Harvard in the Crosshairs

Untangling the government’s overreach and the University’s real failings

Last summer, I wrote a piece explaining why words can’t be violence, where I talked a little bit about my experience getting into fights when I was younger. I also mentioned that there was a period before that when I was a committed pacifist.

Here’s another story:

There used to be this kid on my street, Mikey, who was very good at angering people by running his mouth. One day, he finally pushed a kid named Carlos a little bit too far. Carlos was a tough kid, and he was going to beat up Mikey — pretty badly, I suspected. So even though I thought Mikey had done a lot to deserve it, I couldn’t let that happen. I stood in between them, telling Carlos I wouldn’t let him hit Mikey. So Carlos punched and kicked me instead. And even though I was bigger than him, my rule at the time was that I wouldn’t fight back. And after a punch and kick against someone he didn't really have an issue with, Carlos backed off.

I feel a little like this in defending Harvard, which has certainly done plenty to deserve the negative attention it’s been getting. That is why it truly earned its last place position in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings in 2024 and 2025.

So I feel like I'm standing in front of Harvard the way I stood in front of Mikey. I can understand all the reasons for disliking Harvard, but I feel like I’m stepping between them and the civil libertarian's biggest threat: the power of the federal government. And when the federal government is exceeding its power, or claiming new powers that it never previously had, we have to step in. We have to defend against it.

Are we at FIRE taking some punches and kicks over this? You bet. Since many Americans fully understand that Harvard does not have clean hands, they’ve been pretty mad at us for explaining, time and time again, why the government is exceeding its powers here. But that’s part of the job. After all, our unofficial motto is, “We’ll drive this bus into the wall rather than be unprincipled.”

Thankfully, I’ve got a good 23 years of experience with people hating me for culture-war reasons. So today, we’re going to take some time to explain the sometimes incredibly-hard-to-follow saga of Harvard versus the Trump administration.

Wait, what the hell is going on with Harvard now?

Don’t feel bad if you can’t keep up with the news. For the last three weeks, it’s felt like every eighteen hours (if that!), there was a new development in the ongoing saga of Harvard versus the Trump Administration.

The short version is that the federal government is trying to punish Harvard (either for anti-Semitism or groupthink — or so it claims), and it has chosen to do it in a way that is as troubling as it is unlawful. Its demands of Harvard would catastrophically undermine academic freedom, free speech, and institutional independence on campus. As a result I, along with FIRE, oppose those demands on principle.

As I mentioned above, Harvard is far from innocent. Perhaps more than any other institution (other than Columbia), it has cultivated an institutional monoculture — one that proved to be a fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism. The predictable consequences of that monoculture are also at the root of Harvard’s last-place finishes in our student rankings.

In addition, anti-Semitism is a real problem on college campuses — Harvard included. I have been adamant about that, and it is why I want religion explicitly added to the categories covered by Title VI. The government is not imagining the problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses, and it should take action.

Just not this action.

Many of the criticisms of FIRE here are, as they frequently are, industrial-grade whataboutism. It seems to be the go-to argument of the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress. (More about that in the paperback release of my and

Rikki Schlott

’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” with updated data and a new epilogue, out April 29!)

Yes, a billion times yes: Harvard has had issues, and still does. But the federal government dictating the hiring, admissions, and academic freedom of a college is no solution to either the problem of Harvard in particular or anti-Semitism on campus in general — and that’s exactly what it’s trying to do.

A New Cope: The Fed puts Harvard on notice

On April 3, Harvard received a letter from the federal government stating that the school “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

The letter was signed by representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services administration — three of an unknown number of agencies involved in a Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

The letter was similar to one sent to Columbia the prior month, which led to back-and-forth negotiations and Columbia eventually acceding to mutually agreed-upon changes. (Or, in layman’s terms, Columbia folded faster than someone holding baseball cards at a poker table.)

Reportedly, the task force expected for Harvard to do the same, and negotiations started.

