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{shortcode-a0fafb3727a5405eac46bd1741f1eafab86bbf7e}arvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 made it clear on Monday that the University was preparing to push back. He alleged that the Trump administration’s demands — conditions for keeping nearly $9 billion in federal funding — encroached on the school’s constitutional rights.
The Trump administration responded quickly, freezing $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard. In an evening press release, the administration’s antisemitism task force stated that Harvard did not deserve government funding unless it curbed antisemitism and campus disruptions.
To understand what Harvard might do next, I spoke with Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president and Secretary of the Treasury. We talked about how he sees the funding cuts as a “short-run storm,” how Harvard could weather it, and how the school could win back the American public after a crisis of confidence.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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FM: Two weeks ago, after the Trump administration said it would review nearly $9 billion in federal funding to Harvard, you wrote that Harvard needed to push back against an administration acting in bad faith. Now, it’s happened. How do you feel?
LHS: I’m very glad to see the University’s response. I thought President Garber’s letter to the community and our lawyers’ legal response to the administration attorneys were both eloquent, forceful, and appropriate.
FM: Hours later, the federal government froze $2.2 billion in funding to Harvard. You’ve overseen the University’s finances before. How, if at all, does Harvard plan for situations like these?
LHS: There are all kinds of elaborate contingency planning exercises. We don’t know over what horizon the $2 billion was going to come in. I suspect that a temporary interruption of funding is something that, with a lot of strain in the financial offices, the University can manage and weather. Certainly, short-run financial concern should not be something that causes the University to be weak. If cuts of this kind were to become permanent, that would — I imagine — force much more dramatic rethinking of the way the University operates, but we’re well short of that at this point.
FM: You wrote two weeks ago that there are ways to cleverly maneuver endowment funds to weather a financial crisis, including, potentially, the use of funds restricted by donors to specific causes. Can you walk me through what that would look like?
LHS: There are a number of ways of mobilizing funds. The University has, including in the president’s office, substantial reserve funds. There are areas where there are restricted funds that are being used where there are also unrestricted funds being used, and so, by increasing the flow of restricted funds, one would free up unrestricted funds. The University in the past, for major university causes, has placed levies on all endowments across the board. So, there are a variety of ways of achieving financial flexibility.
These types of measures usually are more effective in weathering short-run storms than fundamental long-run changes in climate, but my hope would be that what Harvard is confronting is a short-run storm.
FM: Does having $50 billion during a time of financial uncertainty give any sort of competitive advantage?
LHS: Most of the elite universities have very large endowments relative to their operating costs. In part, Harvard’s larger endowment reflects that it is a larger-scale institution with many more professional schools than Princeton and much larger professional schools than Yale or Stanford.
But, certainly, financial strength is an asset in troubled times, and I would hope that Harvard would use this moment to take advantage of targets of opportunity — for example, brilliant faculty members who for some reason become less comfortable about the prospects for their home university. I would hope that any freezing of activity would cover more administrative activity than investments in the University’s long-run future, like the hiring of brilliant new junior faculty.
FM: You’ve been very vocal about the presence of antisemitism at Harvard, and you’ve called out its lack of ideological diversity. At the same time, you’ve said the Trump administration is misusing those concerns in an effort to control universities. If, as you’ve said, the University has failed to address these concerns on its own, is there a time when the federal government should step in? And if so, what does that look like when done right?
LHS: I think one needs to distinguish discrimination from general concerns that the University could operate better. It’s not the place of the federal government to decide that institutions, for-profit or non-profit, could fulfill their missions better and start ordering them around. That’s not what happens in a free society.
It is the case with respect to discrimination, carefully defined.
The federal government’s financial interventions at universities that banned interracial dating were, in my view, appropriate. And so, in the face of egregious tolerance of antisemitism, for the federal government to enter dialogue and even to place pressure around specific policies, I think is appropriate. I had no objection to the Biden administration’s decision to investigate Harvard and other universities over antisemitism. But a decision to investigate is a very different thing than a set of announcements that contravene the relevant statute many ways over.
FM: Did you find any of the Trump administration’s demands to be reasonable?
LHS: There was material in the Trump administration’s letter that connected to many of the concerns I’ve expressed around antisemitism, around ideological diversity, around excesses in the name of DEI, around failure to maintain order, but the tone and manner and bludgeon that was involved in the Trump administration letter seemed to me something that the University had to reject.
There will be a temptation on the part of some to focus on how outrageous the Trump administration demands are and lose sight of the many ways in which great universities like ours have estranged themselves from the broader society and the need for internal reform. It’s troubling to me that it has taken as long as it has to come to the conclusion that major reform was necessary at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies or that postponing our Birzeit University partnership was in order.
The near-unanimity that seems to exist that Harvard must respond to this external threat should never be confused with legitimate grounds for complacency about the way in which we’re now operating.
FM: Many Americans have been disillusioned with elite higher education for some time. Would elite higher education have eventually come under attack even without Donald Trump?
LHS: Donald Trump was not president when the congressional hearing took place last year that generated more views than any hearing in the history of the Congress. So, I think there’s no question that these issues were very much present apart from Donald Trump, and, by the way, these are long-standing themes in American history. Ronald Reagan began his political career by running for the governorship of California against a popular two-term incumbent — Pat Brown. His most successful issue during his campaign against Governor Brown involved his attacks on the excesses at Berkeley during the early days of the Vietnam War protests. So, the divisions — the issues between universities and the broader society — are not new.
