24.04.2025

MAGA versus Harvard

With America’s oldest university offering token resistance to the attacks of the Trump administration, Paul Demarty looks at academic freedom and the parlous state of higher education

On April 14, Harvard University released a statement signed by its president, Alan Garber, promising to fight back against onerous demands from Donald Trump’s administration.

Garber’s letter was received rapturously among Stateside liberal opinion-makers and, while we will offer a more critical account of the university’s recent conduct in due course, it is difficult not to share at least a sense of relief that someone in the American elite is prepared to offer token resistance to what is, without doubt, the most serious direct assault on higher learning in the country for some decades. Garber’s conclusion reaches for some stirring notes, and mostly finds them:

Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity - and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.¹

In response, the government has announced the cancellation of over $2 billion in research grants. Trial balloons are flying for revoking the school’s tax-exempt status - which would be far more costly than any grant cancellations - and fiddling with its ability to recruit foreign students. All of this will be dragged through the courts at great length, assuming some deal is not struck.

What are the demands of the government? A sweeping clear-out of all affirmative action and diversity initiatives in hiring and admissions; the subjection of effectively the entire humanities to state ideological policing for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’; plus a laundry-list of anti-‘cancel culture’ measures that, taken together with the bogus ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunting, reveal themselves as purely hypocritical measures to defend only rightwing speech from ‘cancellation’.²

Courage

It took several months for Garber and the rest of the Harvard administration to find their courage. In that time, they had already given all the signs of capitulation to an earlier, less drastic set of government demands. Notably, Harvard adopted the infamous International Holocaust Remembrance Association ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, which is the cudgel of choice, whenever the Palestine movement is to be harassed and marginalised in such institutional settings. Fortunately, the administration faced intense countervailing pressure from the faculty - who hardly look forward to Trumpite and Zionist thought-policing of their research - as well as students, alumni and even the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Even Garber’s statement of defiance is equivocal on the question of Palestine: “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating anti-Semitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard,” he laments. He also qualifies his defence as that of the rights of a private university (as opposed to the USA’s large public university system).

Nevertheless, the somewhat stiffened spines of Harvard are to be contrasted with the utter cowardice and cynicism of the other Ivies so far. Yale president Maurie McInnis cancelled a much-trailed speech on her vision for that institution - in spite of the fact that this colourless bureaucrat can surely not have had anything grander planned than an hour of interminable business-school pablum, she was not prepared to risk making herself too visible under current conditions.

Most egregious of all is the conduct of Columbia University in New York City, which has rolled over and begged like a beaten dog. At stake for Columbia is $400 million of research funding (which no amount of grovelling will bring back) - a lot of money to you or me, but certainly survivable for an institution with an endowment that is two orders of magnitude larger. The university authorities are plausibly implicated in the rendition of Mahmoud Khalil, sundry deportations and mass arrests of participants (and some mere bystanders) in the pro-Palestine encampments. It has agreed to subject its Middle Eastern Studies department to federal government oversight.

In return, it has gotten … no concessions, except perhaps the ability to continue operating as a glorified real-estate investment trust and paying its top brass obscene salaries. The conclusion is difficult to avoid that the Columbia administration in fact supports the sort of clampdown demanded of it, but lacks the cojones to take action without the face-saving appearance of having been forced into it. Harvard’s stance, limited as it is, reflects extremely badly on these people, and deservedly so. Indeed, there is some merit to the assertion of Justin Smith-Ruiu - an eccentric philosopher and Columbia alumnus - that the school “de facto does not exist anymore, at least not as a university in the proper sense of the term”.³

History

Whether or not Harvard’s move stiffens the resolve of other institutions, the outlook seems bleak for American higher learning. This fracas takes place at a moment when the public reputation of universities (especially elite private schools of the Harvard or Columbia type) is at a nadir - by some measures worse than other institutions facing what is a well-documented crisis in public trust. The schools are on their own. It also comes at an important inflection point in the history of the American academy, reflected to some extent in many other countries, including Britain, in which the internal cohesion and institutional strength of colleges has become the property of precisely the people - administrators who are effectively corporate managers - least likely to put up a fight.

