TThe day after the Trump administration announced an examination of $ 9 billion in federal contracts and subsidies with Harvard because of what he claimed to be university failure to fight against anti-Semitism on the campus, the president of the university, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community entitled: Our resolution.
“When we saw the object line of Garber’s declaration, everyone thought:” Oh, Super, Harvard will get up! “Said Jane Sujen Bock, member of the Coalition Board of Directors for a various Harvard, a group of former students founded in 2016 in the midst of a legal battle on positive action.
But the real body of the message indicated nothing like this. In the email, Garber briefly praised academic freedom while committing to “commit” to the administration to “fight against anti-Semitism”, which he said that he had experienced directly and listed a series of measures that the university had already taken. “We still have a lot of work to do,” he wrote. He did not offer any details on what Harvard would do to protect his independence from the Trump administration.
It was “an abdication declaration,” said Kirsten Weld, history professor and president of the Harvard section of the American Association of University Professors, a national group pleading for teachers. “That said essentially:” Yes, we were bad and we deserve to be punished. »»
Email mail, as well as a series of actions recently taken by Harvard against academic programs, teachers and groups of students who have been accused of being pro-Palestinians, fueled anxieties in American campuses that the Ivy League school would respond to the traces of the Federal University of Columbia, which recently bowed to a series of requests from the Trump administration.
On Thursday, the Trump administration wrote in a letter to Harvard that federal funding would be conditional at the university prohibiting diversity and inclusion initiatives, restricting demonstrations on campus, cooperating with the Ministry of Homeland Security, examining its academic programs to treat prejudices “and installing managers to implement the president’s requests.
Dozens of other universities are under investigation for having pretended to have failed to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Brown University becoming the last to risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. They all pay particular attention to the way in which Harvard and others weigh the financial costs of Donald Trump’s defense against the moral and academic costs that accompanied him.
‘We must be ready to get up’
Some more muscular decreases begin to emerge.
Tuesday, in response to the announcement of the administration that he would suspend $ 210 million in funding at Princeton University, its president, Christopher Eisgruber, said that he had no intention of making concessions to the administration. In Harvard, the student newspaper reported that Rakesh Khurana, the dean of the Harvard College, attracted the applause of his colleagues on Tuesday when he accused the Trump administration of weapons to the concerns concerning the anti -Semitism of the campus to justify his ongoing attacks against higher education. (Eisgruber and Khurana did not respond to requests for comments; several Harvard teachers agreed only to talk about the file, citing a repressive climate.)
Khurana’s comments followed the upheaval days at Harvard after 600 members of the faculty signed a letter calling for university to publicly condemn the attacks of the American president and “legally challenge and refuse to comply with illegal requests”. The Harvard Academic Workers Union, which represents non-Piste researchers and teachers on Wednesday, wrote in a statement on Wednesday: “The attack on the administration of Trump against Harvard a Nothing to do with anti -Semitism ” And called on the university to “resist this intimidation with us”.
Until now, Eisgruber and Christina Paxson, president of Brown, have reported that they can take a different path and resist.
“University presidents and leaders must understand that the commitment to allow academics – including our teachers, including our students – to continue the truth as best they see for what our universities do,” Eisgruber said in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “We must be ready to defend this.”
Brown did not announce how he planned to respond to the threats he will lose more than $ 500 million in funding, but last month, PAXSON explained how the university would react to federal attacks against his academic freedom. “I know that many in our community have been seriously concerned about the persistent media relationships of some of our peers who undergo encryptions on their freedom of expression and the autonomy necessary to advance their mission,” she wrote. “If Brown faces such actions with a direct impact on our ability to execute these academic and operational releases. »»
Professors across the country have also started to organize themselves. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) brought three prosecutions: COLUMBIA financing reductions, targeting international students by immigration authorities and Trump’s efforts to prohibit diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campus. Meanwhile, professors at Rutgers University proposed a “mutual defense compact” within the “big ten” consortium, which includes some of the country’s largest state universities, to support each other in the face of political attacks.
“The attacks that come from the federal government could be directed to Columbia University last week, and Harvard University this week, and who knows what other university next week, but if we allow them to proceed, we will be removed one by one,” said Weld. “The only way to follow for any individual institution in the higher education sector at the moment is to ensure forces.”
‘We have our voices’
Harvard had tried to get ahead of the administration attack. The university was one of the first to be examined after October 7, 2023 and protested the War of Israel in Gaza. The allegations according to which he had not approached anti -Semitism on the campus contributed, in part, to the resignation of Claudine Gay, the first black president of Harvard.
This year, Harvard adopted a controversial definition of anti -Semitism in a legal regulation concerning the complaints carried by Jewish students. In the days preceding Trump’s threats, he forced to release two leaders from the Center for Middle East studies and suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University, in the West Bank occupied by Israeli. This week, the University also suspended an “initiative of religion, conflict and peace” to the divine School that the Jewish Alumni Association had accused itself of “entirely on the Palestinians” and prohibited the Solidarity Committee of the First Cycle Palestine from hosting events on the campus.
But if the repression of the programs targeting the sympathetic spaces to the Palestinians was supposed to appease the Trump administration and avoid threats of funding, it did not work.
A fraction of the endowment of $ 53 billion in Harvard – the largest in the world for a university – is liquid or free from restrictions, but several teachers said that it was time for the University to go there to defend its fundamental values. While the administration cuts threaten hundreds of jobs on the campus, Harvard is only placed to resist the impact, they say.
“We are constantly told that the endowment is not a piggy bank, it is not a melting snow fund and that we must protect it because it ensures the success of our long -term initiatives and for future generations,” said Maya Jasanoff, history teacher at Harvard. “But if we lose the independence of the universities of political interference, then we sacrifice something for future generations which are really invaluable.”
Others have noted that Harvard is also able to defend himself forcefully before the court, just as he did when a positive action has been attacked, although the United States Supreme Court finally ruled against the university in this case.
Until now, the university administration has not shown any signs that it will have a point. Several members of the faculty believe that Trump’s efforts have the tacit support of certain university leaders and administrators.
“There is a strategic alliance among the segments of professor and university administrations, in particular the boards of directors, which are suitable that pro-Palestine activism on American university campuses must be closed,” said Weld. “That these voices understand what the collateral damage of their participation in this alliance will be, I don’t know.”
The Faculty of Harvard, in recent months, has increased organizational efforts, in particular by launching the AAUP chapter on the heels of the Gaza camp last spring and the response of the university.
“One of the more brilliant perverse things to get out of last year is that I saw the faculty organize and work together to a measure that has exceeded everything I saw in my university career,” said Jasanoff. “We have our voices and we can use our voices together.”
