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      The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

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      The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.Trump reacted furiously this week after the president of Harvard University, the US’s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.“It’s as dangerous as anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors.“They’re attempting to undermine and destabilize and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it’s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy. So I think this is a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country’s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe at this moment.”The government said on Monday it planned to freeze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard, hours after Alan Garber, the university president, said Harvard would not accept a series of demands made by the Trump administration. The demands included appointing a White House-approved external body to “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity”, and that Harvard “immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs”.Garber said the government’s edicts “represent direct governmental regulation” of the school’s independence and constitutional rights.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in an open letter, which was hailed by the left and by college professors concerned at the capitulation of other schools.Yet, as evidenced by Trump’s emotional post on Wednesday, the government’s assault on universities is unlikely to stop anytime soon, particularly if he is to emulate the kind of strongman leaders, such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, he has praised in the past.“[People in the Trump administration] have read their history, and they know that authoritarian regimes often target higher education as an independent sector and society, and aim to undermine it because of its role in creating an educated populace that could stand up to all forms of authoritarian rule,” Wolfson said.“And so this is part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism: to attack and to attempt to control or destroy higher education.”The move against universities has echoes of the efforts by the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the middle of the 20th century to root out people he accused of being communists and Marxists. And like McCarthy, Trump’s efforts – led by a group of loyalists including the White House deputy chief of staff and head of policy, Stephen Miller – go beyond just universities. Trump has targeted some of the biggest law firms in the US with executive orders, prompting many to cave and pledge hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work to causes backed by the Trump administration.“The Trump administration is following the playbook of totalitarian dictatorships elsewhere in the world. It is trying to use the force of law to intimidate independent civic society organizations, so that opposition to its policies is impossible,” said Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and co-chair of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom.“This new incarnation of the American right wing, with complete fealty to a single man, and an unprecedented attempt to disable civic society institutions like law firms and universities, is quite extraordinary.”The Trump administration has framed its move on Harvard and other colleges as an effort to crackdown on antisemitism, following protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and as a move against alleged civil rights violations on campus. Few outside of the rightwing sphere see that as a good faith argument.“As a Jewish faculty member, I’m sensitive to antisemitism on campus, and it does exist and it should be combated. But the claim that Harvard is a bastion of antisemitism is just wild hyperbole. Three of our last four presidents who’ve served longer than a year have been Jewish. The fourth was married to a Jewish professor,” Pinker said.Harvard has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs because of its status as the best known of America’s universities, one of the eight esteemed Ivy League schools. Thousands of influential figures across politics, media and business attended Harvard’s grand campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of those who didn’t go to Harvard still tend to take an interest in its affairs.“We’ve got between 4,000 and 5,000 higher education institutions in the US. The Ivys always make headlines. The major cultural commentators in this country are obsessed with the Ivys, and have been for a long time. These are things that sell papers, they get a lot of clicks and a lot of attention,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of US colleges and universities and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.“The other thing, too, is what happens at your regional state public flagship university often follows from the trends that are set at the Ivys. Not only do they generate a lot of headlines, they are influential in that way.”Just as Harvard’s existence predates the founding of the US, rightwing antipathy towards universities has been brewing for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California in 1966, he used anger towards anti-Vietnam student protesters for political gain: one of his main campaign strands was a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” – the state’s flagship university.Reagan’s tactics bear echoes of Trump’s. Ray Colvig, UC Berkeley’s chief public information officer at the time, told the university’s news service years later that Reagan “wanted to establish a special process to select faculty in several disciplines”.“In other words, he wanted to set a political standard for appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed, and it went away,” Colvig said.Reagan wasn’t the first to take on the universities. Shepherd said efforts to set up rival, conservative universities, date back to the 1920s, while McCarthy’s war on higher education came later. Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, wrote in the Nation recently that the Trump administration’s efforts were “worse than McCarthy”, and Shepherd said Trump’s attacks were “much more accelerated” than the communist-paranoid senator’s tactics.