Donors appeared to distance themselves amid the turbulence, with the university’s endowment decreasing by 34 per cent last year. High-profile supporters, notably hedge fund billionaires Bill Ackman and Ken Griffin, stepped back, citing the institution’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus as their reason for doing so. (It remains the world’s wealthiest university, with an endowment fund of some $50bn. In 2024, its operating budget was $6.4bn.)
Ultimately, Trump’s supporters see the battle over Harvard as essential to winning the higher education cultural war. “If Trump manages to break Harvard, he breaks the higher education system, which needs to happen as it requires fixing” says Melissa Rein Lively, CEO of ‘Anti-Woke” communications firm America First PR. “It makes sense to start with Harvard, the school with the biggest endowment and a bastion of intellectual rot.
“Harvard should be building entrepreneurs but instead they’ve allowed anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism to proliferate on campus. I hire people all the time but if I got a Harvard resume, I would probably throw it in the trash because people there are not prepared for the real world,” she adds. “Institutions like Harvard have basically become bloated intellectual hedge funds that have become untouchable. That’s not how the college experience should be.”
Not ideal, but nothing new
Others reject the idea that the White House’s interventions are a radical departure from the past.
Conservative political historian Harvey Mansfield, 93, who was Professor of Government at Harvard between 1962 and 2023, argues federal interference of this kind is far from ideal, but nothing new.
“A liberal state has no business interfering with a liberal society. Its task is to protect rights, not exercise them. But in America there is a great precedent for interference [such as] in the civil rights movement,” he says.
“The Trump administration regards the elite universities as enemies and wants to reduce their influence… How did ‘woke’ take over the universities? Not by consent but by decree.” The White House, Mansfield argues, is “recapturing them [universities] for what they should be – apolitical.”
White House education source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the government was not seeking to take over higher education, but rather to end “cancel culture” and discrimination on campus.
“The reaction has been predictably hysterical, many on the left evidently graduated with degrees in delusion,” the source told the Telegraph. “The measures are designed to make campuses safer environments for students of all religions and political ideologies and uphold intellectual honesty and freedom of speech.
“We’re ending cancel culture and discriminatory hiring practices under the false notion of equality. It’s not about dictating to universities what they should teach and we’re not taking away anybody’s freedom.”
‘Unprecedented and existential’
Most academics take a very different view, however, arguing the government’s threats to withdraw federal funding from universities unless they meet the White House’s demands are authoritarian.
“The threat is unprecedented, and it’s also existential,” says Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Of course the federal government has influenced and regulated higher education in myriad ways since World War II – consider the Title IX rules developed under Obama and [Joe] Biden around sexual assault adjudications, for example. But nobody suggested cutting millions or billions of dollars from schools that failed to comply and nobody threatened interference with the ‘academic’ mission of the school.”
Even some of those who wish to see more intellectual diversity at Harvard and other top universities feel uneasy about Trump’s campaign.
“Some of their arguments I have sympathy for, but the White House trying to exercise more power is dangerous and to me a lot of what Donald Trump is doing is trying to keep himself at the centre of attention,” says Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and former adviser to president George W Bush. “I believe in limited government and what the Trump administration is doing is anything but that. Change needs to come from within.”
Fundraising opportunity
Despite the opposition, it appears the Trump administration is bent on continuing to pressure America’s elite centres of learning to change.
Isaac Kamola, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom with the American Association of University Professors, says resistance will prove futile unless establishments join forces.
“This cannot be about Harvard saving Harvard or Columbia saving Columbia… Harvard will not save us but a strong alliance of faculty, students and academic institutions can,” he says, accusing the White House of pumping out “propaganda” on the state of higher education.
“The fever dream that Trump, [JD] Vance, [Ron] De Santis and right-wing activists and MAGA ideologues have created is scary. They have distorted what takes place on college campuses, told lies about what we do in the classroom and are using these distortions to make laws and take executive actions that transform higher education into their own political mouthpieces.”
