The university announced it will not comply with the federal government’s demands, including implementing merit-based hiring and admissions by August 2025.
Sword of Damocles hanging above it by a horsehair, Harvard University has pulled out the scissors.
The university announced it will not comply with the federal government’s demands, as detailed in a letter sent on April 11, including implementing merit-based hiring and admissions by August 2025. Harvard is the first high-profile university to outright refuse the Trump administration’s reforms.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” writes Harvard University President Alan Garber.
Garber retreats behind the sturdy bulwark of “academic freedom.” This defense is shoddily-formed. One doubts, for instance, whether Harvard would hire a professor who openly professes the superiority of the white race over all others. Or admit a student who submits an engaging, syntactically unimpeachable essay about repealing the 19th Amendment.
The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. https://t.co/5k5t9RYYC2
— Harvard University (@Harvard) April 14, 2025
Garber argues the federal government’s prescription “violates Harvard’s First Amendment 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.”
As the federal government reminds Garber, “an investment is not an entitlement.” Private universities are free to teach what they’d like — but if they expect their activity to be funded by the American people, they must justify the value proposition. And they have failed in spectacular fashion.
“A significant portion of the country feels that they have been abused by elite academia,” says Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson to the Daily Caller. “They understand that a lot of these ideas that are now disrupting their lives, trying to destroy their lives, destroy their personal spaces, destroy their parental rights, all started and are fueled on the campuses.
