Education

Professors Pushed Harvard to Resist Trump. Now Billions Are on the Line.

Published

1 year ago

April 2, 2025

Professors Pushed Harvard to Resist Trump. Now Billions Are on the Line.

The Trump administration has turned campaign promises to target universities into devastating action, pulling hundreds of millions in federal funds from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.

On Monday, the Trump administration went after Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university, announcing that it would review about $9 billion in contracts and multiyear grants. It accused the university of failing to protect Jewish students and promoting “divisive ideologies over free inquiry.”

Harvard had been bracing for the development. In recent months, it had moved cautiously, seeking compromise and, critics said, cracking down on speech. The approach riled some who worried that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.

Though it remains unclear how much the university will actually lose, if anything, the move on Monday shows that the conciliatory approach hasn’t fended off its critics yet.

In the days leading up to the Trump administration’s announcement, faculty members called on the university instead to more forcefully defend itself and higher education more broadly. In a letter, more than 700 faculty members called for Harvard to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”

“As much as a body blow from the administration would hurt us, Harvard has the capacity to withstand the blow,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political science professor who circulated the letter.

But a lot of money could be in question, and the stakes at Harvard underscore the excruciating dilemma faced by leading universities and civic institutions, from law firms to nonprofits: Should they work to protect themselves, as many seem to be doing, or stand on principle?

“That every-man-for-themselves response is about to cost us our democracy,” said Dr. Levitsky, who studies authoritarian regimes.

As President Trump’s inauguration approached, Harvard hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with deep ties to Mr. Trump. On the first full day of the Trump presidency, the university announced it was adopting a highly debated definition of antisemitism — which labels certain criticisms of Israel, such as calling its existence racist, as antisemitic — a move encouraged by the new administration but slammed by free speech advocates.

As the spring went on, pro-Palestinian actions spurred campuswide messages, even as Harvard remained quiet when a former Israeli prime minister visited and joked about giving student hecklers pagers, said Ryan Enos, a Harvard political science professor. (The comment was an apparent reference to the exploding pagers Israel used to target Hezbollah last fall.)

Under pressure, Harvard recently suspended a partnership with a Palestinian university while agreeing to start a new partnership with an Israeli one.

Then last week, two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies were pushed out of their positions after a Jewish alumni group complained about programming, according to faculty members. To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.

“It’s pretty transparent what’s going on,” Dr. Enos said. “Harvard is trying to put on a posture that mollifies its critics.”

Many say Harvard’s actions make sense, given the money at stake. And to many on the right and even some on the left, Harvard’s recent actions are a correction.

Harvard has often been criticized by conservatives who say that left-leaning politics permeate the campus and make it hard for different views to be heard. For years, it has also become a target for conservatives who say efforts to make higher education more inclusive of racial minorities have been excessive. Harvard, along with the University of North Carolina, was drawn into a Supreme Court case over its consideration of race in admissions, for instance. It ultimately lost in the conservative-leaning court, leading to a national ban on race-conscious admissions.

Last year, amid pressure, Harvard’s largest division ended a requirement that job candidates submit statements about how they would contribute to diversity.

As the war in Gaza set off student protests and debate over university responses, some have pushed for the federal government to use its power, and its purse strings, to force additional change.

Others, like Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of the Harvard Medical School, have called the Trump administration’s attack on higher education “an existential threat.” But Dr. Flier said the assault was occurring in part because of higher education’s failure to take seriously the free expression concerns of conservatives and even political moderates.

He said that Harvard and other universities had tolerated behavior toward Jewish students that they would not have if it had been directed at other minorities and had generally created an unhealthy environment for the expression of heterodox views. Dr. Flier said Harvard had begun to address some of those issues — moving away from commenting on political issues, for example — before Mr. Trump took office.

“We were beginning to go in the right direction,” Dr. Flier said. “There was a vibe shift. And an awareness shift. And that all got shifted again by the Trump administration’s massive, uncalled-for, pretextual attacks.”