“McCarthyism, in the 1940s and 50s, the idea was to identify specific professors, hardly ever students, always faculty, and have them fired. Today, we’re seeing much worse than that. These are attacks on entire programs and departments. So entire departments like Black studies or DEI initiatives. It’s also not just relegated to the professors. We’re seeing students with their visas revoked being literally plucked off the streets,” Shepherd said.Trump hasn’t just targeted Harvard. Columbia University caved to a series of demands from the Trump administration in March, as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding, while the White House has announced funding freezes to other schools including Brown, Northwestern, Princeton and Cornell.Harvard taking a stand is one of the first signs of a fight back – even if it came after it was reported in March that the leaders of the university’s center for Middle Eastern studies were forced out, a move seen by critics as an attempt to appease Trump – and academics and others hope it could begin a resistance. It is likely to require a group effort to avoid the right wing’s goal for higher education in the US: universities that are in effect government-controlled, and where freedom of speech and thought is restricted.“The right don’t want students to hear about the legacy to slavery. They don’t want them to hear about structural inequalities,” Shepherd said.“They don’t want to hear why billionaires are bad. They don’t want to hear, from the sciences, about climate change. They want a nice, friendly experience where the most students ever get to debate is the differences in Aristotle and Plato.“They don’t want the actual debates that we see unfolding on campuses today.” More

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      Trump’s political bullying of Harvard will do nothing to foster diversity of thought | Kenan Malik

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      Few people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” – that to truly know one’s own argument, one must also know the arguments of those who disagree.How to create a culture that encourages more fruitful engagement between those of differing political views has become a key question in contemporary public debate. Nowhere more so than in universities, where there has been much debate about “viewpoint diversity”, the aspiration to nurture differing and conflicting perspectives within an institution or group as a means of sharpening arguments and teasing out truths.Universities have in recent decades become recognised as predominantly liberal institutions in which the range of debates can be constrained, both by the fact that most people share a similar perspective and by a culture wary of ideas deemed offensive or hurtful. Hence the growing calls for greater viewpoint diversity. The desire to create a richer culture of intellectual engagement and debate has also, however, been turned into a political cudgel, as in the current standoff between Donald Trump and Harvard University. The Trump administration sent to Harvard, as to many other elite colleges, a series of demands for the reorganisation of its governance and procedures, and for the reform of myriad departments deemed too radical.It is part of an attempt to impose political authority over academic life. One key demand is that any department “lacking viewpoint diversity” must hire new faculty members to transform its political complexion. University authorities must “audit” political views and only hire staff whose politics would ensure greater diversity of opinion.To engage with conservative perspectives is vital. This, though, is identity politics of a particularly pernicious kind packaged as a challenge to “woke” beliefs, a form of social engineering that conservatives normally denounce. Whatever happened to their insistence that the person best qualified for a job should get it?Nor is it easy to see what political balance might mean. How many conservatives should there be? How many Marxists? Should there be a quota for Jews supporting the Palestinian struggle? Or for Hamas-hating Muslims?At the same time as demanding viewpoint diversity, the White House insists that “Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences and practices … throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests”. How then can the university collect data on the political views of potential hires, even were that acceptable practice, to refashion every department’s ideological complexion as Trump demands?These are not merely problems and contradictions within Maga world but reflect conundrums within much of the discussion around viewpoint diversity. The lack of viewpoint diversity can be a real issue. The solutions proffered, though, often threaten to make the problem worse. Trump’s demand is in essence for universities to introduce affirmative action for conservatives while abolishing diversity policies in every other sphere. Similar ideas have long percolated through liberal arguments for viewpoint diversity.In an address to the American Psychological Association in 2001, psychologist and legal scholar Richard Redding argued for “affirmative-action-like practices” to increase the numbers of conservatives in academia. Many others, such as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who helped establish the Heterodox Academy as an academic forum for diverse views, and Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a fierce critic of Trump’s assault on universities, have followed suit, arguing, in Roth’s words, for “an affirmative-action program for the full range of conservative ideas and traditions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolitical scientist Eric Kauffman, director of Buckingham University’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science, argues that he is “not advocating affirmative action”, but insists, too, that what “a university decides to do on gender and race in terms of equity and diversity and inclusion … should be matched by equal action on ideological and political equity, diversity and inclusion”.Fostering diversity of opinion, nurturing a richer culture of debate and encouraging freedom of expression are all vital aims. But, in advocating affirmative action for certain political viewpoints, institutionalising individuals’ political