“I think Harvard’s a disgrace. I think what they did was a disgrace. They’re obviously antisemitic,” Trump said when asked why the IRS was considering revoking the school’s tax-exempt status as part of an escalating battle between his administration and the nation’s most prestigious university.
Navarro stood silently to the side. Not that anyone, especially a White House official, would be expected to contradict Trump in front of the TV cameras. But since the fight against Harvard began, Navarro and other Harvard grads in the administration and top echelons of the Republican Party — and there are a significant number of them — have not said a kind word about Harvard in any public forum about the university.
In fact, when they have spoken, it’s been just the opposite.
New York Representative Elise Stefanik, who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2006, said on Tuesday that Harvard “has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education” and urged the federal government to completely “defund” the university. On his podcast Wednesday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a 1995 Harvard Law grad, described “my alma mater” as the creator of the “woke virus” and “the locus of much of the radical leftism and cultural Marxism that has done enormous damage.”
And on Friday, Navarro issued a scathing statement to the Globe when asked how he feels now about the school he spoke so fondly of in 2019.
“I cherished my time at Harvard, but Harvard has lost its way,” Navarro said. “It has allowed itself to be dragged from the pinnacle of excellence into the morass of DEI mediocrity, anti-Semitism, and woke politics — from its admissions policies and professorial appointments to its federal grant huckstering, politically weaponized lawyering, and pompous defense of the indefensible. If Harvard wants to live and posture as a political animal, it should live off its endowment, not the federal taxpayers.”
Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky, who studies authoritarianism, said there are two types of Harvard alums in Trump’s orbit.
“One are the real converts . . . people who are committed to this populist authoritarian project, which involves attacking the Ivy League,” he said, putting Stefanik and Vice President JD Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, in that category. “Their political ambition is trumping their undergraduate or law school loyalties. That’s not surprising.”
The other group, Levitsky theorized, are Harvard alumni in the administration worried about losing their jobs if they publicly object.
“They are scared to speak out on a number of issues they care about and we’ve seen all kind of disappointing disloyalty, should we say,” he said. “We’ve seen people do some pretty unsavory things because they didn’t have the chutzpah to stand up to Trump, and some Harvard alums fall into that category.”
Conservatives have long seen crimson when they look at Harvard, branding it a bastion of liberal elitism where dissenting viewpoints are not tolerated. Pete Hegseth, now Trump’s defense secretary, scrawled “return to sender” on his master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy school live on Fox News in 2022 because, he said, “we can’t keep sending our kids and elevating them to universities that are poisoning their mind.”
But Trump’s expressed disgust with Harvard and other elite institutions — including the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated — hasn’t stopped the president from boasting about the elite degrees of his top appointments.
He described Navarro as a “Harvard-trained Economist” when naming him as senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. And he took care to note Stefanik “graduated from Harvard University, with honors” when he nominated her as ambassador to the United Nations. (He withdrew the nomination in March because of concern about Republicans losing her House seat.)
Harvard alums in top Trump administration positions include Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Solicitor General John Sauer, Council of Economic Advisors Chair Stephen Miran; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as at least seven people in other high-level jobs.
“Dr. Oz comes to this position as one of the nation’s most talented and beloved medical professionals. He graduated from Harvard University. Ah, Harvard,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office before Oz was sworn in. Trump paused and Oz laughed in light of the controversy.
“Well, how convenient,” Trump continued. “Should we talk about Harvard?”
Trump said nothing more during that event. But he has said plenty about Harvard since it became the first university to fight back against administration demands for major changes, including ending diversity programs, allowing external audits of some academic programs; and providing information about foreign students to federal authorities. Harvard’s refusal infuriated Trump, leading his administration to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funding, consider revoking its tax exempt status, and take other steps as punishment.
“Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges,” Trump wrote Wednesday in a long diatribe on his social media site. “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.”
For conservatives, Harvard is the ultimate liberal foe.
“At its essence, Harvard is the epitome of elite institutions in this country,” said Republican pollster Jon McHenry, adding the university is a proxy for “all the people who held us down during the COVID lockdowns or all the people who tell us how we should live our lives and tell us we need to use pronouns.”
“It sort of sums it all up by just saying ‘Harvard,’ ” McHenry said.
Anger had been simmering for years on the political right as Harvard seemed to move further to the left. And the feud exploded with the intense protests that erupted on Harvard’s campus — as at many universities — over the war in Gaza after the deadly Oct. 7, 2023 ,Hamas attack on Israel. Some Jewish students said they felt threatened and Harvard was hit with allegations it was ignoring antisemitism.
Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned in early 2024 in part because of the controversy, which included her disastrous answers to questions about antisemitism on campus during a congressional hearing. The president of the University of Pennsylvania also stepped down following her testimony at the hearing. Last summer, a third Ivy League leader, the president of Columbia University, resigned because of the controversy over the handling of Gaza war protests.
Representative Seth Moulton of Salem, a 2011 Harvard graduate, was among the Democrats who slammed the university’s response to the protests. But he said Trump has gone too far in trying to force changes at Harvard.
“This is not about antisemitism. This is a personal vendetta, and personal vendettas are the practice of childish dictators,” Moulton said. “I have often criticized Harvard for not doing enough to protect Jewish students and for not doing enough to encourage more open debate. Harvard has had some challenges over the last decade, but these are solved by thoughtful debate at a private institution, not by having the government come in and try to control what students think or believe.”
Moulton said it’s important that Harvard is fighting the Trump administration.
“Whether you like it or not, everyone looks to Harvard as a great university, some would say the best in the world,” Moulton said. “And so Harvard has an obligation to lead, an obligation to be true to its values, one of which is truth.”
Fighting back — publicly and legally — was exactly what Levitsky and a colleague called for when they circulated a letter in late March to the university’s leaders after Columbia acquiesced to Trump administration demands following the withholding of $400 million in federal funds. The letter was signed by 840 of their fellow professors.
“If we’re not going to lose our democracy, somebody’s got to push back and defend our democracy, and if it’s not Harvard, who’s it going to be?” Levitsky said.
And he doesn’t think it’s going to be Harvard graduates in Trump’s Republican Party.
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.
