As Harvard leaders consider how to respond to a list of demands from the Trump administration to combat what it views as rampant antisemitism on campus, a growing chorus of high-profile voices is calling on the university to stand its ground.
Many students, faculty, and prominent alumni are arguing Harvard, with its vast wealth and global reputation for excellence, has the obligation to stand against what many view as an unprecedented threat against academic freedom.
US Representative Seth Moulton, a Harvard graduate, on Monday criticized universities “like Columbia” for “trying to make deals with the Trump administration.”
“Harvard, frankly, with the biggest endowment in the world, should lead the pack doing the right thing,” he told reporters after an event at Tufts University.
The university Monday gave the first public indication its leaders are at least preparing for the possibility of losing federal funding by borrowing $750 million. Spokesperson Jason Newton says Harvard is preparing “for a range of financial circumstances.”
“Harvard is evaluating resources needed to advance its academic and research priorities,” Newton said.
Still, to the chagrin of many in the Harvard community, the university has not issued full-throated commitments to preserving academic freedom, as Brown and Princeton universities have, nor has the nation’s oldest college turned to the courts to demand the Trump administration follow the proper procedures for alleged violations of civil rights laws, as some professors have recommended.
The university’s top governing boards met over the weekend for a regularly scheduled meeting, the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson reported. A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on the substance of the meeting. Fiona Hill, a member of the university’s Board of Overseers, said in an interview with WGBH Monday that institutions need to collectively push back against Trump.
“You can’t just stand alone because you will get picked off,” Hill said.
Even some of the university’s harshest critics in the past year, including former President Lawrence Summers, have denounced Trump’s attacks on Harvard and other universities.
Some on campus urge caution, saying it’s premature to challenge the administration.
“If the Trump administration’s actions are unlawful, it’s entirely appropriate to resist them in court, and even to do so collectively,” said Harvard law professor Noah Feldman. “It would be wrong for universities to refuse to comply with civil rights laws.”
In a message to the campus community after the government’s funding review was announced last week, Harvard president Alan Garber closed no doors. He said Harvard would protect its community and academic freedom but also that the university would “engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism.”
The university has not commented further since confirming it received demands from the Trump administration Thursday.
The stakes are enormously high, not only for Harvard — which has nearly $9 billion in federal funding on the line for research within Harvard and at affiliated hospitals, including Boston Children’s Hospital, Mass General Brigham, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center — but also for the entire higher-education sector, said Richard Freeland, a former president of Northeastern University.
“What a crushing burden is now placed on the president and the leadership of Harvard and the board,” Freeland said. “Everybody knows that Harvard is the top university in the country, and really in the world. How Harvard reacts is going to have implications for the whole industry.”
The administration’s demands include ending diversity programs, implementing “merit-based” admissions and hiring practices, cooperating with federal immigration authorities, and changing student disciplinary procedures. The Trump administration, which contends the measures will help combat antisemitism, did not give Harvard a deadline to respond.
Some see a parallel between the dilemma facing Harvard and major law firms targeted by the Trump administration. Some firms have made deals with the administration to save their businesses; others are fighting the government in court, or offering support to them.
“The only way to resist this is to build a broad coalition of universities, of law firms, which so far has not happened,” Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, said at a recent event in Cambridge. “We need to encourage that.”
Some of the administration’s directives would be less painful for Harvard to agree to than others. The university, for example, no longer considers the race of applicants after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 to end race-based affirmative action in college admissions, so presumably it is already complying with the Trump administration’s demand for merit-based admissions. (Harvard and other universities after the ruling said they would use other strategies to foster campus diversity — efforts that could come under scrutiny if they assented to the Trump orders.)
Other demands, including that the university end DEI programs, have generated “a great deal of confusion and concern about what is being threatened,” said Bridget Long, professor of education and economics and former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“Harvard cares deeply about quality and maintaining high standards — these are core values of the institution,” Long said.
Nikolas Bowie, a law professor at Harvard Law School, called the demand letter “illegal and lawless,” adding that it seems unclear what, precisely, eliminating DEI or fully cooperating with Homeland Security officials would entail.
And if Harvard agrees to the conditions, how could it be sure the administration would not send more demands?
“Harvard just really is facing extortion, and it’s extortion without limit,” Bowie said. “So for Harvard to comply in this moment would just set itself up for being put in the exact same present next week.”
The vague nature of some of the administration’s orders may be even “more threatening to Harvard in the end, simply because it’s hard to know exactly what would please these people,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a visiting scholar at Harvard who is on sabbatical from Princeton University. He also fears classes like the one he taught for years at the Kennedy School about race, and others that “discuss the history of race and racism, or colonialism, or oppression” could be implicated if Harvard capitulates.
“If Harvard were to accept that the government has a right to make these demands and then attempt to meet their expectations, one would then expect a complete erasure of certain curricula, and of the student-facing and staff-facing programs meant to support a wide variety of affiliates at Harvard University,” Muhammad said. “It would create a new standard for which every private university would essentially have a choice to fall in line.”
Helena Jackson, a Harvard sophomore, said she is afraid the university will capitulate, and DEI programs that create opportunities and “spaces for students from marginalized communities” will suffer as a result. On the other hand, she said in a recent interview as she walked to class in the Harvard Science Center, as a physics student, she fears the loss of federal research funding.
“Without [DEI programs], I worry Harvard will start heading in the wrong direction,” Jackson said.
Harvard should make changes to ensure Jewish and Israeli students are free from bias and harassment “regardless of whether the federal government demands them or not,” said Boaz Barak, a Harvard computer science professor and a member of the university’s presidential task force on combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.
“At the same time, the university should be refusing interference that does not accord with the law, and should be providing legal support to any students or other scholars that are targeted by the administration,” Barak said.
The reservations among faculty appear to be widespread; more than 800 Harvard professors recently signed a letter calling for Harvard leaders to take a more forceful approach with Trump, including asking them to “publicly condemn attacks on universities,” “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance,” and lead a coalition of universities and alumni to oppose the attacks.
Other higher education and nonprofit leaders are watching carefully, and a few have spoken out. Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times that Trump’s attacks on higher education in the name of antisemitism “pose a direct threat to the very people they purport to help.”
John Palfrey, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the nation’s largest philanthropies, and a Harvard alumnus, said he is concerned the basic premise of what it means to be American, including the protection of free speech, is at stake.
“We decided we don’t want kings in the United States,” Palfrey said. “We need to speak out urgently and with moral clarity — ‘That is not the country we want to live in.‘”
Globe staffer Matt Stout and correspondent Nathan Metcalf contributed to this report.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.