On April 11, 2025, Harvard received another letter from the federal government demanding that it take a long list of steps as a condition of receiving continued federal funding. It’s really best to read the whole letter (it’s all of five pages), but here are some back-of-the-matchbook highlights of the government’s demands:

• Hire a third party to audit certain programs, identify faculty members who contributed to anti-Semitism on campus, and sanction them “within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment”;

• “Carry out meaningful discipline” for conduct violations (presumably, those related to Title VI and campus protests) since 2023;

• Implement merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, to be audited by a third party acceptable to the task force;

• Immediately report any conduct violation by an international student to the federal government (on top of providing ongoing information to the Department of Homeland Security);

• Shutter all DEI programs and offices;

• Ban masks;

• Reform governance to, among other things, “reduc[e] the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”; and

• Ensure through a series of audits, hires, and transfers that “each department, field, or teaching unit [is] individually viewpoint diverse.”

The task force’s letter makes demands that have never been made by the federal government to any institution in the country — ever — probably because they would gut the independence of our truth-seekers and forever leave them even more subject to political whiplash after every election.

FIRE’s Executive Vice President

Nico Perrino

summarized the depth of what the task force is seeking with an excellent post on X:

The feds are essentially demanding Harvard become a vassal institution.

[…]

Not only do these demands ignore the process for adjudicating alleged Title VI violations, they are fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.

The feds cannot condition federal funding on a private university giving up its First Amendment rights.

This is big government “conservatism,” plain and simple.

Later, The New York Times reported that the administration’s demand letter had been sent prematurely, citing three sources who gave different accounts as to what was supposed to have happened. Either the letter was meant to have been circulated to the other task force members, or it was supposed to have been circulated to White House staffers for feedback — but where it wasn’t supposed to be sent, according to the Times’ sources, was Harvard.

I’m flabbergasted by this part of the story — both that the letter was sent in error, and that sources can’t even agree on where it was supposed to have been sent. What exactly is the process here? Keep circulating potential sanctions about Harvard until someone accidentally adds its lawyer to a Signal chat?

Episode II: Harvard Strikes Back

On April 14, 2025, Harvard responded by rejecting the government’s demands, both through a letter from its attorneys and a statement from Harvard President Alan Garber.

Later that day, the government’s joint task force announced it was freezing $2.2 billion in grants to, and $60 million in contracts with, Harvard.

FIRE made a statement supporting Harvard’s position:

The ostensible justification for these demands stems from the government’s belief that Harvard has allowed for a hostile environment for Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But federal law also dictates specific procedures for adjudicating alleged noncompliance — procedures the government circumvented here.

If allowed to stand, the government could revoke federal funding from any institution regardless of the merit of the government’s allegations. This processless approach is a loaded gun for partisan administrations to target institutions and individuals that dissent from administration policies and priorities.

Mistake or not, the government has tripled down on the letter in the days since Harvard rejected its demands. News reports indicate it is looking to freeze an additional $1 billion in funding, review Harvard’s donations from foreign sources, limit access to student visas, and potentially even eliminate Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

On Monday, April 21, Harvard filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that the government’s attempt to “coerce and control” the school violates the institution’s rights and academic freedom.

And they’re absolutely right.

Why the government’s attacks on Harvard are unconstitutional

There are so many things wrong with the government’s actions in the last month that mentioning any one risks failing to adequately impart the wrongness of the others. I’d like to break this down into three specific points:

1. The government is ignoring established procedures for its proposed sanctions.

To the extent the administration is seeking to sanction Harvard because of anti-Semitism on its campus, Title VI is the law that has been used to evaluate such complaints.

Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in federally funded programs — but as the anti-Semitism on campus has been deeply tied to opposition to Israel, Title VI has been the go-to law to cite. (As mentioned above, in my letter to Trump on the day of his second inauguration, FIRE and I called on his administration to support amending Title VI to explicitly mention religion as one of the categories it covers.)

But there are specific procedures for enforcing Title VI, and the government bypassed them when it started to withhold funding.