identities, and making political beliefs legitimate criteria for admission and recruitment, the proposed solution, cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder observes, “embraces the very problem it diagnoses”.In defining academics by their political views, the traditional vision of scholarly objectivity, as another anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz notes, becomes subverted. Max Weber, perhaps the most influential of 20th-century sociologists, proposed a “value-neutral approach” by which one aimed to be objective irrespective of one’s politics. Many now view Weber’s approach as naive, given that “nobody has found a way to eradicate confirmation bias in individuals”, as Haidt and his colleagues have argued. All that is possible, they suggest, is to “diversify the field to the point where individual viewpoint biases begin to cancel each other out”. In other words, ensure that liberal bias in research becomes countervailed by conservative bias. This may work in many circumstances but, in others, it may make the search for answers more difficult.In many disciplines within the social sciences or the humanities, the political stance of the scholar can be vital to the argument – for instance, in the difference between conservative, liberal and Marxist views of globalisation. Here, robust debate is essential but there may be no “neutral” position to be arrived at by washing out the “biases”.I began by suggesting that few people want to live in an echo chamber. Nevertheless, societies have also become more fragmented and the politics of identity have helped create a more Balkanised world. It is a culture particularly entrenched in universities, where, as Shweder observes, “exposure to arguments and evidence that challenges one’s convictions” can often be experienced “as trauma or as the creation of a hostile work environment”.These are not issues confined to universities, nor to one side of the Atlantic. These are cultural changes we all need to confront. They are also cultural shifts that cannot be remedied through state mandates or bureaucratic procedures.What we need, rather, is to rethink what is meant by social and political engagement and, in particular, to encourage and celebrate, in place of Balkanised intellectual silos, what Shweder calls “the capacity of the human mind to stay on the move between different points of view”. More

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      The showdown between Harvard and the White House – day by day

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      It took Harvard University less than 72 hours to reject a series of demands put forth by the Trump administration, setting up a high-stakes showdown between the US’s wealthiest and oldest university and the White House.The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students and alumni and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington.Harvard was one of the first universities to face national scrutiny following 7 October 2023 and the ensuing campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, as critics accused the school and its leaders of failing to adequately combat antisemitism on its campus.And this February, just weeks into Trump’s presidency, the administration’s new Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced that it would be visiting 10 universities, including Harvard, in an effort to “eradicate antisemitic harassment” in schools.Soon after, the White House went after Columbia University, first launching a review of its federal funding, and then revoking $400m in federal funds from the school, citing the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment amid the campus protests against the war in Gaza.View image in fullscreenIn response, groups of Harvard faculty, alumni and students as well as Cambridge community members began calling on their own university leaders – through protests, letters, op-eds and resolutions – to publicly oppose the administration’s actions and to resist any future demands and pressure from the White House.On 6 March, the day before Columbia’s funding was cut, Harvard professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky penned an op-ed in the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, criticizing the university’s silence, and urging Harvard leaders to set an example by making “a firm public defense of democracy”.Days later, immigration authorities arrested Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, and Trump officials warned 60 universities of potential penalties tied to antiseminism investigations.That week, nearly 200 Harvard affiliates gathered on campus and protested Khalil’s detention, and urged the university to condemn the administration’s actions.Enos and Levitsky followed with another op-ed, this time titled: “First they came for Columbia.”“So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education,” they wrote. “That must change. Harvard must stand up, speak out, and lead a public defense of our freedom to speak and study freely.”The piece resonated widely within the Harvard community, Enos said, even reportedly reaching Harvard’s board of overseers (one of the school’s two governing bodies).Enos decided to write to several members of the board of overseers, sharing arguments from his recent op-eds. He had heard that some board members were sympathetic to their view.In mid-March, universities watched Columbia yield to a series of sweeping demands made by the Trump administration in an effort to restore the halted funding. (The funding remains withheld, and reports now suggest that a possible consent decree is on the table.)Enos and others feared that when the time came, Harvard might follow suit. At that point, Enos said, Harvard’s leadership had shown “no indication” that they were willing to put up a public fight in defense of Harvard or public education more generally.In the weeks prior, the university had appeared to be taking pre-emptive steps to get ahead of the administration’s potential crackdown and funding cuts. They announced a university-wide hiring freeze, and made several decisions that critics viewed as aligning with the administration’s priorities.The university adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism in a legal settlement over complaints brought by Jewish students, ousted two leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and a “religion, conflict and peace initiative” at the Harvard Divinity School amid accusations that it focused “entirely on the Palestinians”, and banned the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee from hosting events on campus.These actions caused concern for some who worried that Harvard was compromising academic freedom to appease the government.