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Amid Harvard’s ongoing fight with the Trump administration, Harvard has received widespread praise for defending its academic independence.

The only problem? Harvard has never been truly independent.

Our University has always been beholden to the wills of its donors, allowing them to influence its decision-making and institutional priorities. When Harvard accepts checks for tens — or even hundreds — of millions of dollars, it is hard to believe that Harvard does not move toward alignment with the donors’ desires.

It’s true that the federal government and private donors give with different motivations, restrictions, and use cases. Research funding is dedicated to specific projects, often at the School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences while an enterprising individual donor can give to establish a much wider range of programs.

In both cases, though, the fact is that by accepting vast sums of money Harvard has already given up a bit of its supposed independence, whether to Congress, the President, or billionaire donors.

Regardless of one’s politics, it would be naive to think that Harvard suddenly regained this independence when it opposed the president in court.

In fiscal year 2024, following the University’s botched and widely-criticized response to the October 7th attacks and campus antisemitism, donations to the endowment fell by $151 million. Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 privately acknowledged fundraising challenges, and — strangely enough — Harvard soon adopted far stricter guidelines on antisemitism and discrimination against Israelis, in addition to previous tightening of campus use policies in the wake of the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard.

The University was right to address the critical issue of antisemitism — but it would be hard to dismiss the influence of donors, who publicly and privately pushed Harvard to take action.

Or take the issue of denaming. Last year, the University refused to accede to yearslong student demands to rename two buildings named for psychiatrist Arthur M. Sackler, whom activists criticized for his family’s role in the opioid epidemic through their leadership of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.

The University found the arguments advanced by the renaming activists to be tenuous; Sackler died years before OxyContin was ever introduced and the University did not find it reasonable to hold him accountable for advertising techniques he innovated, but were later misused. Although Harvard may not have been persuaded by these criticisms, many other prominent institutions — like Tufts University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — apparently were. In its report, Harvard vaguely acknowledges a confidential gift agreement that specified Sackler’s wishes.

With both campus antisemitism and building naming disputes, activists subsequently criticized the University for bowing to the demands of major donors — in essence, sacrificing its independence. Against the backdrop of the dispute between Harvard and the White House, these cases remind us that plenty of our University’s independence has already been auctioned off.

The overwhelming majority of the funds in Harvard’s endowment are restricted by its donors for use by a specific school, or even a specific department, program, or building. More directly, donors also exercise broad power simply by deciding which programs are and are not worth funding.

This type of influence has existed for over a century — worries about estranging alumni donors played a role in Harvard’s decision to impose a thinly-veiled quota on the number of Jewish students in the early 20th century. Two centuries prior, Thomas Hollis funded the Hollis Professorship of Divinity; in his gift, he required that only members of three specific Christian denominations be allowed to hold the chair. (Note: Hollis’ inclusion of Baptists was a step against the religious exclusion prevalent at the time.)

With the amount of influence that comes with money, the donations that Harvard receives will surely affect its academic independence. Because of the far from fully transparent nature of how Harvard screens donations, one cannot help but wonder if, for example, a graduate program reliant on funding from tech industry donors would be truly independent when it comes to contentious issues like digital privacy and ethics?

There may not be an enlightened path for Harvard to take the money it needs without any strings attached, but in an era of such profound change for the University, we can’t dismiss the real issue of academic independence. Donors have shaped the University’s direction, for better or for worse, for centuries.

Despite the strategic political framing of Harvard’s present fight with the federal government, it would be naive to think that Harvard is, or has recently been, truly independent.

Tejas S. Billa ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Statistics concentrator in Pforzheimer House.