What Title VI requires first is an investigation. Then, assuming the investigation finds evidence of discrimination within a funded program, the Department of Education communicates its findings to the school. The Department then attempts to work cooperatively with the school to make changes that will bring the program back into compliance, under a jointly crafted “resolution agreement.”

If that agreement can’t be reached or is breached, the government sends another letter notifying the school of the alleged violation and offering an administrative hearing for the school to defend itself.

If the school declines that hearing, or if the hearing upholds the findings of the government, the Department of Education reports that to Congress. It also provides 30 days’ notice before actually terminating the funds.

Another threat from the administration is that it plans to review foreign donations. There’s a procedure for that, too (at least, a procedure for what must be reported, and sanctions for when it isn’t). Revoking tax-exempt status? There’s a procedure for that. De-certification process for a school eligible for student visas? You guessed it: procedure.

In other words, if the federal government wrote the Bible, Genesis 1:3 would read, “And God said, ‘Let there be a Request for Proposals in order for there to be light, to be followed by a six-month comment period.” And since it’s in the Good Book, not abiding by them is wrong.

Critics on X argue the funding cuts are justified by Harvard’s anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination during the decades before racial preferences in admissions were struck down (in a case involving — who else? — Harvard) in 2023. But that, too, would be determined under the Title VI process. And procedure is important. Circumventing it increases the risk of error, reduces the buy-in from stakeholders, and in many cases, is unlawful. Also, the argument that the procedures are broken or poorly conducted doesn’t justify avoiding them. Rather, it’s an argument for properly administering those procedures.

2. Some of what the government seeks to do is beyond its lawful authority, even as part of proposed sanctions.

There is actually precedent for attempting to use an enforcement letter to create reforms that a law could not accomplish — it just isn’t helpful precedent for the government.

FIRE saw the prior Obama and Biden administrations try to do something very similar to what Trump’s is attempting:

The federal government weaponized Title IX to erode campus due process and free speech protections. The fight over the Obama/Biden rules lasted over a decade, and has been largely resolved (for now) in court and with President Trump’s Department of Education promulgating federal rules that protect free speech and due process rights in campus sexual misconduct investigations.

That second link provides a lot of detail about a particularly telling antecedent: A federal task force (then, the Departments of Justice and Education) sent a letter making unconstitutional demands to a college to close an investigation into violations of a civil rights statute (then, Title IX).

FIRE’s coalition letter, which we sent to that task force, explains more. (Please send it to the next person who wants to argue that FIRE didn’t hold the Obama or Biden administrations to the same standard it’s asking from the Trump administration. Where was FIRE when Obama tried to impose unconstitutional rules through enforcement letters? The same place we are now: On the front lines.)

One difference, however, is that the college in question, the University of Montana, didn’t reject the government’s demands. It complied. Although, to be fair, the University of Montana isn’t an independently wealthy private institution like Harvard.

Another thing that differentiates the Harvard letter from prior attempts is that, between the time of the letter to the University of Montana and the letter to Harvard, the Supreme Court decided a case that should make clear the government’s demands of Harvard overstep their bounds.

In NRA v. Vullo, a New York state official told banks and insurance companies that they shouldn’t work with the National Rifle Association. As was to be expected, the gun rights group sued. A unanimous Supreme Court found that “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.” In Vullo, that meant that if the government could not lawfully bar banks and insurance companies from working with the NRA, it could not intimidate them until they “chose” not to do so.

The Harvard demand letter is full of things the government cannot do directly — such as close offices, interfere with Harvard’s disciplinary processes, and require a private nonprofit be “viewpoint diverse.” Accordingly, under Vullo, it cannot lawfully compel those ends indirectly, either.

3. The federal government attempting a hostile takeover of a private institution is a bad idea.

A number of the proposed “remedies” in the government’s April 11 letter involve giving the federal government a role in approving changes to hiring, admissions, departmental viewpoint diversity, and discipline. As you’ll see, I have (and have had) concerns about how Harvard does all of these things. But I also have no confidence the federal government is any better suited to the task.