“Someone might reasonably think that these changes were in order to accommodate, to demonstrate to the federal government, look, we’re closing down programs that have been accused of imbalanced coverage,” said Kirsten Weld, a professor of history at Harvard, who heads Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).On 24 March, Enos and Levitsky, with help from several others, circulated a letter among faculty, urging Harvard’s two governing boards to publicly condemn the attacks on universities, legally contest and resist unlawful demands, and mount a coordinated opposition.More than 800 faculty members signed, though some non-US citizens refrained due to fear, Enos said.The letter was sent to governing board members before their next scheduled meeting, which was to be on 5 and 6 April.Separately, in another letter, more than 1,000 Harvard alumni urged Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, to defend academic freedom and free speech, and to take a stronger stand.“We cannot appease the Trump administration – it always asks for more,” the letter warned.James Stodder, who drafted and circulated that letter, said that he and a group of other alumni were looking for ways they could make their voices heard.Another alumni letter with more than 1,200 signatures called for courage over capitulation.In late March, Harvard’s chapter of the AUP along with the national chapter and other groups, sued the Trump administration, alleging it had violated members’ first amendment rights by targeting pro-Palestinian speech by noncitizens.Around this time, the Crimson was reporting that Garber had been privately discussing the administration’s pressure campaign with other university leaders.Then, on 31 March, the Trump administration put Harvard directly in its crosshairs, announcing a review of Harvard’s $9bn in federal funding, citing alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus.Garber’s response was seen by some as conceding to the administration’s narrative and suggestions.On 3 April, Trump officials sent Harvard a letter, stating that its federal funding would be conditional on changes such as eliminating diversity and inclusion programs, reviewing its programs “to address bias”, cooperating with law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, installing leaders to implement the president’s demands, and more.“We said to ourselves, OK, we’re now in the same position as Columbia,” Weld said. “This is kind of the first shot across the bow.”That same day, Enos and Levitsky published a third op-ed, “Appeasing Trump Damages Harvard and America”, urging the university to resist and take a stand.Enos said he heard from alumni who had begun threatening to withhold donations to the school if Harvard didn’t stand up against Trump.After receiving initial demands from the administration, the Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard leaders were in contact with the administration in pursuit of an agreement. Federal officials reportedly believed that Harvard would eventually concede, as Columbia had. Harvard said that the demands were too vague and requested more details.Harvard’s governing boards met as planned in early April. While no details from those meetings were released, Enos believes their faculty letter was likely discussed, noting that last year he was told that the governing bodies had found a similar letter he organized in support of former Harvard president Claudine Gay to be “very persuasive”.“I would find it shocking if they ignored or at least didn’t consider that kind of outpouring of faculty support,” Enos said.Following the weekend meeting, the Cambridge city council passed a unanimous resolution urging Harvard to reject Trump’s demands, and to “use all measures possible, including the University’s endowment funds, if necessary, to safeguard academic independence, the rule of law, and democracy”.Councilmember Burhan Azeem, who co-sponsored the resolution, said he wanted Harvard to know that they had the support of the city behind them if they chose to stand up to the administration.Azeem said it’s rare for the city council to get involved in internal Harvard affairs, but the stakes were high.“We were trying to convey to Harvard that the city is not the most powerful institution, but we are an institution, we have lawyers and we are willing to take action and we are willing to stand by them,” Azeem said.By this point, despite the Trump administration’s 3 April letter demanding “immediate cooperation”, Harvard had not yet publicly responded.On 11 April, Harvard’s AAUP chapter filed a second lawsuit against the administration, this time challenging the federal review of the university’s federal funding.The next day, hundreds of Harvard affiliates and Cambridge residents rallied in near-freezing temperatures at Cambridge Common, demanding once more that the university resist the federal pressure and also protect its international students and faculty.Unbeknownst to the protesters, behind closed doors that weekend, Harvard leaders were parsing through a new five-page letter from the Trump administration that had been delivered late on Friday.The letter included a list of sweeping demands – the shuttering of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives, restrictions on the acceptance of international students who are “hostile to the American values and institutions”, and federal oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff and more.Harvard officials were stunned by the demands in the letter, the Wall Street Journal reported, viewing them as more extreme than those sent to other schools. A Sunday board meeting ended in unanimous agreement on how to respond.Then, on Monday, 14 April, Harvard released its statement publicly rejecting the demands, and released the administration’s Friday letter.“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism”, the “majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard”, Harvard’s president wrote.