I don’t expect my grandkids to attend Harvard University. After all, I didn’t get in when I applied a half-century ago. Even though I’m now president of an elite college myself, I’ve enjoyed making fun of the fancy school in Cambridge whenever possible. “They think they’re so great,” is an attitude I’ve shared with many Americans whether the “they” referred to graduates of our nation’s oldest university or some other privileged group to which we don’t belong.
But now, as America’s president targets Harvard with relentless vindictiveness, I’m seeing the school in a different light. As the White House insists on loyalty and subservience from all sectors of civil society, I find myself rooting for Harvard — and so should you, even if you share conservative priorities on other matters.
When I was growing up, “Follow the leader” was just a children’s game in which players would mimic whoever was in charge no matter what silliness they indulged in. When I was a little older, I remember watching old newsreels of German and Italian adults in the 1930s and 40s marching in step, but my parents assured me that that would never happen here. As an American, they told me, I would never have to follow the leader. I could love my country without being subservient to those in power. And that’s what I want for my grandchildren: to thrive in America without having to express loyalty to oligarchs and government officials.
The logic of the current administration is that since many schools receive federal funding, they too are now expected to march in step. But countless groups receive financial support from Washington — from soybean farmers to computer chip manufacturers, from rural hospital workers to coal miners — and that funding has not, until now, depended on conformity with the ideology of those in power. So why would the Trump administration now demand exactly that from universities like Harvard?
The answer is that the federal government’s current assault on higher education is meant to erode the independence of colleges and universities, even though the excellence of this sector depends on that very independence. Although the president claims he is attacking “woke,” liberal values, he and his administration are attacking core conservative values as well.
The government’s specific accusations are absurd on their face. Jim Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, led a school where the fastest growing subjects were Computer Science and Data science, but he was targeted for leading an institution that was dominated, according to the government, by a bunch of leftist lunatics. Northwestern University and Cornell University have had grants suspended mostly from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services totaling more than $1.5 billion because of suspected civil rights violations. At Harvard, where the university president and several leading deans identify as Jews, the school is accused by the White House of deliberate indifference to victims of antisemitism. The funding threats to scientific research, especially in medicine, are astronomical.
As an American Jew, I know that antisemitism is real, of course, and it has gotten worse in this country. But the administration’s anti-antisemitism is a sham. The president and his minions have a long history of tolerating the most vile Jew hatred, whether being mealy mouthed about the extremists marching in Charlottesville or Nick Fuentes dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Elon Musk’s Grok AI may have been praising Nazis last week, but this week the Department of Defense announced it was one of its bot-bros for government work.
The truth is that the Trump administration’s anti-antisemitism is a flimsy cover for their insistence on ideological conformity, particularly from institutions whose legitimacy has never depended in the past on expressions of loyalty to the leader.
Another pretense Trump administration officials have used is enforcing the Supreme Court’s decision last year to end race-conscious admissions. The White House does indeed have the authority to move away from programs that resemble affirmative action. Rejecting “reverse discrimination,” the government can forbid attempts to deal with historical patterns of discrimination through preferences meant to counteract those patterns. Elections have consequences, and the new civil rights regime understands discrimination through a lens of individual fairness outside of a historical or social context. I don’t agree with this approach, but I obey it as the current law of the land.
The federal government also has the authority to insist that no one is discriminated against because of their political beliefs or protected speech. The political biases in some departments at some universities are real, and leaders of colleges and universities should be encouraged to do more to ensure that conservatives, for example, are not discriminated against in admissions or hiring decisions.
But the recent moves against universities go far beyond reinterpretations of civil rights statutes. This White House wants to ensure that universities, like big law firms, media outlets and foundations, show their allegiance to those currently in charge. The mere independence of these organizations is seen as a threat to the concentration of power in the hands of the president.
You don’t have to be a progressive to worry about this assault on some of these key institutions of civil society. The president’s supporters themselves rail against entrenched elites and a deep state that lords it over ordinary citizens.
Indeed, at the core of modern conservative thought is the notion that a country needs “countervailing forces” that push back against the centralization of state power. This was fundamental to Baron de Montesquieu writing about law in the first half of the 18th century, as it was for Edmund Burke writing about political culture in its second half. For the French philosopher, a healthy society depended on the freedoms that are preserved in local and regional traditions. Burke argued that we learned about freedom from what he called the “little platoons” in our communities — those local associations that nurtured us without the intrusion of a central government. We learn about belonging as we develop allegiances to family, work associations, religious congregations. Schools are such associations, groups that come together for the purposes of learning and inquiry, communities that foster practices of freedom without being directed by a central power.
Alexis de Tocqueville, another thinker beloved by many conservatives, underscored this dimension of American democracy when he wrote in the mid 1800s that “without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.” The spirit of freedom is built on the associations that develop without dictates from central government, and it guides educational institutions. “The art of associating together must … be learned,” Tocqueville wrote. “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.”
Colleges and universities in this country have long cultivated this subtle “science of association,” and that’s why it is so vital for all Americans to resist the current administration’s efforts to force public and private schools to conform to the president’s ideological preferences. It’s not that the ecosystem of higher education is perfect — I know that firsthand. But neither are other institutions core to our nation’s liberty, including churches and synagogues, scout troops and public libraries.
Whatever the flaws of universities and other institutions, massive pressure from the executive branch cannot improve this vital part of our economy and culture; it can only impose conformity, something conservatives have long opposed. Nothing good will come from forcing schools as different as Hillsdale and Harvard, the University of Texas and the University of Virginia to conform to the president’s image — any president’s image — of what higher education should be.
Chances are that when my little grandkids are old enough to go to college, if they apply to Harvard, they won’t get in. (Even though I can assure you they are absolutely perfect!) That’s okay, because if there are still great independent universities to apply to, that will mean that we were successful in fighting back against the tyrannical assault currently underway. It will mean that they can enjoy the freedoms that are my birthright and theirs.
