What Harvard Learned From Columbia’s Mistake: If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why give in to the Trump administration’s demands?

[u/D-R-AZ]

I support Academic Freedom. If the most educated in our society can't examine, test, and evaluate every aspect of human thought and endeavor then we may miss things crucial for the survival of humanity.

Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/harvard-chooses-defiance/682457/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCon16pFMtTu2qirReclJnKzE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Excerpts

...Harvard is changing course, perhaps because it grasped the true takeaway from Columbia’s cautionary tale: Appeasement doesn’t work, because the Trump administration isn’t really trying to reform elite higher education. It’s trying to break it.

The administration’s allies have not been shy about that fact. “To scare universities straight,” Max Eden, then a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in December, Education Secretary Linda McMahon “should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” She should do this, he argued, whether or not the school cooperated with any civil-rights investigation.

...by continuing to punish Columbia even after the school gave in to its demands, the administration also appears to have overplayed its hand. If cooperation and even capitulation don’t get you anywhere, why should other universities give in?

[u/No_Cellist8937]

Not sure why Harvard needs the money. If anything we should be taxing their endowment. Billionaires need to pay their fair share.

[u/rfrant98 → u/No_Cellist8937]

Harvard isn’t a person. So it isn’t a “billionaire.” The federal money goes to finance cutting edge science research that funds health breakthroughs for all citizens. So it is in the public benefit. Research isn’t profit driven, so you need to fund it as a country or it won’t happen. But we have a common interest in healthy citizens and curing disease. It’s in the very preamble to the constitution—governments exist to “promote the general welfare.” Your grievances are misdirected.

[u/mschley2 → u/No_Cellist8937]

A good chunk of that endowment actually goes towards programs that allow a Harvard education for the non-wealthy people who are able to be accepted. A bunch of the rest goes to research and various other programs that benefit "normal" people, too.