“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”It was then Harvard became the first major US university to openly defy the administration’s demands.Garber’s office did not respond to a request for comment on how the decision came together. But, Enos believes that the pressure from faculty, alumni, students and others mattered.“I think we did manage to put a tremendous amount of pressure on Harvard to do the right thing,” Enos said. “It came from all circles.”Weld said she was “very glad” when she read the announcement, adding that the demands from the Trump administration were “such an egregious overreach”. Accepting them, she said, would have been “disastrous”.Harvard’s announcement drew support from Democrats, as well as Harvard faculty and alumni, and leaders of other universities.View image in fullscreenThe Crimson reported a surge in donations to Harvard after the announcement, with the school receiving an average of 88 online donations per hour. Between Monday, when the announcement was made, and 9am Wednesday, nearly 4,000 gifts totaling $1.14m had been made, according to a giving update from Harvard alumni affairs and development obtained by the Crimson.But the battle has only just begun. The fight this week has already escalated.Following Harvard’s announcement, federal officials froze more than $2bn in grants to the university. Trump also has threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll international students.On Thursday, the Trump administration accused Harvard – in yet another letter to Garber – of failing to report large foreign donations to the federal government, as is required by law. They demanded that Harvard provide names of foreign donors, including records of communication with all of them from the beginning of 2020, and records pertaining to foreigners who spent time at Harvard; that latter group includes students Harvard expelled or those who had their credentials canceled, going back to 2016.A Harvard spokesperson told the New York Times on Friday: “Harvard has filed Section 117 reports for decades as part of its ongoing compliance with the law.”Layoffs have already been reported at the Harvard School of Public Health, with warnings at Harvard Medical School, too.Though Harvard’s endowment is sure to offer some financial cushion, the New York Times reports that about 80% of it is limited to specific purposes.“It’s going to get more painful before it gets better,” Enos said.Weld said that the AAUP will continue to proceed with their lawsuits against the administration and that concerns remain regarding Harvard’s decisions earlier this year to “shut down spaces of independent critical inquiry related to Palestine on our campus”.Still, she said it was “vitally important” for the whole higher education sector that Harvard was fighting back.“If Harvard had not stood up and rejected the Trump administration’s demands, it would have sent generational chill through higher education in this country,” she said.“If Harvard, the richest university in human history, cannot stand up and fight back to unquestionably illegal demands, then what other institution is going to feel that it’s safe for them to do so?” More

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      What would it mean for Trump to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status?

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      Harvard University is in a standoff with Donald Trump after rejecting a series of demands from the president’s administration, which critics view as an attack on the elite college for its reputation among conservatives as a bastion of liberal thought.After cutting off its funding, Trump has reportedly given the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a potentially illegal order to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. Such a decision would mark an escalation in the Republican president’s weaponization of federal government agencies against the people and institutions that defy it.Here’s more about the battle between Trump and Harvard and how the president might try to use the IRS:How did the standoff begin?The Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce this month sent the university a letter saying it had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”. It listed demands, including banning face masks, closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and cooperating with immigration authorities.How did Harvard react?Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, refused to yield, saying: “[T]he university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” It has retained attorneys William Burck and Robert Hur, both veterans of Republican administrations, who say Trump’s demands are “in contravention of the first amendment”. Harvard’s stand is in contrast to the situation at Columbia University, which acceded to similar demands from the Trump administration in exchange for the restoration of $400m in federal funding that was revoked.How did Trump retaliate?The Trump administration quickly froze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multiyear contracts to Harvard. A member of the president’s antisemitism taskforce attacked the school’s stance, saying it “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”. Trump then called for Harvard to lose its tax-exempt status, and the Washington Post reported that the administration had asked the IRS’s top attorney to revoke it.What is tax-exempt status?If the IRS grants an organization tax-exempt status, they can avoid paying federal income tax, but must follow certain rules. These include refraining from campaign activity or attempting to influence legislation, while no individuals or shareholders are allowed to receive their earnings. According to the IRS, the status is available to charitable, religious, scientific and literary organizations, as well as those involved in preventing cruelty to children or animals, organizing amateur sports competitions or conducting testing for public safety reasons.Can Trump legally ask the IRS to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status?Federal law prohibits the president from directing the IRS to conduct an investigation or audit, and no evidence has yet emerged that the university has done anything to lose its tax-exempt status. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told US media “any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to” Trump’s public call for the status to be revoked.Has something like this happened under Trump before?In 2022, after Trump’s first term concluded, the New York Times reported that the former FBI director James Comey and his ex-deputy, Andrew McCabe, had been selected in 2019 for the IRS’s most invasive form of random tax audit. Trump had fired both Comey and McCabe during his term, and tax experts said both of them being selected for the audits was unusual. Trump, who had attacked Comey and McCabe by name even after their dismissals, denied any involvement. More

