Back in 2021, far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who supports abolishing American democracy and replacing it with a dictatorship, went on a podcast to discuss how a hypothetical “American Caesar” might successfully carry out a power grab if elected president.
His interlocutor, then-former (and now, current) Trump official Michael Anton, argued that any such effort would fail because “the real power centers” in the US — the elite media and academic institutions exemplified by “Harvard and the New York Times” — would fight back.
“That’s right,” Yarvin agreed. “That’s why, basically, you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April.”
It’s now April — and Harvard is suddenly facing an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump has already revoked $2.2 billion in federal research funding for the university. He and his aides have suggested they may use more weapons of state power soon — revoking Harvard’s nonprofit status through the IRS, taking away its certification to host international students, and scrutinizing its disclosures of foreign donations.
The assault on Harvard is part of a broader Trumpian assault on elite universities, which is itself part of a yet broader federal assault on progressive institutions and groups deemed enemies of the president (from Big Law firms to liberal nonprofits to mainstream media outlets).
The attacks have various pretexts, but they fit a larger strategy that right-wing activists advocate. They believe that the best way of strengthening the right’s cultural power is to force liberal and left-leaning institutions to bend the knee — or be destroyed. And though destroying Harvard will be a tall order, tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences, forever transforming the relationship between the federal government and academia.
Harvard became Trump’s top target because it stood up to him in a high-profile way, announcing last Monday it would not give in to his demands. The school has won praise from Trump critics for resisting where Columbia University didn’t last month. But really, Harvard had no choice but to fight back, because Trump officials’ demands had become far more extreme.
Most notably, Trump officials demanded that every single department and teaching unit at Harvard, as well as the student body, face federal government-approved audits for “viewpoint diversity” every year through 2028. This essentially meant that the punishment would continue until Trump allies determined every component of Harvard had sufficiently moved to the right — a stunning federal intrusion on a private university.
Much of this seems plainly illegal, and Harvard began its effort to fight back in court by filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration Monday. But Trump’s team may just be getting started. Aides to Trump, the New York Times recently reported, “have spoken privately of toppling a high-profile university to signal their seriousness.” That is: They may not just want to change Harvard’s ways — they may want to destroy it.
That’s easier said than done. Harvard is well-positioned to fight back, both in court and via fundraising among its wealthy alumni network, and the school has an enormous endowment. But the longer-term trajectory for the relationship between universities and the federal government seems bleak.
Now that Trump has pioneered the tactic of pulling funds to coerce and try to control universities, it seems hard to put that genie back in the bottle: The threat will loom during any future Republican presidency. Universities will likely have to either figure out how to live without the federal government, or make themselves more acceptable to the right.
Trump vs. “the Cathedral”
Trump’s stunning weaponization of government power against universities is happening partly because of his own vindictiveness. But it’s also a strategy that certain thinkers and activists on the right have long advocated.
Conservatives have long complained that elite colleges and universities are poisoning the minds of America’s youth with their far-left ways. But over the past decade — the decade of the Great Awokening — this has become increasingly central to the right’s narrative of what ails America. Influential voices on the right, such as activist Christopher Rufo, argued “wokeness” was in large part created by elite universities.
Yarvin, meanwhile, started focusing on this long before the wokeness wars. He’s long asserted that progressives dominate US culture because of what he calls “the Cathedral” — elite academic and media institutions that, in his telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames.
To people persuaded by this account, like Vice President JD Vance, the response seemed obvious: Vance said in 2021 that conservatives should “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Several developments in the 2020s made universities more vulnerable to these right-wing attacks. The Covid-19 pandemic turned many on the right against the medical establishment, making them more open to threatening scientific and medical research funding (which is most of the direct federal funding for universities). The Supreme Court declared Harvard’s race-based affirmative action practices illegal in 2023, opening the door to future federal scrutiny over whether Harvard or other universities complied with the ruling.
Above all, there was the eruption of the Israel-Gaza war and the pro-Palestinian protests that caused controversy on many campuses. Though many students and faculty members supported the protests, others — including major donors — opposed them, arguing Jewish students had become newly unsafe on campus. Protest supporters have argued this was a blatant effort to chill criticism of Israel. But the issue was bitterly divisive, Congress joined the fray, and Ivy League presidents (including Harvard’s) were soon forced out.
The Trump administration cited those protests in creating a “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” which has taken on the leading role in threatening funding for Harvard and other universities. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies have been similarly aggressive in taking a wrecking ball to the medical research status quo involving grants to universities. And recent reporting suggests Trump himself is personally involved in and excited about the effort.
Will Trump’s tactics actually work — against Harvard specifically, or “the Cathedral” generally?
Trump can clearly hurt Harvard. Layoffs are already beginning at the Harvard School of Public Health. The school can make up for some grant losses with new fundraising, but it will be quite hard to conjure up $2 billion — or much more, if the IRS revokes Harvard’s nonprofit status, forcing it to pay taxes and removing the tax-deductibility of its donations.
But Harvard seems to have good prospects in court. Law professors have argued that Trump’s rapid revocations of funding may well be illegal, and a politicized use of any IRS will likely bring court scrutiny too. The conservatives on the Supreme Court certainly have their gripes about elite universities, but they may blanche at Trump’s apparently illegal attempts to burn them to the ground. (For what it’s worth, four of the nine Supreme Court justices went to Harvard Law School, and four others went to Yale Law.)
Furthermore, Harvard’s influence doesn’t stem primarily from its federal funding — it comes from its prestige. And that prestige won’t go away because of crude political assaults; indeed, it may be enhanced by the university’s vow to stand up to Trump. While Harvard’s reputation has been somewhat hurt amid the controversies of recent years, a principled stand against an unpopular and undemocratic president could in some ways prove rejuvenating.
Advocates like Rufo fixate on universities as the enemy who must be attacked or overhauled to smash progressives’ cultural power. But in doing so, they overestimate the power of intimidation tactics and underestimate the importance of persuasion. If Trump’s attacks on Harvard are widely viewed as an illegal abuse of power, they won’t work. Put another way: University power brokers were deeply divided over Israel and Gaza, but now they’re united against Donald Trump.
And while elite universities are clearly important and influential, the right-wing worldview in which they conceptualized and imposed wokeness on America seems to me extremely oversimplified. Was it that Harvard radicalized its students into becoming woke? Or did a new generation of Harvard students consuming lots of social media simply find left-wing views newly appealing, and act accordingly? Did Harvard change the kids, or did the kids change Harvard?
There may be no going back to the previous era
Beyond Harvard, though, other universities may well be in a tougher spot. It does seem clear that the federal government is no longer a partner that can be relied on for federal funding. If Trump can yank away billions of dollars in grants for political reasons, future Republican presidents — potentially, for instance, Vance — should be expected to do the same.
The previous status quo was that elite universities didn’t particularly have to care whatsoever about what conservatives thought of them. The spectrum of relevant opinion that they took into account ranged from far-left activists to centrist socially liberal donors. Trump has changed that, and now everyone hoping for federal funding will have to look over their shoulder.
Of course, though Harvard’s critics are most fired up about wokeness and Israel, the ultimate victims of all this will be scientific and medical researchers — as well as anyone who would have benefited from their findings. Funding for Harvard studies on tuberculosis, cancer treatment, and ALS has already been clawed back. The ultimate upshot of this agenda is to smash US scientific and medical expertise to own the libs.
Update, April 22, 9:40 am ET: This story, originally published April 21, has been updated with news that Harvard filed suit against the Trump administration.