As university faculties have become more and more unified in terms of their ideological beliefs — as various doctrines that are fashionable in academia but questionable to most in the broader society, like some of the ideas in critical theory, have had increasing influence within the academy — the divisions have increased. So, it’s a very difficult balance that has to be struck. The job of universities is to create new thought. Going back to Galileo and Socrates, new thought is often threatening and angering to the broader society that wants to and does seek to retaliate. And so, the challenge is to not lose the academic freedom, which is what we’re all about, but at the same time to maintain a broader connection and the respect of the broader society.
FM: Can universities like Harvard regain public approval? And if so, how?
LHS: I think these things always fluctuate and, in general, in life it’s a good rule that there are no final victories and no final defeats — or that, as statisticians like to say, things mean revert.
I think if Harvard shows itself to be returning to the pursuit of truth rather than advancement of particular causes of social justice; I think if Harvard emphasizes diversity of perspective more and diversity of demography less, in line with the Supreme Court’s edicts; I think if Harvard does less commentary from a far left perspective on the political issues of the day; I think if Harvard does more to contribute to the vast challenges of education by greatly broadening its efforts in distance education and by engaging in a substantial way with the task of improving public schools; I think if Harvard becomes less exclusive by allowing the scale of its classes to increase somewhat, by making its summer school an engine of opportunity; I think if Harvard focuses on assuring that its remarkable capacity for innovation is effectively translated into viable private enterprises that increase American competitiveness and employ large numbers of people; I think that, in those ways and many more, Harvard can further demonstrate the immense contribution that it makes to the success of the American project and humanity more broadly.
But I think that achieving all of that will require some adjustment in our ethos — away from self-regard, away from taking pride in exclusivity, and towards thinking of ourselves as institutional citizens. But I think there’s an incredible number of very, very dedicated extraordinary people in the Harvard community. I am a big fan of Alan Garber’s, and so, while I think we’re headed into a very challenging time, I’m ultimately an optimist.
FM: What’s the mood like among professors you interact with? Do people think this is survivable, or is higher education headed for major change?
LHS: I think everybody should speak for themselves. I reject the terms of your question, Neil. I think it’s survivable because higher education is going to change in major ways that are going to make it better and magnify its contributions to the United States and to humanity more broadly.
FM: You’ve spoken about the importance of globalizing higher education and about how Harvard needs to admit both more international students and give its students more international experiences. With the recent wave of student visa cancellations, do you think those ideals are still achievable?
LHS: I hope so. I would hope that the University is very vigorously defending members of our community against injustice. It can’t be Harvard’s place to resolve every immigration dispute or to become engaged in the personal affairs of everyone who works or studies here, but, where there are — as has been reported — attacks on Harvard people for reasons related to what they do at Harvard, I would hope that as appropriate in public or private ways Harvard would be very, very much standing with them.
I’ve always thought that Harvard has a crucial role to play as an American university with global reach. And I think by focusing on the global aspect, it best advances American interests.
I remember very well the story of a man named Yakovlev who was Gorbachev’s ideological advisor, and he was the man who invented “perestroika” and “glasnost” — the concepts that drove the liberalization that brought the Berlin Wall down and ended the Cold War. And he was asked: where did he get those ideas? And the answer was he got them from a year he had spent in the United States as a graduate student in some kind of exchange program. If you think about it, having done that, if all of academia’s efforts at global interchange had done nothing more than that, a major contribution to the peaceful end of the Cold War would be enough to justify all of it. I think it’s profoundly important, and I hope and trust that that is something that Harvard will remain open to.
Let me say, if I could, just a final thing.
FM: Go for it.
LHS: Harvard is an extraordinary institution — above all because of the remarkable quality of the people who engaged with it and who have passed through its gates but also because of the scale of its resources and the power of its reputation. At a time of testing for the country and in the world, with all of our privilege, it’s never been more important that we think about what is right and carry it out in ways that best serve both the immediate moment and posterity. That’s why I think it’s important for all of us to think very carefully about what we are doing and how we can maximize its positive impact. That means being willing to rethink where that’s appropriate, resist when that’s necessary, and respond when new conditions and new challenges make new approaches necessary.
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After our initial conversation, President Donald Trump threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and CNN reported that the Internal Revenue Service had started planning to do so. Summers called to offer his thoughts.
FM: Yesterday morning, President Trump threatened to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Could Harvard, as we know it, survive that, and is that even possible?
LHS: I used to be Treasury secretary. The idea of the President of the United States intervening with respect to the tax status of an individual institution is something that would have been beyond conceivable in any previous administration. It violates every norm, every ethic, and, I very strongly suspect, a variety of relevant statutes. I cannot imagine that the selective persecution of an institution via political pressure from the president would be permitted by the judiciary. Certainly, anything in this direction would have been a resignation issue for the IRS commissioners I knew and very likely for the Treasury secretary as well.
There is, of course, a policy question about whether universities should be eligible for charitable contributions. That is the kind of policy question that Congress addresses in tax legislation. It would be legal to reach a broad judgment about the tax status of universities. The evidence from many economic studies is overwhelming that the charitable deduction is an enormous stimulus to giving to universities and other institutions.
Without philanthropy, our great universities could not be what they are in terms of preserving the Western tradition, serving as custodians for humanity’s greatest ideas, and advancing scientific progress on everything from artificial intelligence to cancer cures and from the atmospheric science of global warming to the treatment of badly injured accident victims. There is no single factor more important in explaining why almost all of the world’s best universities are American than our tradition of private institutions supported by philanthropy.
FM: Do you think that Harvard’s decision to fight the federal government on this is going to lead to more philanthropy?
LHS: I hope that the University’s supporters will come forward in support of academic freedom. I know that I would be very responsive to any kind of academic freedom appeal as an alum, and I suspect thousands of others would as well.
The stakes here go beyond new buildings for Harvard. They go to the idea of progress through thought and to the preservation of American democracy.
—Magazine writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15.