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      Harvard shows resistance is possible. But universities must join forces | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Harvard is refusing the plainly illegal demands by the Trump administration. That sends an important signal: resistance is possible.But universities must realize that the government is adopting a divide-and-rule tactic: they should collaborate on a shared litigation strategy, take a common approach in getting the public on their side, and do everything possible to have Congress push back against Trump treating money allocated by the legislature as if it were a private slush fund to be used for political blackmail. Some faculty have already begun to unite. In principle, not just progressives, but self-respecting conservatives – if any remain – should be responsive to such a three-pronged strategy.It has become abundantly clear that Trump 2.0 is using a moral panic about “woke” and pro-Palestinian protests as pretexts to subjugate institutions posing multiple threats to aspiring autocrats: universities constitute an independent source of information; they encourage critical thinking; they gather in one spot young people easily outraged by injustices. Of course, like all institutions, they have flaws; but, unlike, let’s say, businesses, they give wide latitude to criticism and position-taking (if you think colleges are censoring speech, try some political oratory on the factory floor or in the boardroom).Some academic leaders think they might mollify the Trumpists, or at least get a better deal, if they concede points about allegedly widespread antisemitism, as well as supposed indoctrination and discrimination. Self-criticism should of course be part of university life, but trumpeting on page-one op-eds that there are deep structural problems with higher education is naive at best. For one thing, there are no simple generalizations about the roughly 4,000 colleges and universities in the US; even what are usually called “elite universities” are hardly all the same.Yet far too many academics are uncritically repeating the right’s propaganda about a “free speech crisis” and conservatives feeling marginalized. Is it perhaps relevant that the most popular majors remain business and health sciences – subjects hardly taught by dogmatic lefties hell-bent on silencing dissent? Is it just about possible that some much-cited statistics – that many more professors vote for the Democrats – have more to do with the GOP having turned itself into the anti-science party, rather than professors all wanting to corrupt the youth with socialist nonsense?Even those worried about what the government’s letter to Harvard called “ideological capture” might balk at the proposed remedy: what can only be called totalitarian social engineering in the name of assuring “viewpoint diversity”. The government seeks to subject an entire university to an ideology audit: both faculty and students would have to be tested for “viewpoints” – whatever that means exactly. If an imbalance were to be found, departments would have to bring in what the Trumpist education commissars call a “critical mass” of faculty and students with viewpoints deemed politically correct by the commissars.This is not just an attack on academic freedom; it is a license to investigate individuals’ minds and consciences (could a student be hiding a secret interest in Judith Butler? Only extensive interrogations would reveal the truth!). Might students be encouraged to denounce their professors, in ways already popular on rightwing websites? Might professors in turn be encouraged to tell on their charges (he looks preppy, but he once wrote an essay on gender ideology)?Besides the obvious contradiction of violating freedoms in the name of freedom, there is the rank hypocrisy of demanding “viewpoint diversity” while seeking to outlaw any diversity initiatives not based on political ideology. And the practical enforcement of viewpoint diversity would probably also be a tad uneven: no economics department would be forced to hire Marxists; evangelical colleges are unlikely to be led towards balance by having to bring in a “critical mass” of faculty promoting atheism.Trumpists are trying hard to frame university leaders as feeling “entitled” – one small step from calling them welfare queens and kings parasitic to the taxpayer. Education, they insinuate, is a luxury for spoilt kids, research a pretext for faculty to impose loony personal beliefs. If one accepts this framing, an otherwise inexplicable idea starts to make sense: Christopher Rufo, the much-platformed strategist of the attacks on academic freedom, wants to “reduce the size of the sector itself”.Why would one want to deny opportunities for kids to learn and for research to advance, unless one fears critical thinking? Or unless one has a completely warped view – Musk-style – of how science actually works? Or unless one exhibits willful ignorance of the fact that the government does not just shovel cash to universities so they can organize more pride parades, but that it concludes contracts for research after highly competitive selection processes?Clearly, the Trump administration is in the business of unprecedented national self-harm. Those who think of themselves as “conserving” must ask whether they really want to be part of an orgy of destruction. Those who say they worship the founders must wonder whether they can tolerate daily violations of the constitution, as Trump works to impound funds approved by Congress (for research, among other things).Self-declared free speech defenders must question why they would support an administration inspired more by Mao than by Madison. And those who just want to hold on to basic decency must ask whether they can accept a proposition along the lines of: “We’ll prevent cures for cancer, as long as Harvard doesn’t hire mediocre conservatives.” As my colleague David Bell has recently put it, if this proposition becomes acceptable, it will be the triumph of malignancy in more than one sense.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University. More