Bowing to federal pressure has not proved to be a solution, either.

Last week, Columbia’s interim president resigned — the second leader there to do so in a year — amid intense internal and external pressure over the Trump administration’s demands on the university.

Dylan Saba, a lawyer with Palestine Legal, noted that Columbia had fallen in line with many Republican demands before Mr. Trump took office and had taken an especially aggressive stance against pro-Palestinian activists, including denouncing scholars by name at a congressional hearing. It did not placate Mr. Trump and produced even more student activism, Mr. Saba said.

“In seeking a painless way out, they ended up producing a much bigger conflict,” he said.

Amid the speed and chaos of Mr. Trump’s assault on higher education, colleges have not figured out how to respond in a way that will satisfy their antagonists — if there is one. Some faculty members wonder whether the conciliatory approach has only emboldened critics.

Even for universities with sizable endowments, the financial hits the administration has promised could be painful. Harvard’s endowment is more than $50 billion. Johns Hopkins University, which also has a large endowment, recently announced it would cut more than 2,000 employees because of reduced federal funding.

Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this spring, Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote in communication to the campus that community members should “rest assured that Harvard is working hard to advocate for higher education in our nation’s capital and beyond.”

Harvard has been a longtime target of Republicans who want to take it down a notch. In the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, student groups released a statement holding Israel responsible for the assault. In response, Harvard’s president at the time, Claudine Gay, released a tepid statement denouncing the attack.

Amid pressure, she followed it with a stronger message, but Harvard was one of three colleges whose leaders were questioned by Congress in 2023 about their efforts to combat antisemitism. A month after a widely panned performance, Dr. Gay was out.

Ongoing protests, unrest and lawsuits have kept Harvard in the public eye, though they have quieted considerably since last spring. In the fall, pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a silent “study-in” in a library, and the university temporarily banned them from the space.

In lawsuits over the last year, Jewish students said that Harvard had allowed hatred and discrimination to go unchecked and that it still had a long way to go to fix endemic problems. They accused Harvard of ignoring antisemitism, by allowing chants like “from the river to the sea” and the showing of the film “Israelism,” a documentary critical of Israel.

This winter, Harvard was placed on a list of 10 universities the Trump administration was taking special interest in.

“The sharks circle when they smell blood in the water,” said Kenneth Roth, a former director of Human Rights Watch and a fellow at Harvard, who wants Harvard to fight better to allow robust debate and academic freedom.

The announcement on Monday did not make it clear what other steps the university would have to take to be in good standing with the federal government.

Some universities have been more vocal amid the federal onslaught. A Georgetown law dean responded forcefully earlier last month to Washington’s top prosecutor, a Trump loyalist, saying his efforts to control the university’s curriculum were unconstitutional. Brown’s president wrote recently that it would defend its academic freedom in the courts, if need be. And Princeton’s president recently condemned the attack on Columbia, calling it “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”

Other universities also appear to be taking a more cautious approach.

Last month, the University of California system announced it would end the use of diversity statements in hiring — a practice that had been under fire from conservatives for years. Michael V. Drake, the president, had told faculty leaders he didn’t want the system to be “the tallest nail” and stand out, according to Sean Malloy, a professor who was in the meeting. A spokesman for the system said the meeting was meant to be confidential, and that Dr. Drake was relaying a sentiment he had heard on a trip to Washington.

And Dartmouth College recently hired a former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee as its vice president and general counsel, to help “understand and navigate the legal landscape surrounding higher education,” President Sian Leah Beilock said in a statement.

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said it was only rational for Harvard, or any university, to try to negotiate a solution with the Trump administration, given the arbitrary nature of Mr. Trump’s actions against higher education and the number of jobs on the line.

Professor Feldman, who has criticized Mr. Trump’s actions, said Harvard had acted responsibly, given the political climate.

“Sometimes people who are eager for the university to get up and make big statements have a slightly unrealistic conception of what the real-world effect of those statements would be,” he said.

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Education

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

2 days ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.