They include multiple bogus investigations, including one from the Justice Department into whether Harvard has been lying to the government about its admissions policy; billions in federal research funding cuts and freezes at the school and its partners for various reasons, from the school’s purported failure to stem antisemitism on campus, to discrimination against white students, to its failure to include enough conservative faculty and orthodoxy to satisfy the administration.
The university has received juvenile threats from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, including a May 5 letter that reads like a late-night Trump rant, calling Harvard “a mockery of this country’s higher education system,” and decrying its large numbers of foreign students: “how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country — and why is there so much HATE?” The administration has threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status. And Homeland Security head Kristi Noem has demanded that it turn over detailed information on its 6,800 foreign students, including disciplinary records.
On Thursday, deeming Harvard insufficiently cooperative, Noem suspended the school’s ability to enroll any foreign students, and put other schools on notice that they could be next. In addition to being unspeakably cruel to students, the move would further pressure Harvard’s finances, given that a quarter of its students are from other countries, and many pay higher tuition.
On Friday, a federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the ban. But this is all going to continue, and it’s not clear the Supreme Court will choose to stop it.
As I’ve written before, this administration does not give a flying fig about antisemitism. Trump is cozy with white supremacists and straight-up Nazis, and even has a few on the payroll. Fifty of the people who bought their way into a private audience with Trump at his Virginia golf club on Thursday night own crypto assets with names only white supremacists could love, including many named for racist meme Pepe the Frog, one whose name is an unprintable attack on Jews, one named for the n-word, and a few with names that are variations on the word “swastika.” The guests were all thoroughly vetted, according to the White House.
Obviously, universities should be doing all they can to combat antisemitism and other bigotry. But Trump and his people are lying when they say their attacks on Harvard are about protecting Jewish students. Their real goals are to break independent academic inquiry, stifle the dissent universities foster, demonstrate their power to bring even the most storied institutions to heel, and remake Harvard into a place that reflects and disseminates their white Christian nationalist ideals.
They have been open about this: Project 2025 explicitly calls for dismantling higher ed as we know it, replacing rigorous academic inquiry with conservative orthodoxy and a constricted understanding of who and what is American. Vice President JD Vance has come out and said, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
What could be clearer?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put this playbook into action at New College in Florida, a small public liberal arts school at which he installed loyalists who shut down diversity programs, nixed courses he deemed too progressive, recruited student-athletes to change the makeup of the student body, and drove faculty away. He gutted the place.
But the true model for the administration’s attacks on Harvard can be found 4,000 miles away, in Hungary, where authoritarian prime minister and GOP demigod Victor Orbán knew that seizing absolute power meant destroying the universities.
“Universities are often a very big target for particularly right-wing populist governments because they tend to rail against the elites and the deep state,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton, and an expert on the rise and fall of democracies. “Their followers are very attracted by the rhetoric that elites are plotting against them, and that often connects to an assault on the universities.”
Scheppele ought to know. During the 1990s, she was a professor at Central European University in Budapest, which became a particular target of Orbán’s. He started with fiscal attacks, just as Trump has, weaponizing taxes and subsidies against CEU and other universities, which are largely publicly funded in Hungary. He cut faculty salaries, and when teachers continued to work for free, he introduced high tuitions that few students could afford. He gave scholarships to the children of supporters, stacking classes with students who pushed back at pro-democracy professors, who were reported to Orbán’s hand-picked higher-ups.
“Now, if you want a real university education in Hungary, you have to leave the country,” Scheppele said. “It was a pretty complete destruction of what had been one of the best systems in Eastern Europe.”
She does not think Trump will succeed as well as Orbán when it comes to destroying colleges like Harvard and Princeton, given they have other sources of funding. But he will do — is already doing — massive damage. Even if Harvard ultimately wins in the courts, funding cuts have curtailed research in the meantime, and the administration’s attacks on international students have created so much uncertainty that many will choose to study elsewhere to avoid risking deportation.
Maybe you figure Harvard doesn’t need your help, that your people never went there or never will, that a school as rich and storied as that one will be fine.
It won’t. And if the extremists who run the country get away with doing this to Harvard, they can destroy any school, kicking crucial pillars out from under our democracy.
This is an emergency. Could we please start acting like it?
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.