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      The mysterious firing of a Chinese professor has Asian students on edge: ‘Brings chills to our spines’

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      When FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents descended recently on two homes owned by Xiaofeng Wang, a Chinese national and cybersecurity professor at Indiana University, many in the idyllic college town of Bloomington were shocked.In December, Wang had been questioned by his employers about allegedly receiving undisclosed funding from China on a project that also received US federal research grants. On the same day of the home raids, Wang was fired from his longstanding post at Indiana University over email – a move that goes against the university’s own policy.But Wang hasn’t been charged with any offence, and his lawyer says no criminal charges are pending.The incident has driven fear into the hearts of Bloomington’s Asian community of faculty and students who fear a political motivation.“I study at the computer science department, and I’ve overheard Chinese professors talking about how worried they are that something similar could happen them, too,” says a Chinese PhD student who came to Bloomington from Suzhou, Jiangsu province, last September and who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the issue.During the first Trump administration, the Department of Justice created the China Initiative in an effort to find and prosecute spies for Beijing working in US research and development sectors. At the time, it was criticized by rights groups for fueling racial profiling and violence against Asian Americans, and a review by the Biden administration saw the effort ended in 2022.Now as before, Trump has made targeting universities whose leadership and faculty he believes run against his own agenda a key element of his second term.For the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, what happened to Wang “brings chills to our spines”.“What is particularly troubling in this case is that Indiana University fired him and his wife without due process, presuming guilt instead of innocence,” Chen says.Chen, who has US and Chinese nationality, found himself charged by the Department of Justice for allegedly failing to disclose links to Chinese organizations on a grant application for a federally funded project, with just weeks remaining in Trump’s first term, in January 2021.The charges were dismissed a year later.“The investigations on Professor Wang and his firing creates huge fear among researchers of Chinese descent, especially students and postdoctorates from China. It is clear that such events, together with legislation and hostile rhetoric, are driving out talents. I learned that many Chinese students and postdoctorates here are considering leaving the US.”More students from China come to the US to study and research at third-level institutions than from any other country.The fear of Chinese spies operating in the US isn’t completely unfounded.A report released recently by US intelligence agencies found that China remains the top cyber threat to America, and many politicians on the right believe smaller colleges in low-key parts of the country such as the midwest could be used as gateways into the US by the Chinese Communist party.In October, five Chinese students at a college in Michigan were charged with spying on a military training camp where Taiwanese soldiers participate. This month, information on several Chinese students at Purdue University, also in Indiana, was sought by members of Congress, claiming national security interests, though no charges have been brought.But the vast majority of the estimated 300,000 Chinese academics and students in the US today are in the country to legitimately contribute to research and to learn, say experts who fear that Trump’s targeting of colleges deemed to be antisemitic may now be shifting to the midwest.Last month, the Department of Education named Indiana University Bloomington among 60 colleges under investigation for alleged antisemitic discrimination, a move that could result in funding cuts.It’s not only Chinese academics and students who could be affected.Universities in Illinois, Indiana and other heartland states are home to some of the largest Chinese student populations in the country.Nearly half of Urbana-Champaign’s combined population of 130,000 people in neighboring Illinois is made up of college students and staff. Nearly six thousand are students from China.In Bloomington, which has a population of under 80,000 people, close to 50,000 are students, with nearly 10% coming from overseas.Midwestern colleges and the communities around them are keen to attract international students and rely heavily on the money they bring with them; about 2,000 Chinese students enroll at Indiana University every year. International undergrad students are charged an average of $42,000 in tuition and fees, alongside $14,000 in housing and food, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the college and town.Over the years, these and other small university towns have come to rely on international students to prop up their economies.A couple of blocks west of the University of Indiana Bloomington campus, a grouping of Chinese, Korean and Asian eateries cater to the college’s large Asian community. The sidewalk in front of the Longfei Chinese restaurant is dotted with food signs written in Mandarin. The restaurant’s manager, however, says he believes that the political problems between Washington and Beijing have seen the number of Chinese students coming to the US – and through his doors – fall in recent years.The Chinese PhD student, who one recent morning is here grabbing lunch, says his student visa status allows him to stay in the US for up to five years, but he and his Chinese colleagues are worried that the Trump administration may cut that short.“I’m concerned with President Trump’s hostility against China and this kind of hostility may affect Chinese students and professors, and the funding that we get,” he says.“I’m concerned about the impact on my life.”Faculty at the department where Wang worked for more than two decades have called for Indiana University to revoke his dismissal. His profile page on the University’s website has been removed and college authorities have not commented on his firing.“Neither Prof Wang nor Ms Ma [his wife, who worked as a library analyst at the same university] have been arrested … further, there are no pending criminal charges as far as we are aware,” says Jason Covert, a lawyer at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, a firm representing Wang and Ma.“They look forward to clearing their names and resuming their successful careers at the conclusion of this investigation.”Covert would not say whether Wang planned to remain in the US. More

