Nicolaus Czarnecki/Sipa USA via AP Images
A supporter backing Harvard University is seen outside the campus during the university’s 374th commencement on May 29, 2025.
Winston Churchill is said to have observed that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else. That could be said of Harvard’s president Alan Garber, who kept trying to appease President Trump until he finally appreciated that appeasement only invited more extreme demands. So Garber became something of a hero, in spite of himself.
At Harvard’s commencement on May 29, the university managed a rare moment of unity. Garber did not mention Trump by name, but declared that “absolute certainty and willful ignorance are two sides of the same coin—a coin with no value but costs beyond measure.”
Garber was booed last year for denying degrees to 13 pro-Palestinian demonstrators. This time, he was interrupted by ovations.
On Alumni Day a week later, stickers proclaiming “Crimson Courage” were everywhere. The keynote speaker, surgeon and author Atul Gawande, took a sharper tone. “The past five months, I’ve had the misfortune to have a front row seat as the current regime has moved to weaken and even outright dismantle core foundations of humanitarian assistance, science, public health, law, and higher education,” he said. Gawande served as an assistant administrator for global health in the U.S. Agency for International Development until January.
Trump seems determined not just to punish America’s oldest, richest, and most celebrated university, but to destroy it. His weapons include shutting down all federal research funds to the university and its affiliates, trying to deny Harvard access to all foreign students, challenging its tax exemption, taxing its endowment income, blocking federal student aid, and effectively trying to take the university into receivership on grounds of bogus antisemitism.
This set of moves follows the playbook of Viktor Orbán, who used all the power of the Hungarian state to destroy the Central European University, a center of free inquiry in Budapest for the entire former Soviet bloc. Instead, the university relocated most of its operations to Vienna. Harvard is unlikely to relocate.
Most of the Trump administration’s assaults are now being challenged in court. Harvard has urged its foreign students to stay put. If they leave the country, they will probably not be allowed back. On June 6, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, an Obama appointee, issued a temporary block against Trump’s executive order banning foreign students for Harvard, and this is likely to be upheld by the higher courts.
Trump seems determined not just to punish America’s oldest, richest, and most celebrated university, but to destroy it.
A president also lacks the authority to alter the tax status of any entity by executive fiat. The courts would probably also be skeptical of any effort to take away nonprofit status from educational institutions, since they are expressly made eligible in the IRS code, especially ones singled out for political retribution.
Where Trump does have the power to hurt Harvard is in the pocketbook. The Republican mega-bill includes provisions to increase taxes on university endowments, via a tiered system with a top rate of 21 percent, replacing the current flat 1.4 percent tax. Harvard’s endowment income provides about one-third of its operating budget. A tax rate of 21 percent on Harvard’s endowment income of roughly $2.4 billion would cost the university about half a billion dollars.
Six agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Education, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, have pulled or frozen grants to Harvard and its research partners, totaling nearly $4 billion. (On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, accused the Trump administration of racial discrimination and ordered the National Institutes of Health to reinstate dozens of grants terminated for supposed DEI sins, declaring the terminations “illegal and void.” This was not specifically directed at Harvard.)
As Gawande pointed out in his address, the cost of the lost research grants is not just to Harvard but to the scientific enterprise generally. Assuming that Trump eventually goes and future administrations restore the disabling cuts to scientific and biomedical research, Harvard will survive, though it is likely to be diminished for years if not decades. Yet with its endowment of over $50 billion, Harvard is far better defended than most of higher education.
TRUMP’S ASSAULT ON HARVARD and on university-based research generally comes at a time when higher education is experiencing an overdue shakeout from other causes. As colleges and universities increasingly operated like for-profit businesses, maximizing tuition income, gaming the U.S. News rankings, and relying on student debt to pay the freight, they overexpanded and began to price themselves out of the market.
Tuition-paying foreign students, especially from China, plus federal research grants, delayed the reckoning by providing subsidy. Now, Trump is restricting both. This coincides with a drop in college enrollment for next fall that is one part the result of the baby bust that occurred 18 years ago in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse and Great Recession, and one part more young people deciding that massive debt to get a college degree just isn’t worth it as salaries and career opportunities stagnate.
The model of 18-year-olds deferring entry into the job market in order to take a four-year break to continue their education meant one thing when college was affordable and only one person in four went to college. It means something else entirely when more than half of high school grads go to college, and colleges have inflated tuition with bloated administrations and market-like schemes to maximize their incomes.
About 80 nonprofit and public colleges and universities have closed or merged since 2020. At least 40 have closed outright. Many others are cutting budgets and laying off faculty. Clark University, a well-respected small university in Worcester, Massachusetts, has experienced several years of declining enrollments, and is closing entire departments and will reduce its faculty by 30 percent.
For the system as a whole, we are likely to see more remote online learning, more vocation-specific training programs and credentials, and relatively fewer young people having the traditional four-year experience. Some of this was inevitable. It will now become more chaotic and brutal.
That experience is likely to revert to what it was before the great expansion of colleges and universities—a privilege for elites, at places like Harvard. If we value college not just as a training ground for vocations, but as broad education in the liberal arts and for an informed citizenry, this is a real loss. On the other hand, higher-education leaders partly brought this on themselves.
What they did not bring on themselves was Donald Trump. The partnership between the great research universities and the agencies that Trump is now defunding, such as NIH and NSF, made the U.S. a world leader. Long before Joe Biden began to reinvent industrial policy, this was America’s de facto industrial policy, and it worked.
In order to get rid of universities as centers of liberal inquiry and truth-telling, Trump would destroy their scientific leadership. The shakeout in higher education would have been a serious challenge even without Trump’s ill-timed assault. But under a normal administration, the Department of Education would have helped plan and ease the transition. Now we will lose one more asset that made America great.
