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{shortcode-24643cedbe14221289878261864001a8ceef067a}ne in two faculty members who responded to a survey of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said the Trump administration’s actions have discouraged them from expressing their political views.
More than 70 percent reported feeling negatively about the state of academic freedom at United States colleges and universities. Pressure from the government was the most cited threat to academic freedom, with 85 percent of respondents identifying it as a major fear.
These results — a strikingly grim outlook for academic freedom at Harvard — come after the Trump administration conditioned billions of dollars in federal funding on sweeping demands, in a move many affiliates argued would undermine free inquiry on campus. The conditions included external audits of faculty and students for viewpoint diversity, as well as audits of schools that “reflect ideological capture.”
“They want to directly review who we hire on our faculty. That has implications for what kinds of views can be expressed on campus,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said in an April interview with NBC.
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Garber rejected the demands in a blistering public letter and sued the Trump administration, arguing that the move violated the University’s First Amendment rights. Faculty and students have cheered Harvard’s defiance in the weeks and months since.
But these survey results suggest that even as the University openly resists the White House, faculty remain deeply concerned that intervention from Washington — alongside growing donor influence and widespread self-censorship on campus — is stifling voices on campus.
A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The Crimson’s FAS survey was distributed to more than 1,400 faculty members, including both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty, with names collected from the FAS’ public masthead. Faculty were polled on demographic information, politics, and campus issues.
The email survey had 406 responses, with 260 fully completed and 146 partially completed. The survey was open for three weeks, from April 23 to May 12.
This is the third installment in a series of pieces on the survey results. The first focused on support for Harvard’s lawsuit, and the second covered faculty perspectives on the University’s governance. This installment details perspectives on academic freedom, student protests, and diversity initiatives.
Academic Freedom
Faculty have long been pessimistic about the state of academic freedom at Harvard. But their outlook has only grown gloomier since last year, when only 57 percent of respondents felt negatively about free inquiry on campus — more than 10 percentage points lower than the figure from this year’s survey.
Compared to last year, the share of respondents who said they felt “somewhat negatively” stayed almost constant at roughly 37 percent. But those who felt “very negative” nearly doubled, from 18 percent to 34 percent.
Professors cited pressure from the government as the greatest threat to academic freedom, though they also pointed to self-censorship and pressure from donors as major concerns. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said self-censorship posed a danger to academic freedom, while more than half said the same for pressure from donors.
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Faculty have become increasingly concerned about self-censorship in recent months after an FAS committee on classroom norms reported that many Harvard College students self-censor when discussing controversial topics in class. The findings prompted the FAS to amend the College’s student handbook with new language explicitly barring grading grading based on political beliefs and introducing a non-attribution policy for discussions in class.
In The Crimson’s survey, more than 30 percent of respondents said their students “always” or “often” refrain from expressing their political views during class, while the same percentage said students “rarely” or “never” hold back from sharing their political beliefs. Another 42 percent said their students “sometimes” hold back their beliefs.
Most respondents last year blamed the political right for the dangers to academic freedom. But this year’s results showed faculty shifting blame even further to the right, with 77 percent of respondents saying they thought academic freedom was threatened more by the political right. In comparison, 12 percent of faculty said they thought academic freedom was threatened more by the left.
Last year, only a narrow majority of respondents, 51 percent, held the political right responsible for imperiling academic freedom, while 26 percent said it was threatened more by the left.
This shift was likely influenced by the Trump administration’s escalating pressure campaign against Harvard. The White House has slashed nearly $3 billion in federal funding over the University’s refusal to accept the sweeping demands many faculty view as an affront to academic freedom.
Meanwhile, federal crackdowns on pro-Palestine activism have hit international students and faculty particularly hard. At other universities, students and researchers have been detained and threatened with deportation over pro-Palestine speech — which led a group of Harvard faculty to join a First Amendment lawsuit this spring. And at least one Harvard-affiliated researcher who studies the Israel-Palestine conflict was blocked from entering the U.S.
The Trump administration has repeatedly accused Harvard of lacking ideological diversity, demanding that it reshape its faculty and student body in response. But faculty seemed significantly less concerned about lacking ideological diversity than the administration.
Only 13 percent of respondents said a lack of ideological diversity among students was one of the greatest threats to academic freedom, making it the least chosen of 10 factors that The Crimson polled faculty on. A quarter of respondents said a lack of ideological diversity among faculty was a top concern — making it the factor that received the third-smallest share.
However, respondents were somewhat more concerned about intolerance among students and among faculty, with 39 and 32 percent of respondents respectively ranking them as major threats.
Just 34 percent of respondents said that University restrictions on protest were major threats to academic freedom. The same fraction cited administrators’ policies and messaging.
Harvard has undertaken several controversial academic decisions this year — including cutting ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank, forcing out the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and suspending Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. But the survey results suggest that FAS faculty do not consider those moves as threatening as external pressure.
The survey does show that many faculty worry that Harvard’s decisions have been swayed by outside parties. More than 70 percent of respondents said they think donors have too much influence on the actions of the University, a slight decrease from last year. A stark majority of respondents — 83 percent — said they think national politicians have excessive influence on Harvard’s actions. Around 76 percent said the same last year.
The findings come as the University resumes negotiations with the Trump administration. Garber has said that Harvard has focused on presenting how it has acted on shared concerns — including antisemitism and viewpoint diversity — but the FAS survey results show that faculty may be less convinced that those issues create common ground with the White House.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programming has been another target for the Trump administration, but most Harvard faculty did not view it as a major threat to academic freedom. Just less than a quarter of FAS survey respondents identified it as a top concern.
The survey also found broad support among faculty for DEI principles, with 55 percent of respondents saying Harvard should prioritize DEI principles, and 27 percent saying the University should not.
The University has been moving away from diversity programming as it comes under fire — axing diversity statements from faculty hiring processes, leaving key DEI-related leadership posts unoccupied for years, pulling support from affinity group Commencement celebrations, and renaming its diversity office to “Community and Campus Life.” Several of the changes followed demands from the Trump administration that Harvard dismantle its DEI programming and that universities end affinity graduation celebrations based on race.
A majority of respondents said they believed recent efforts to discredit DEI initiatives were unfair, with 33 percent saying they “strongly agree” and 25 percent saying they “somewhat agree” with the notion.
Despite their widespread support for DEI principles, faculty were divided over whether Harvard has effectively implemented those principles in its programming. Approximately 30 percent of respondents approved of the University’s implementation, but 39 percent disapproved. Another third also said they were ambivalent with how Harvard has run its DEI programming.
Faculty respondents were also split over whether Harvard has been too harsh or not harsh enough in its response to student protests on campus. Forty-three percent said the University has been “appropriately restrictive or permissive” toward protests, while 40 percent said the administration has been “too restrictive.”
Protests have been another flashpoint in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Harvard. In its April 11 demands letter, the administration asked the University to discipline student protesters who violated time, place, and manner rules. In a more recent letter, the Trump administration praised the University for centralizing protest policies, though it still said the changes fell short of its expectations.
—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.