If the government wants heightened oversight of college programs, it can accomplish that by making it a condition of new funding, and letting colleges decide freely whether to accept that condition or walk away. What it can’t do is provide funding, then turn around and say, “You know how there are these conditions that are tied to processes we have to follow? We’re going to just ignore the processes and impose the conditions, and also demand the following dozen things that dramatically exceed what we agreed upon.”

The former is a deal; the latter is a heist.

The government could impose some of these rules by revitalizing the oversight for accrediting institutions in a way that requires them to seriously weight free expression and non-discrimination when they accredit schools and programs. But that should be done systematically, for everyone, as a use of government power. It shouldn’t be done as a punishment meted out by abusing that power.

Harvard is a monoculture that has discriminated against outgroups and not responded effectively to anti-Semitism on campus.

Before I get into this next bit, I want to be crystal clear: Harvard should win its lawsuit. It filed an excellent complaint that makes many important points. One that I found particularly striking was the list of research funding being suspended by the government, which includes research into infectious diseases, neurology, toxins, microbiomes, military advancements, and cancer.

As I said on X, “nuking U.S. research to bring them to heel is not just wrong, it’s shooting ourselves in the foot.” (I’ll go out on a limb here and say we should never be so upset with an institution that we stop trying to cure cancer. If we ever get that upset, we don’t need institutional due process, we need serious therapy.)

Nothing I say in this section justifies the actions taken by the federal government — which are at various times wrong, unlawful, unconstitutional, bad for academic freedom, and bad for free speech culture. Having said that, the frustration that led the federal government into overstepping its bounds here is justified.

I’ll try to keep this brief, because this could easily occupy dozens of posts:

Harvard occupies an outsized place in our collective imagination because, far more than any other institution, it is and has been the source of our presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, Joint Chiefs, Fortune 500 CEOs, and other figures that impact our daily lives. It’s why we imagined it was the crucible for feminist icon Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde,” and why it was unfortunately imagined as the site of Joe Pesci and Brendan Fraser’s uniquely awful “With Honors.” (Now that I think of that movie, maybe Harvard has suffered enough.)

The point being: Anyone who isn’t at least somewhat interested in what happens at Harvard really doesn’t understand how much the culture there impacts what happens in the wider world.

That’s power, prestige, and influence.

This gives the public good reason to be concerned with the possibility that Harvard no longer has enough intellectual diversity to pursue truth. From the outset, it seems clear the government task force views the anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus as a symptom of what it calls “institutional capture”:

[A]n investment is not an entitlement. It depends on Harvard upholding federal civil rights laws, and it only makes sense if Harvard fosters the kind of environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor, both of which are antithetical to ideological capture.

Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.

Institutional capture is a fair term. We could also call it monoculture, groupthink, or ideological homogeneity. Harvard has an ideological homogeneity problem. In our 2024 Faculty Survey, 6% of respondents at Harvard identified as conservative. The Harvard Crimson’s 2023 survey only found 2.5% who identified as such, with more than three-quarters identifying as liberal.

And that problem is genuinely connected to campus anti-Semitism. Intersectionality, the ideology most popular on these captive campuses, fosters and socially rewards anti-Semitism. The trope that Jews run the world found its happiest home in the ideology that says right and wrong can be determined by measuring the aggregate power held by people who share certain demographics.

While of course this is emblematic of a larger issue on campuses across the country, the problematic culture on Harvard’s campus in particular is reflected in responses to our campus surveys. Nationally, 55% of students said it would be difficult to have an open and honest conversation about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. At Harvard, it’s 67%. Among faculty nationwide, according to our 2024 Faculty Survey, 70% have a hard time talking openly and honestly about the conflict. At Harvard, it’s 84%.

