Sword of Damocles hanging above it by a horsehair, Harvard University has pulled out the scissors. 

The university announced it will not comply with the federal government’s demands, as detailed in a letter sent on April 11, including implementing merit-based hiring and admissions by August 2025. Harvard is the first high-profile university to outright refuse the Trump administration’s reforms. 

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” writes Harvard University President Alan Garber. 

Garber retreats behind the sturdy bulwark of “academic freedom.” This defense is shoddily-formed. One doubts, for instance, whether Harvard would hire a professor who openly professes the superiority of the white race over all others. Or admit a student who submits an engaging, syntactically unimpeachable essay about repealing the 19th Amendment. 

The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. https://t.co/5k5t9RYYC2

— Harvard University (@Harvard) April 14, 2025

Garber argues the federal government’s prescription “violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights…No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

As the federal government reminds Garber, “an investment is not an entitlement.” Private universities are free to teach what they’d like — but if they expect their activity to be funded by the American people, they must justify the value proposition. And they have failed in spectacular fashion. 

“A significant portion of the country feels that they have been abused by elite academia,” says Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson to the Daily Caller. “They understand that a lot of these ideas that are now disrupting their lives, trying to destroy their lives, destroy their personal spaces, destroy their parental rights, all started and are fueled on the campuses.” (RELATED: Trump Admin Piles More Penalties Onto Ivy League Amid Funding Negotiations | The Daily Caller) 

While these disruptive and costly beliefs have infected the rest of the country, the universities themselves remain sealed in a happy, hermetic bubble. 

“They have captured the campuses. They’ve captured everything,” says Jacobson. “At Cornell, you are talking to the internal opposition. That’s it. In a university of 2,000 faculty, you’re talking to the only one.”

Jacobson found the Equal Protection Project in 2019 to investigate and litigate against programs and scholarships that discriminate based on race. “We have filed over seventy complaints, challenging over two hundred programs and scholarships…I do not believe we have found, ever, a program which openly and by its terms discriminates in favor of whites,” he says. 

With Trump at the helm, universities are finally facing consequences. Hours after Garber’s refusal, the government froze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard. Discrimination against high-performing groups is so essential to elite academia’s self-conception they’d rather shutter their doors than open them based on merit.

They “sincerely believe that they are on the right side of history,” says Senior Legal Fellow GianCarlo Canaparo of the Heritage Foundation to the Daily Caller. This belief explains Harvard’s ill-guided decision to defy the Trump administration. They’ve cast themselves as the heroic resistance, the torchbearers of justice in a dark and bigoted world. (Not that “dark” is to be negatively connoted). 

Enter the federal government. 

“It does not surprise me that it seems a number of other people have decided the only way to change the universities is from outside pressure,” says Jacobson. “Universities are paying the price for a generation of marginalizing everybody who didn’t agree with them, for a generation of treating at least half the country in a very disparaging manner. And when you insult half the country for a generation, and that half of the country finally gains power, are you really surprised that they’re taking it out on you?”

Yet they do seem surprised, even offended, that their privileges have been revealed as such. 

The elite private universities “made themselves really, for lack of a better word, slaves of the government,” says Canaparo. They assumed the government would always be an “ideologically aligned or at least passive benefactor, but the problem with hitching your financial security to any benefactor is that he might change his mind,” he continues. “And it’s absolutely the federal government’s prerogative to do so when the American people change theirs.” (RELATED: Harvard Runs To Wall Street For $750,000,000 Cash Infusion | The Daily Caller)

Garber’s response took issue with the scope of the administration’s request. He complains, “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.” The university maintains its present “intellectual conditions” at its own peril — not just for fear of losing federal funding, but for the damage its own students inflict on its reputation. 

 “So many of our universities, the ones which give the best credentials, are captured by ideology that has rendered them deeply unserious, unscholarly,” says Canaparo. “Whatever they’re selecting for, it’s not what actually matters. It’s not what actually indicates somebody who is a good thinker, analytical, curious.”

Prestige is a resource painstakingly accumulated and all too easily spent. Harvard, by virtue of its merit-optional admissions and education process, defeats herself. The university has accrued an enormous debt based on the good name of past alumni — a debt which more recent graduates cannot repay. 

“That definitely affects Harvard’s prestige when you’ve got people who are like me in hiring positions, making a choice between two applicants,” says Canaparo. He notes his “self-interest is not to prop up a school that I like, it’s…to get help that I need.”

Without the faith of the American people, or their dollars, what does the future look like for schools like Harvard?  

Harvard is sitting on an endowment the size of a small country. It is a market player and should be treated as such. And the university seems to be giving Trump the perfect chance to do so. 

Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatalieIrene03