Harvard students and faculty celebrate defiance of Trump’s demands

Harvard — founded a century before the United States — is by far the wealthiest university in the country and the most influential in the world. It boasts more alumni who’ve become U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, living billionaires and Nobel Prize winners than any other school. 

Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard, said the scope of the demands left the university with no choice but to reject them.  

“It had the potential to interfere with every single aspect of everything that we do on campus: what I sign, what I say, what I write about, what I think about practically, who is in my classroom, who are my colleagues, everything,” Jasanoff said. 

The Trump administration has already cut or frozen funding to several Ivy League institutions and opened dozens of investigations into other colleges about how they’ve dealt with antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests over the past two years. 

Fellow academics have condemned higher education leaders for not speaking out more forcefully against the Trump administration’s pressure on universities.  

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University and an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s directives to colleges, applauded Harvard’s statement. 

“Federal funding for universities must not depend on a loyalty oath,” Roth said in a statement. 

Hundreds of Harvard students and faculty and staff members demonstrated last weekend, pleading with the university administration not to give in, adding to an earlier open letter with a similar sentiment signed by 600 university educators, who expressed fear that the school would follow Columbia University’s actions. 

Last month, Columbia agreed to some of the Trump administration’s proposed reforms, which included banning masks at most protests, enlisting new campus security officers with the ability to arrest students and hiring a senior vice provost to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African studies. 

Late Monday, Columbia’s interim president issued a statement noting Harvard’s stand and said it would not consent to some of the government’s other “overly prescriptive” demands. Other prominent universities — Brown, Cornell, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Caltech — also joined several state schools in a lawsuit Monday against recent research funding cuts imposed by the Trump administration. 

Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties watchdog group, saw this week’s developments as a significant change in tune. 

“What Harvard does, others follow,” Perrino said. “I do think we’ll see some colleges and universities start to grow a spine in response to Harvard standing up.”