“Finally!”
That was my first reaction to Harvard’s letter on Monday, which pledged to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on its autonomy. You can’t have a free university or a free society when the government is dictating what you can teach, think or write. Good on Harvard, for stating what most schools have been too scared to say.
Yet we should also read the letter as a challenge to our universities, which haven’t always lived by their ideals of free expression and open inquiry. President Trump’s proposed restrictions and penalties pose a dire threat to these values, as the Harvard letter makes clear. But we shouldn’t pretend that we have made good on them ourselves.
Consider the question of viewpoint diversity, which the Trump administration highlighted in its own letter to Harvard earlier this month. The university was instructed to abolish “ideological litmus tests” and to “hire a critical mass of new faculty” in departments where everyone thought the same way.
I heartily endorse that goal, even if I detest Trump’s mechanism for achieving it. Surveys have repeatedly confirmed that faculty at elite schools like Harvard lean heavily and almost uniformly left in their politics. That’s a big problem if you think that education should expose us to a wide range of perspectives. And it also helps explain the rising public disdain for universities, especially — but not only — among conservatives.
But I don’t want Trump or any other government official deciding which departments or schools are so ideologically lopsided that they will forsake their federal funding, as Trump has threatened. That’s a formula for corruption, not balance.
And that’s why the universities have to step up, admit they have a problem, and commit to solving it. So I was pleased to see that Harvard’s letter pledged to “broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community,” as Harvard president Alan M. Garber wrote.
Message to the world: Harvard isn’t as intellectually diverse as it should be. Nor has it done enough to “nurture a thriving culture of open inquiry” or to “develop the tools, skills, and practices needed to engage constructively with one another,” as Garber also admitted.
Changing all of that will require our universities to improve their classroom teaching, which is something Garber’s letter didn’t mention. If you don’t prioritize instruction — or if you don’t prepare faculty well for it — they’re unlikely to help students learn how to speak across their differences. It’s a lot easier just to speak at them, which is what so many of us continue to do.
But we’re afraid to admit it. In her fateful testimony to Congress in December 2023, Garber’s predecessor Claudine Gay claimed that Harvard devotes “significant resources to training our faculty in . . . pedagogical skill and prioritizing that in our recruiting and hiring.”
That would be great, if it were true, but it’s almost certainly false. Elite schools like Harvard hire faculty for their research, not for their teaching. But when we survey Americans about what makes a good university, the most popular answer is “excellent teachers.” If we want to win back the public’s trust, enhancing our teaching would be a great place to start.
Most of all, we need to answer the question that should be on everyone’s mind right now: why have college at all? At a moment when Trump and his lieutenants have deemed universities “the enemy,” it has never been more important for us to define our central goals.
So I was also glad to read Monday’s letter by Claire Shipman, the embattled acting president of Columbia University, who called for “a continued public conversation about the value and principles of higher education.”
“I am especially concerned that many Americans have lost faith and trust in higher education,” Shipman added. “We should continue the hard work of understanding why.”
Emboldened by the Harvard letter, perhaps, Shipman pledged to resist “heavy-handed orchestration” by the federal government into “what we teach, research, or who we hire.” That was music to the ears of many Columbia alumni — including myself — who have denounced our alma mater for its craven concessions to the Trump administration.
I hope other universities come aboard, too, and join hands against Trump. That might require them to sustain huge cuts to their budgets. But who better to do that than Harvard, the richest university in the world? As President John F. Kennedy (Harvard class of 1940) said in 1963, quoting Jesus Christ during a graduation ceremony at Vanderbilt, “of those to whom much is given, much is required.”
After Harvard released its letter, White House officials announced that they would freeze more than $2 billion in federal grants to the university. And the next morning, Trump followed up with an additional new threat: if Harvard doesn’t come to heel, it might lose its tax-exempt status.
“Perhaps Harvard…should be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political ideological, and terrorist inspired/supported ‘Sickness?'” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Remember, Tax Exempt status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
He’s right about that “last “public interest” part. And the only way for us to fend off his attacks — and to earn back popular favor — is to demonstrate how we serve the public. I’m glad we are finally standing up to Donald Trump. But we won’t win this battle unless we admit where we have fallen short.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
Â
