Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, is the oldest college in the United States and one of its most prestigious. Its graduates may be found in all three branches of the national government, and its endowment of just over $50 billion is the world’s largest for such a college or university.
In contrast to many state colleges and universities, Harvard is a private institution. It includes both undergraduate and graduate students from throughout the United States and the world and has outstanding law and medical schools. Its scholars have been quite successful in securing federally supported grants.
Trump’s criticisms of Harvard
The Trump Administration has criticized Harvard for fostering a hostile environment for Jewish students in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attacks from Gaza in Israel on October 7, 2023, and for failing to deal adequately with student protests. It further chided Harvard for being elitist and for fostering diversity, equity and exclusion policies, which it considers to be racially discriminatory.
Although Harvard made some changes to remedy perceived concerns among Jewish students, it put up greater resistance than some other Ivy League universities to the Trump Administration attempts to alter its curriculum, make the staff and student body more ideologically diverse, and exert influence over hiring and firing policies.
Trump’s attempts to influence the university
The Trump Administration in turn sought to cut off some $2 billion in grant funding to the university, to deny new grants to the institution and to direct such funds to trade school instead, and to deny visas to foreign students hoping to enroll in or continue attending the university. Trump has also threatened to work for legislation that would tax Harvard’s large endowment.
Harvard has, in turn, challenged Trump’s actions as unconstitutional. A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction against attempts to keep international students from enrolling. Harvard has also petitioned a federal court for a summary judgment declaring that Trump’s attempts to cut off its federal funding are unconstitutional.
In a lengthy supplemental brief filed on June 2, 2025, Harvard pointed out that it was a private institution with the right to decide its policies and charged that Trump’s actions were in response to its exercise of First Amendment free expression rights. Harvard noted that Trump’s actions were “unconstitutional retaliation against Harvard for exercising its First Amendment rights to decide what to teach, to express certain views, and to petition the courts to defend itself.” Quoting from two prior Supreme Court decisions, Harvard highlighted that the research activities that the government was attempting to cut, many of which dealt with the treatment of diseases, were not specifically related to the government’s objectives and therefore imposed “unconstitutional conditions that seek to ‘interfere with private actors’ speech to advance [the Government’s] own vision of ideological balance,” and ‘to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech.
Harvard further argued that the government had not followed established procedures that Congress had established for terminating such aid, and that such cuts could have dire consequences for future research and for American competitiveness, especially in the areas of science and medicine.
Concerns and possible consequences of Trump pressure on Harvard
Although Trump has not limited his ire to Harvard (Columbia University is another that has been in his sites), he appears to be trying to make an example of it, in a manner that might exert a “chilling effect” on similar institutions. His efforts appear to be part of a larger effort to gain control of the nation’s key cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, and key law firms as well as his charge that news organizations that have not supported him have spread what Trump has called “fake news.”
Although some voters appear to enjoy seeing Trump threaten an elite institution, Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who had not been part of its legal effort, describes Trump’s efforts and an “overall assault on our democratic values and institutions.” He observed that “the institutions that he likes to go after are places like universities, institutions like the press and the courts, which are institutions that are all devoted to independent judgment and independent thinking. We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts.” Feldman observed that “the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else.” (Gross 2025).
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.