The history of Harvard itself is illustrative of the kind of historical transformations we are talking about here. It was founded in the 1630s - mere decades after the arrival of the first English colonists in the north-east of today’s USA - with an explicitly religious purpose. These people had undertaken a dangerous voyage in order to build a properly Christian society, as they saw it - radical, low-church Protestantism of a distinctly Calvinist flavour. They needed pastors to watch over them, and so Harvard was founded to churn them out. Its products were often widely and well-educated, but also given to small-mindedness and superstition - a contradiction embodied by Cotton Mather, a clergyman who conducted extensive scientific experiments in botany, but also became a protagonist in the notorious Salem witch trials.

As the young colonies outgrew the Calvinist theocracy of the 17th century, so Harvard evolved, becoming somewhat secularised and less focused on producing good Protestant clergymen. Its first great transformation was undertaken in the second half on the 19th century, however, when it was remade in the image of the German research university (the modern conception of academic life, in which professors are expected both to teach students and to conduct research, dates to the Prussia of the early 19th century). With the ascension of the US to global hegemony, Harvard, and other elite American research universities, became the model to be followed everywhere; it was affected by initiatives like the GI Bill, which provided for veterans to attend college, again like the sector as a whole, somewhat diversifying its student body from the New England WASP elite.

Since the abandonment of the post-war consensus, however, Harvard has followed the sector as a whole in being subjected to increasingly philistine managerialism. Skyrocketing inequality in society at large has removed what fetters existed on the marketisation of degrees - never very strong in the States - with the result that tuition fees have ballooned over the course of a four-year degree to the kind of price you would pay for a modest house outside the great cities. Like housing, this is financed by debt; and therefore students expect some return on their investment. Thus the promotion of ‘business-minded’ executives, who treat the thing much as any other CEO of a blue-chip firm must protect the brand.

But job growth in the sort of professional careers to which a Harvard degree might be expected to buy access is pretty stagnant (this is, of course, all the more painfully true further down the university pecking order.) There is the smell of a bubble about all this. The neoliberal era was sustained in part by the technocratic idea that university education would equip people with the skills they needed for the new information economy, in which the production of physical commodities would be rendered invisible by outsourcing. The overproduction of graduates was the inevitable ultimate result, and consequently the risk of a rapid ‘correction’ in this market.

This political-economic situation makes fighting back very risky for the average college, even if they want to. But the consequent degradation of the actual activity of these institutions tends to make a mockery of any attempt to do so. The humanities are being run down; the sciences and related fields reduced to the sort of thing that can get you a good job at the end, which means a corresponding degradation in fundamental research. Of course, useful work still takes place; but Harvard’s job is to be Harvard, such that the price of a Harvard degree remains high.

Mafia

There is a certain idea abroad - particularly among humanists - that we are witnessing more than a brazen assault on free inquiry by a mafia-like administration, but rather something like the death of the research university itself. The crisis of the humanities is well-enough documented, but the truth is that many of the so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are on equally shaky ground. Much work in mathematics and the sciences is only doubtfully relevant to future earnings; it is undertaken purely to push human intellectual endeavour into novel territory, and in that respect more closely resembles philosophy or literature than, say, civil engineering. So far as the more obviously vocational courses are concerned, in many cases (and notably in my own profession of software engineering), it is clear that academic training is not nearly as effective as apprenticeship in the actual work.

Thus there is much chatter about rebuilding intellectual inquiry somewhere outside the ivory towers, whose walls were taken by the philistines long ago. As a mere endeavour of academics, this is surely hopeless: Who will fill the libraries with books? Who will pay the teachers? Who will feed the students?

The workers’ movement, in times of greater organisational strength, did create libraries, and did find ways to open higher education to broad masses precisely for its own sake. It was able to do so because of its mass roots in society, and the institutional sinews that came with it. It was willing to do so, because its aim was ultimately a more encompassing idea of human development. There was no reason why Seneca, the Stoics or the sciences should be the private property of the ruling class - no reason except the injustice of exploitation itself.

We have here, then, one more instance where the custodianship of an aspect of human flourishing falls to us. It is up to us to take it on.