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Harvard’s defense of higher education so far can essentially be summed up in two words: “cancer research.”

When the National Institutes of Health capped funding for indirect costs, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 described how federally-funded research has produced “technological innovations” and “life-saving” treatments for illnesses. When the executive branch announced a review of Harvard’s federal funding, Garber wrote again about the threat posed to life-sustaining research and science.

And on Monday, when he announced that the University will defy Trump’s demands, Garber’s defense of higher education specifically cited its contributions to breakthroughs in areas like artificial intelligence and Alzheimer’s treatment.

To be clear, I couldn’t agree more: Harvard’s research produces invaluable advancements in health and engineering. And from a public relations standpoint, this may very well be the best message the University can send right now.

But the fact remains that much of Harvard’s teaching and research isn’t about medicine or technology — and that doesn’t mean it’s any less important. If even Harvard can’t make a case for the academic project as a whole, then our University’s problems will last for far longer than the next four years.

The thing we’ve failed to reckon with is that — though scientific research will bear the brunt of Trump’s attacks because it benefits so much from federal funding — it’s not his real target.

Since late February, the NIH has canceled more than $110 million in research grants to Harvard and its hospitals, all — according to analysis by The Crimson — for projects that discuss gender and sexual identity, Covid-19, or health disparities. In March, two Harvard Medical School professors sued the Trump administration after their research was removed from a government-run website for merely including terms like “LGBTQ” and “transgender.” And now, because Harvard won’t dismantle DEI or comply with unprecedented and overreaching federal audits, Trump has pulled billions in funding across the board.

Trump is coming after Harvard because we sponsor area studies. Because we’re home to academics who might question his agenda. Because we produce research that makes the mistake of daring to acknowledge race and gender, or literally just the word “minority.”

Clearly, he’s decided that if it takes losing cancer research to rip higher education from the grasp of “leftist dopes,” it’s worth the cost.

In response, Harvard is trying to convince the public otherwise. But as long as all we do is advocate for the research that no one finds objectionable, I find it hard to believe that we won’t keep facing backlash for the rest of our worthwhile work.

A truly robust defense of Harvard and higher ed against charges of pushing “communist indoctrination” has to engage with the crime with which we’re being charged. Here’s how I would start.

For one, out of Trump’s mouth, “political” is obviously a dog whistle for anything that mentions identity. But just because research concerns gender or race doesn’t mean that it is any less rigorous or relevant to the broader public. Harvard research projects that have come under threat cover every topic from suicide risk assesment to endometriosis. They still go through rigorous peer-review and they still speak to problems worth solving.

Second, even research that doesn’t serve every member of the public or directly “save lives” still has value. Why are we so hesitant to fund and celebrate academic work when the lives being preserved — or just described — belong to women or people of color or LGBTQ+ people?

What’s more, research isn’t just meant to extend lives, it’s also meant to improve them. After all, curing disease means very little if we can’t figure out how to pay for treatment or ensure that everyone can access it in the first place. These are exactly the kinds of problems that the “political” research Trump has been attacking seeks to solve.

And finally, politics is actually central to the work of the academy. “The promise of American higher education” — to borrow Garber’s language — is that we can apply careful research to life’s most pressing problems, producing new knowledge that will help us solve them.

The reality is that many of these problems are fundamentally political in nature. Questions of how to distribute resources in an unequal society or live well with other people are notoriously complicated, but knowledge generated and disseminated by universities can help us answer them.

I know that we believe every unit of our University has something to offer society. Now, the task at hand is convincing the country of that.

E. Matteo Diaz ’27, an Associate Editorial editor and Crimson Diversity and Inclusivity Chair, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Applied Mathematics in Leverett House.