harvard’s decision is momentous. After the Trump administration got Columbia University to agree to a set of demands by threatening to withhold federal funding, it attempted a similar playbook in confronting Harvard.
The federal government’s “unprecedented” demands, Garber said, were made in an attempt to control Harvard. Among other things, the administration called for Harvard to shutter all DEI programs, reduce the power of faculty “more committed to activism than scholarship,” and submit to an audit of the school community’s “viewpoint diversity.”
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After Garber announced that the school would not accede to the demands, the Trump administration froze more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts. Harvard receives about $9 billion a year in federal funding, which supports the school’s 11 affiliated hospitals’ research in a variety of areas.
Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, said on social media that he was happy to see Garber’s decision and expressed hope that other universities would follow suit in “resisting extralegal and unreasonable demands from the federal government.”
Laurence Tribe, a prominent constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said that he was proud of Harvard and its leaders and called for people to donate to the school in the wake of the funding freeze.
Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, dedicated a post on his Substack page to the news.
“I agree with Alan [Garber] entirely in the implication behind standing against government overreach in violation of our constitutional rights,” he wrote.
Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, also called Garber’s response “powerful and entirely justified.”
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Other notable politicians weighed in as well. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who taught at Harvard, called Trump’s threats to universities “lawless” in a statement to Boston.com.
“Cutting research for cancer or heart disease does not help anyone,” Warren said. “Harvard is right to reject the Trump administration’s demands. I support their efforts to fight back, and I hope more institutions step up to protect academic freedom.”
Sen. Ed Markey said simply that this is “how we fight back.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, a Harvard alum, said that he was happy to see the school’s leaders “finding the courage to stand against modern-day tyrants.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont congratulated Harvard for “refusing to relinquish its constitutional rights to Trump’s authoritarianism.” He said that other universities should take similar positions, and also called out “cowardly law firms” for capitulating to Trump.
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