Can Trump Force Harvard to Improve?

Can you guess who's who in this modern-day western? One character plays Little Bill Daggett, and the other plays English Bob. Hint: Alan Garber does not play a Sheriff.

Can Trump Force Harvard to Improve?

Probably not. But the president’s supporters hope the example will cause leaders of other universities to get serious about reform.

By Ben Sasse, WSJ

May 30, 2025 3:07 pm ET

A scene from Harvard’s commencement Thursday. Photo: Charles Krupa/Associated Press

Three outcomes are possible in Donald Trump’s war with Harvard: Scenario one is that the nation’s top private universities remain delusional about the dozen reasons a large and growing share of the public distrusts them. The “plan” is to avoid institutional course-correction and seek protection from the courts and ultimate rescue from the Democratic Party in 2029 or after.

Scenario two is that Mr. Trump and other populist-inspired politicians force change from without by intervening more consistently and even more forcefully in the internal operations of these schools.

Scenario three is that substantive reform comes from within these schools, or at least some of them. That would require their leaders to listen humbly to a broad range of legitimate criticisms—about the cowering before vandals and antisemites, about endless celebration of regressive identity politics, about administrative bloat and indefensible tuition hikes, and about the corruption of teaching and research—the nearly 4.0 average grades across the humanities, tenure rates of 80% and 90%, and a replication crisis in many fields. After deliberation and introspection, boards and presidents would need to announce publicly a reform agenda with precise goals and a specific timetable.

Many Americans have a rooting interest in the conflict between Harvard and Mr. Trump. I’ll put my cards on the table and acknowledge my ideal that reform come from within for these important institutions. (I have a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a daughter who commissioned out of Harvard ROTC into the Air Force.) But I also understand why one might think it naive to expect anything of the sort, given that top universities have for decades arrogantly resisted any critique of their drift into shallow partisanship, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

Public distrust is not only increasing but accelerating—Gallup tracks a collapse from nearly 60% of the public judging higher education a valuable sector a decade ago to barely a third today, including a precipitous fall among Democrats as well as Republicans. It’s bizarre that self-styled champions of higher education would wish for a listless no-reform scenario and thereby the increasing political ghettoization of elite universities. And if scenario two isn’t already inevitable, the pursuit of scenario one heightens its probability in the long term, as the pendulum of partisan elections sooner or later swings back to the Republicans.

Every constructive path forward therefore requires the Ivy League and Ivy-adjacent schools to acknowledge they’ve screwed up. Although their crests once represented the most distinguished education in the world, years of misguided administration have left them academically adrift. Top-tier universities act entitled to elite status, even as they neglect the necessary work of persuading fellow citizens of their value and seriousness. Standards are slipping and political activism has been on the rise in classrooms, all in the public eye. When those entrusted with massive endowments fail to acknowledge valid criticism and correct course, is it any wonder they trigger a backlash?

In response, a thirsty White House has begun launching a broad range of weapons at the richest and best known of these universities. Harvard is under investigation for tolerating antisemitism in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It has seen $2.6 billion of National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health and other federal grants canceled. It has learned its students’ Perkins grants, Stafford loans and Pell grants could be at risk. Federal contracts have been frozen. The ability to admit foreign students, who constitute 27% of Harvard’s student population and a larger share of tuition revenue, has been withdrawn, though a court has enjoined that move. Mr. Trump has said he wants to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, and congressional Republicans seek to raise the tax on income from the largest endowments—with Harvard’s $53 billion sitting atop the leaderboard.

These punishments fall along a continuum of tightly connected to tangentially connected to unrelated to the school’s alleged misdeeds. But the most invested observers seem either strongly against Harvard or strongly against Mr. Trump, and thus relatively uninterested in proportionality or due process.

The administration speaks of Harvard as an undifferentiated monolith. In reality, large universities are like cities filled with different neighborhoods, projects and ventures rather than a single-purpose organization with one set of books reporting through a definable structure to an identifiable boss. A college president is more like a mayor than a company CEO.

The American university—with roots in both the German scientific tradition and the English residential college—is esteemed around the world partly because of its awkward combination of advanced research and undergraduate teaching in one complex organization. When it works, it sparks extraordinary and unpredictable dynamism, as in Silicon Valley over the past-half century. When it doesn’t, the lack of accountability infuriates the citizens who pick up a large subsidy tab to feed pap and poison to the students we’re told are our nation’s future leaders.

The public’s biggest gripes about top universities center on the politicization of the humanities and the lack of accountability in the teaching enterprise amid skyrocketing expenditures, whereas the easiest governmental leverage to deploy against a place like Harvard is turning off the federal research funding spigot. But what does the cutting-edge biomedical researcher or computer scientist have to do with woke orientation staff foisting racial division into every corner of freshman arrival week? Not much. And political threats to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status are constitutionally egregious. As Chief Justice John Marshall famously observed in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

Nonetheless, Harvard isn’t owed in perpetuity the discretionary billions of federal funding it has received in the past. There’s a massive gulf between finding new cancer treatments and funding campus wackiness, between developing digital technologies to enable synthetic biology and subsidizing activist professors’ Hamas advocacy. Funding basic science through competing universities arguably has the highest return on investment of any work the federal government does. But the public has reason to doubt that boards and presidents have the backbone to ensure the dollars they steward actually support real science over culture-warring that masquerades as expertise.

And so the administration sees an opportunity—and among its more serious members, an obligation—to force reform from outside. Even though personal vendettas and popular rage can only destroy, fans of the vigorous approach see it as creative destruction: If Harvard won’t reform, at least publicly punishing it might indirectly yield reform at Dartmouth.

Anyone who has listened to the doublespeak coming from Columbia’s leadership at the end of a gun in recent months should doubt that foxhole conversions will yield lasting improvement. But go one layer deeper. Imagine a world-renowned gene therapist at Harvard Medical School. If the Harvard name kills any chance of renewing his federal grant, what does he do? Dust off his résumé and look for a new home. Here the administration thinks it might have a market-making tool: encourage brain drain from Harvard.

In this respect, higher education’s failures are high-profile case studies in our larger crisis of civil society. In institution after institution, in sector after sector, center-left leaders in recent decades went from understanding that most Americans are in the middle on most debates to making the bizarre misjudgment that the loudest voices on the culture-war left were the constituencies to which they were accountable.

The result has been that the center-right plurality of Americans understandably judge normies as under assault, and thus they fearfully drift toward greater tolerance of meat-ax approaches from the right, whose illiberalism seems preferable to the illiberalism of the left. This “choice” between two illiberalisms is tragic because it is false.

Culture warriors of neither the left nor the right are interested in or capable of rebuilding the social cohesion of postwar America. The worldview and institutional pluralism that long defined the best of our political tradition has gone into seemingly permanent remission. Mr. Trump’s targeting of Harvard would have been far more off-putting to far more Americans if it didn’t come after the Obama administration’s targeting of organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Using the federal government merely to punish partisan enemies is unlikely to yield reform inside any particular institution, but the administration’s defenders believe blunt force to make an example of someone is the one tool that’s not been tried by the right before—and that such a spectacle might make boards at other universities get serious about their own missions. Or at least it will make for titillating social media.