Long ago, when Harvard College was an all-male institution, it was light-heartedly suggested that “You can always tell a Harvard Man—but you can’t tell him much.” Harvard College incorporated the all-female Radcliffe, and the undergraduate school now scrupulously seeks male and female parity in admissions. Harvard has had two women as its president, and its august governing corporation is headed by a woman, but even so, the ability to tell anything to Harvard’s rulers apparently remains low.

Or so it would seem from Harvard’s response to the Trump administration’s attempt to get Harvard to reevaluate some of its policies. Press reports indicate that Harvard receives about $9 billion in federal funding, each year (most of it going to the University’s Hospitals and Medical Schools). This sum represents a bit less than 20 percent of Harvard’s staggering endowment, and such an investment would seem to give the federal government some interest, and perhaps some say in how Harvard operates.

Apparently not. In the view of the Trump administration, Harvard has failed to protect the civil rights of its Jewish students and has failed to comply with the law (as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court) regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Harvard suffered a setback when the Court decided in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, (2023) that Harvard’s admissions unconstitutionally applied racial preferences.

Harvard’s faculty is not without some notable conservatives, but they are in the distinct minority, and to this alum who recently attended his 50^th college reunion, it does appear that the dominant ethos in Cambridge would hardly appeal to the average Donald Trump supporter.

At Harvard, and at the American academy generally, among most students and faculty, the dominant set of beliefs is that the United States is beset by systemic racism, that ours is an unjust “settler society,” that our governing institutions and our very culture are riddled with patriarchy, that capitalism inevitably and wrongly crushes the proletariat, that law, instead of being neutral, is the tool of the rich and privileged, and, finally, that Republicans, in particular, cannot be trusted.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the Trump administration wrote Harvard a letter, on April 11, proposing that if Harvard sought to keep its federal funding, it needed to agree to certain reformative steps designed both to reduce the incidence of antisemitism, and remove DEI from admissions and hiring decisions.

Undoubtedly, however, the most galling part of the letter from Harvard’s point of view was the part that said, “By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which should satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” The price of continued federal support, in other words, is ending the hegemony of “woke” ideology and practice at Harvard.

Some universities, most notably Columbia, have opted to reach some kind of an accommodation with the administration, as yet, Harvard has not. Three days after the government’s letter to Harvard, it retained two high-powered attorneys, William A. Burck (A.B. Harvard, J.D. Yale) and Robert K. Hur (A.B. Harvard, J.D. Stanford) who wrote a fiery letter stating that “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

The Trump administration is not, of course, proposing a takeover of Harvard, but the lawyers’ bombast was certainly an indication that Harvard believes the federal government has no business telling Harvard what to do. In his characteristically blunt manner, President Trump proceeded to comment on his Truth Social account two days later that:

Everyone knows that Harvard has ‘lost its way.’ . . . Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called ‘future leaders.’ . . . Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges. Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.

Someone in the Trump administration, if not the president himself, has precisely fingered the crucial pedagogical issue—can a once great university retain its reputation if it surrenders to an ideology divorced from reality and rejected by most of the American people?

Harvard is a great national asset, and one can only hope that cooler heads will prevail in Cambridge and in Washington. We may hope that an accommodation can be reached which is pleasing both to those who treasure academic freedom and those who seek real diversity (of viewpoint, not ethnicity). Either that, or Harvard, like Hillsdale, may need to learn to survive without federal funding.