The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Over the last several months, President Trump has acted to withhold federal funds from a raft of elite universities: Harvard ($2.26 billion), Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Princeton ($210 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million). His complaint is the “abject failure of these institutions to deal with antisemitism on campus, but the president has also demanded a broader crackdown on DEI compulsions and an expansion of viewpoint diversity among predominantly progressive faculty.”

How should we think about this rather unprecedented act on the part of the president?  As the Wall Street Journal editorially observed, “Few Americans will shed tears for the Cambridge crowd, but there are good reasons to oppose this unprecedented attempt by government to micromanage a private university.  Stipulate that the feds have a duty to enforce civil-rights laws, and Harvard failed to protect Jewish students during anti-Israel protests. But the university agreed to strengthen protections for Jewish students in a legal settlement with Students Against Antisemitism, which praised it for ‘implementing effective long-term changes.’  The Trump Administration nonetheless demanded . . .  that Harvard accede to what is effectively a federal receivership under threat of losing $9 billion. Some of the demands are within the government’s civil-rights purview, such as requiring Harvard to discipline students who violate its discrimination policies. It also wants Harvard to ‘shutter all diversity, equity and inclusion’ programs, under ‘whatever name,’ that violate federal law.”

First, there are some legal and important concerns with what the president has threatened to do here.  The Administration “runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce ‘governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.’ It also orders the school to review ‘all existing and prospective faculty . . . for plagiarism’ and ensure ‘viewpoint diversity’ in ‘each department, field, or teaching unit.’”  As the Journal correctly argues, “These reforms may be worth pursuing, but the government has no business requiring them. Its biggest overreach is requiring ‘viewpoint diversity,’ which it doesn’t define. Does this mean the English department must hire more Republican faculty or Shakespeare scholars? An external monitor will decide such questions.  If the monitor finds insufficient diversity, however defined, the university must hire ‘a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide’ that diversity and admit ‘a critical mass of students’ to provide the same. Must Harvard ask applicants if they support Mr. Trump and impose ideological quotas in hiring and admissions? . . . The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to ‘viewpoint diversity’ . . . Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose. President Trump has enough balls in the air without also trying to run Harvard.”

Second, Harvard history professor, James Hankin, a conservative, makes this astute observation:  “My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues . . . Faculty at Harvard for the most part are serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work. They have books to write and papers to publish. They want to pass on what they have learned to the next generation. They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time . . . Many of my colleagues can see clearly enough that this crisis has been triggered by progressive activists, who are predominantly graduate students or members of the university’s vast diversity bureaucracy. Many faculty wish that the fanatics would just shut up and take the target off Harvard’s back.”

Hankin continues with an incisive conclusion: “One inescapable truth in higher education is that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Harvard’s endowment is massive, around $50 billion, but most of it is tied up in donor-restricted funds, and it pays for only 37% of Harvard’s annual operating costs of $6.5 billion. For the rest, the university relies on tuition (20%), federal grants (11%), current gifts from alumni and other donors, and borrowing . . . [But] Federal funding tends to increase the number and power of administrators, to turn faculty into their supplicants and to insulate the university from alumni opinion.  For instance, a 2011 ‘Dear Colleague’ letter from the Obama administration’s Education Department led Harvard to hire over 50 ‘Title IX Resource Coordinators’ to police sexual mores. The university’s sprawling DEI apparatus created, without faculty input, the pressure to regulate speech, require trigger warnings and enforce preferred pronouns. These administrators, who are the most politically active element in the university, opened the doors to further radicalization following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.”

Third, for the above reason, Larry Arn, president of Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school founded in 1844 by Free Will Baptists, offers some advice to Harvard:  Stop taking federal government money.  Hillsdale takes no government funding, including student loans or Pell Grants and is therefore not bound by any government mandates.  He argues that the “the donor is your government.  It has the power of law and it controls you . . . Officials and the colleges they control think they’re managing the future by managing what young people learn.”

Finally, former president of Purdue and now Distinguished Scholar and Senior Advisor at the Liberty Fund, always has something worthwhile to say when it comes to higher education.  He writes:  “I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and talking with my recent colleagues in higher education, as they react to the new environment in which they find themselves. The tenor of their current commentary might best be described as the language of anguish, and it had a familiar ring that took me a while to pin down.  It finally hit me. I repaired to the Bible and read—I confess for the first time in years—the Book of Lamentations. The despair of Israel at the destruction of Jerusalem gave rise to the same outcries of fallen greatness, of abandonment, of unfair persecution, of hopelessness. Just the response we are hearing today from the nation’s college and university leadership.”

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Daniels counsels:  “So, if my former brethren should ever find themselves at a loss for words, the biblical poet (Jeremiah, by tradition) left them some eloquent options. But words and sympathy won’t rebuild the temples of learning. That will require a change in behavior, which in turn must start with an acknowledgment of error. (I’ll stop short of saying ‘sin.’)  Jeremiah faced up to that realization. ‘Let’s examine and probe our ways.’ The path back to public esteem starts with an honest acceptance that, just maybe, some of the criticisms are legitimate.

• The sector has failed to deliver value: Its prices rocketed upward even as its rigor, quality and the marketplace value of its degrees eroded.
• Much of the federal research money on which it has feasted contributed nothing to the national interest. Too much of it was the stuff of parody, fat targets for skewering by adversaries.
• Decades of undeniable, illiberal discrimination and ostracism of even mainstream viewpoints fatally undercut today’s wailing about “academic freedom.” Those who have trampled the principle for so long are not well-positioned to take refuge in it now.
• Yes, a college diploma is still the right goal for millions of young Americans. But the federal loan program and other price-inflating subsidies are a disaster in need of reform.
• Yes, charges of campus antisemitism are being used as a cover for wider assaults. But enforced conformity, indoctrination and censorship have been real issues for a long time.

As one sympathetic analyst wrote: “The sector has been very effective at preserving funding, but it has not been as effective at reforming itself. And that set up this situation where if you don’t change on your own, sometimes you are forced to change in ways that maybe are not healthy.”

His conclusion:  “Perhaps the apologists for today’s higher education can find the solace of shared grief in this Old Testament lament: ‘Joy has left our hearts; our dancing has turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head.’  But they’d be well-advised to read the next line: ‘Woe to us, for we have sinned.’”

See “Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard,” Editorial Board Wall Street Journal (15 April 2025); Mitch Daniels in the Washington Post (16 April 2025); James Hankins in the Wall Street Journal (26-27 April 2025); and Tunku Varadarajan’s interview with Larry Arn in the Wall Street Journal (19-20 April 2025).