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      Trump officials cut billions in Harvard funds after university defies demands

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      The US education department is freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University, the agency said on Monday.The announcement comes as the Ivy League school has decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” said a member of a department taskforce on combating antisemitism in a statement.The education department taskforce on combating antisemitism said in a statement it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard.In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”On Monday, Barack Obama posted in support of the university: “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting 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. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”The demands from the Trump administration prompted a group of alumni to write to university leaders calling for it to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance”.“Harvard stood up today for the integrity, values, and freedoms that serve as the foundation of higher education,” said Anurima Bhargava, one of the alumni behind the letter. “Harvard reminded the world that learning, innovation and transformative growth will not yield to bullying and authoritarian whims.”It also sparked a protest over the weekend from members of the Harvard community and from residents of Cambridge and a lawsuit from the American Association of University Professors on Friday challenging the cuts.In their lawsuit, plaintiffs argue that the Trump administration has failed to follow steps required under Title VI before it starts cutting funds, and giving notice of the cuts to both the university and Congress.“These sweeping yet indeterminate demands are not remedies targeting the causes of any determination of noncompliance with federal law. Instead, they overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the university to punishing disfavored speech,” plaintiffs wrote.Edward Helmore contributed to this report More

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      Harvard says it will not ‘yield’ to Trump demands over $9bn in funding cuts

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      Harvard University said on Monday that it will not comply with a new list of demands from the Trump administration issued last week that the government says are designed to crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite academic institutions.In a message to the Harvard community, the university president, Alan Garber, vowed that the school would not yield to the government’s pressure campaign. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said.The Trump administration said it would review $9bn of federal grants and contracts, including Harvard’s research hospitals, as part of its effort to “root out antisemitism”.In a letter last week from the government’s antisemitism taskforce, the university was accused of having “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.The Trump administration has also demanded that Harvard ban face masks and close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”. The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.The administration further asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” – and to report international students to federal authorities if they break university conduct policies.University faculties are also under the government’s microscope as it has called for “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”.Harvard’s announced resistance to the administration’s demands comes as Trump’s federal government pits itself against several Ivy League universities over intellectual and political freedoms. The dispute has been playing out in the courts over efforts by the administration to deport several postgraduate students holding provisional citizenship or student visas over pro-Palestinian demonstrations that the government alleges were shows of support for terrorism.On Friday, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian organizer Mahmoud Khalil, 30, can be deported despite having been granted legal permanent residence in the US. The government contended that Khalil’s presence in the US posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences”, satisfying requirements for deportation, according to the judge.After that ruling, Khalil’s immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout told the court that his client would appeal.The letter from Harvard’s president said the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in the message.Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”The new approach by the university, which sits on an endowment valued at over $52bn, comes in contrast to Columbia University. Columbia, which holds an endowment of $14bn, largely acceded to the administration demands after it was threatened with $400m in federal funding cuts.But Jewish advocacy groups are divided on the administration’s efforts. Some say they are an innovative and muscular way to combat what they see as campus antisemitism. Others maintain that the government is weaponizing antisemitism to pursue wider intellectual crackdowns.“The gun to the head and shutting down all science seems like a counterproductive way to handle the particular problems of antisemitism,” Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, told the Boston Globe earlier in April. More