Again, we could be at this all day. We could talk about Harvard’s 2011 civility pledge, which made “kindness” co-equal to truth. Or Harvard’s abandoned 2016 attempt to punish the final clubs for being single-gender — a reflection of a monoculture that felt so strongly about gender opportunity that it was willing to treat people differently based on their gender, and which only the Supreme Court’s Bostock case brought to an end. Or professor Roland Fryer, suspended in 2019 by future President Claudine Gay after an opaque Title IX investigation that followed his research on police violence. Or law professor Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson, the first black faculty deans in Harvard history, who were removed in 2019 after Sullivan, a defense attorney, agreed to defend Harvey Weinstein. Or professor Carole Hooven, driven out of her job in 2023 for violating the monocultural faith by suggesting the terms “man” and “woman” are useful in discussions about biology.

Harvard has had a real problem with groupthink — one that feeds anti-Semitism — and despite a few promising moves, such as adopting institutional neutrality, it has only started to deal with that problem. It would be dishonest to pretend the federal government just woke up one day and decided to target Harvard for no reason.

However, as I mentioned earlier, the government’s ham-fisted attempt to reshape and constructively take over the school does not solve those issues either.

And while Harvard is, as we explained, disproportionately prominent among its peers, its peers need reform, too. Colleges across the country are unsustainably expensive, stuffed with extraneous administrative hires, turning a blind eye to the replication crisis in the sciences, and operating under the same monoculture.

If we want this reform to stick and be successful in turning higher ed back toward the pursuit of truth, it needs to be done systematically. We can’t federalize all the schools. And even if we could, we shouldn’t. What about history suggests to anyone that the federal government is the go-to place for fixes to excess bureaucracy and unsustainable spending?

FIRE stands for principles, and always will

There are two main reactions I’ve seen on X to all of this. One is, “Good, Harvard deserves it.” The other is, “Why is FIRE wasting its time sticking up for a multi-billion dollar corporation?”

The answer to both is the same. FIRE stands for free expression, of which academic freedom is a critical component. It also presupposes some degree of autonomy. We are defending that autonomy, to the extent it exists at Harvard. Even if it could be legally justified, functionally nationalizing a private university is an extraordinary step, and merits extraordinary caution and an extraordinary process.

As the Supreme Court explained in Sweezy v. New Hampshire:

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. . . . Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.

Could Harvard still be found to have violated Title VI, and possibly other laws, for its failure to stop anti-Semitism or their affirmative action efforts? Of course. But it is still entitled to due process. The government cannot freeze funding to impose punitive sanctions on an institution without determining, through the appropriate processes, that those punishments are warranted.

The threat to withdraw Harvard’s tax-exempt status is another reason why FIRE (also a tax-exempt organization) is particularly concerned. FIRE is in court with President Trump right now. His administration has targeted law firms that opposed him on any number of things. If the White House believes it has the extraordinary power to direct the removal of tax-exempt status, that probably wouldn’t be a death sentence for Harvard. But for, I don’t know, say, a scrappy First Amendment organization without $58 billion, for example, it just might. (This is maybe a good time to say that you can send your tax-exempt donations to FIRE and help us keep fighting the good fight.)

Yes, Harvard’s got a long way to go before it can credibly claim to be a bastion of free expression. But that doesn’t make it a fair target for extralegal government strong-arming. FIRE defends free speech and due process, even for schools that flunk our College Free Speech Rankings. Why? Because these principles aren’t about popularity. They're about protecting everyone from the whims of whoever holds power.

It isn’t any more complicated than that, and it shouldn’t be.

Special thanks to ERI co-conspirator

Adam Goldstein

for help in assembling this post!

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

As mentioned above, the paperback edition of my and

Rikki Schlott

’s book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” is out April 29!

This new version contains a brand new epilogue bringing us up to date since the original publication back in 2023. It also includes commentary on FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, which is invaluable if you’re trying to keep on top of the chaos we’ve been living in lately.

Seriously: If you want to know how we ended up here, and want a full accounting of the many sins of higher education in particular, “Canceling” is the place to look. As my friend and FIRE Advisory Council member Steven Pinker put it, “Canceling” is “A powerful and prescient book that is more relevant than ever.”