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More than 600 Harvard faculty signed a letter to Harvard’s governing boards urging the University to publicly condemn attacks on universities and defy orders that interfere with its independence.
The letter was circulated Monday morning and quickly garnered hundreds of signatures by Wednesday evening, drawing support from professors across all nine of Harvard’s faculty divisions.
“Ongoing attacks on American universities threaten bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and inquiry,” the letter reads.
Days after Columbia University made broad concessions to the Trump administration in an attempt to reverse $400 million in funding cuts, the letter calls on Harvard to take a different road if it comes under fire — asking the University “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance.”
Columbia’s promises — including hiring 36 special officers empowered to make arrests on its campus and conducting an administrative review of its Middle Eastern studies programs — sparked fears across academia that the White House could use its threats to extract compromises from other universities.
The Harvard letter represents an outpouring of indignation from an extraordinary cross-section of the University’s faculty — and a unified demand that Harvard, which has so far been silent on the events at Columbia, take a public stand.
Its signatories span academic disciplines — from Computer Science and Mathematics to Comparative Literature and Economics — and political inclinations. The largest contingent came from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with more than 260 signatories, followed by the Harvard Medical School with more than 110.
Government professors Ryan D. Enos and Steven R. Levitsky sent the letter in an email to faculty Monday morning, though Harvard Law School professor Nikolas E. Bowie said several faculty helped draft it.
“Universities like Harvard have a responsibility to defend education as a force of justice in democratic society,” Bowie, a signatory of the letter, said in an interview.
A Harvard University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The letter asks Harvard to work with its alumni and other universities to “mount a coordinated opposition.”
Harvard Kennedy School professor Archon Fung, another signatory of the letter, said cooperation between universities could address a collective action problem — where individual universities may be willing to compromise in their own self-interest, even if doing so sets a dangerous precedent.
“If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can,” Fung said. “But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.”
Top Harvard administrators have told alumni that the University plans to collaborate with peer institutions as it addresses federal funding threats — rather than leading a charge on its own.
And University President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty he is engaged in private discussions with leaders at peer universities around growing concerns about the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against higher education, according to a Harvard professor.
But large contingents of students, faculty, and alumni have pushed — in protests and open letters — for the University to be more vocal in its condemnation of the Trump administration’s actions.
More than 500 Harvard alumni signed a letter to Garber Monday evening urging the University to publicly commit to protecting its affiliates’ free speech and maintain the independence of its operations.
And nearly 80 Jewish Harvard affiliates, including at least three dozen faculty, signed another statement calling on universities to denounce the arrest of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, who is one of several noncitizen students and instructors who now face deportation proceedings over their role in pro-Palestine campus protests.
History professor Derek J. Penslar, a signatory of the faculty letter to Harvard’s governing boards, called the letter’s message “minimalist, moderate, and commonsensical.”
According to Bowie, the Law School professor, several citizen and noncitizen faculty told colleagues they agreed with the letter’s message but declined to sign it out of fear of being targeted by the Trump administration.
That fear “speaks to the value of standing together,” Bowie said. “As a faculty, we are much stronger when hundreds of people join a statement than when only one person does.”
Harvard’s American Association of University Professors chapter sued the Trump administration Tuesday morning for allegedly breaching its members’ First Amendment rights by silencing speech from international faculty and students.
Fung — the Kennedy School professor, who studies democratic participation — said he saw defending the independence of universities as necessary to safeguarding democracy.
“It is a very predictable pattern that authoritarian governments go after two institutions first, which is the media and universities,” Fung said. “We’re one of the two or three pillars that are really, really important for free discussion and inquiry in a democratic society, which is the beating heart of a democracy.”
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
