Donald Trump attended the first Ultimate Fighting Championship event of his new presidency on Saturday, reveling off stage in a standing ovation from Maga supporters and on stage in the barely controlled violence of a sport he has long adored.
The previous day he instigated his own UFC bout, picking a fight with one of the US’s most formidable opponents: Harvard is not only the world’s richest university, with a $53bn endowment that is bigger than the GDP of almost 100 countries, it is also the oldest in the US.
It was founded in 1636, which makes it 140 years older than the United States itself. Round one to Harvard!
The terms in which the US president picked this fight, though, suggests that he was itching to start it even against such heavyweight competition. The five-page screed that the Trump administration sent late on Friday night to Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, made demands that would have been virtually impossible for any self-respecting academic leader to accept.
They included federal government oversight of admissions and an end to recruitment of international students “hostile to American values” – whatever that meant. Most egregiously, the administration insisted on imposing “viewpoint diversity”, essentially ideological control, over faculty appointments.
Harvard, which had previously made conciliatory gestures in the face of Trump’s accusations of campus antisemitism, finally stepped into the ring on Monday.
In a message titled The Promise of American Higher Education, Garber bluntly rejected the demands and stated that Harvard would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”.
Let the fight begin! The awe-inspiring might of the federal government is now pitted against the intellectual and institutional might of the US’s most revered university.
There is much riding on the outcome. Harvard has already been punished with $2.3bn in frozen federal funds this week, and Trump is threatening to terminate the full $9bn in US government subsidies and take away its tax-exempt status. Those would be savage blows, even with such a hefty endowment.
The stakes are even higher for other, less financially padded, institutions. Harvard may be too big to fail, but others are not.
The education department has put at least 60 universities on notice that they will be investigated under the guise of alleged campus antisemitism. According to the New York Times, top White House aides including Trump’s powerful policy guru, Stephen Miller, have talked privately about “toppling” a high-profile university to set a chilling example.
“These attacks are not a minor disagreement over policy,” Ryan Enos, a political scientist and professor of government at Harvard, said. “They are an authoritarian attack on higher education.”
Enos was co-author last month of a letter urging the university to resist, which was signed by more than 800 faculty. The letter landed at a tense time in which Harvard looked poised to capitulate to Trump’s demands, as Columbia University had done.
Harvard authorities had forced out the leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in a move which Enos and many other faculty members interpreted as a “clear violation of academic freedom”. When the university authorities finally took a stand on Monday, the relief was palpable.
Now that the battle has been joined, and with the potential survival of some universities in the balance, the onus is on Harvard to take on Trump, and win. Enos noted that it was critical that Harvard stands strong in the face of government intimidation.
“Harvard cannot lose track of its own values. They must not do the Trump administration’s work for it, even when the pressure is intense,” he said.
One thing is clear: if Harvard, armor-plated by its history and logistically bolstered by its endowment, cannot resist this onslaught, then nobody can. Yet it won’t be easy.
The US is littered with the battered remains of Trump’s defeated rivals, from a legion of moderate Republicans, through top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, to even federal prosecutors who tried to nail him and largely failed.
What can Harvard do differently that Trump’s earlier victims could not? Some of the strategy will be channeled through litigation and the courts.
In his message on Monday, Garber alluded to possible legal action challenging Trump for violating the university’s first amendment right to free speech. He also laid the groundwork for a lawsuit accusing the administration of exceeding its powers under title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race discrimination in programs supported by federal funding.
As a second channel, Harvard intends to lobby Republican politicians hard on Capitol Hill. It has employed the Trump-friendly firm Ballard Partners, a lobbying company whose founder, Brian Ballard, was Trump’s Florida finance chair in 2016.
But where the fight is likely to be most hotly contested – and may well be lost or won – is in the battle for American hearts and minds.
“What matters above all is the relationship between America’s colleges and the American people,” said Danielle Allen, who directs the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Allen has already felt the sting of Trump’s attacks. A program she runs promoting civic education in schools had its $6m grant from the Pentagon pulled by Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn effort, the so-called “department of government efficiency”; she is now having to reconfigure the work on a much smaller footprint.
Allen would like to see Harvard seize this moment to forge what she called in a recent Atlantic article a new social contract with the American people. She proposes a campaign on the part of all US universities to thank the American people for their support.
“We haven’t said thank you enough, and that’s what we should be doing across the country. It’s time for a comprehensive statement of thanks to the American people from American higher education,” she said.
Harvard has moved swiftly to address public support, but from the opposite direction. Rather than thanking the people, it is seeking to show them why they should thank it.
The university has recast its website with an audacious rebuttal to Trump’s slurs, showcasing some of Harvard’s most stunning achievements – with a heavy accent on medical breakthroughs that have transformed countless lives: new treatment for sickle cell patients, new ways of looking at autism, groundbreaking research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease and hearing loss.
The website goes on to brag about jaw-dropping innovations: the first US graduate program in business administration, 1908; the first organ transplant, 1954; the first quantum computing processor, 2023.
IRS reportedly planning to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status
On a lighter note, Harvard presented its secret weapon by throwing Elmo into the UFC ring. Yes, Sesame Street emerged in 1969 from the Harvard graduate school of education.
Not to mention that a Harvard chemist in 1854 invented baking powder. Or that, in a wry nod to Trump’s obsession, in 1899 a Harvard dentist created the first golf tee (Trump won’t like this, but the inventor, George Franklin Grant, was Black).
“They are saying that Harvard research is a part of our daily lives, that it is relatable to the average person,” said Teresa Valerio Parrot, principal at the higher education consulting agency TVP Communications.
“Every college and university across the country has stories like this, and can now emulate what Harvard is doing.”
It all makes for powerful messaging. But then, it is hard to match Trump’s counter-messaging for its sheer punch. Where Harvard has gone high, the president, true to form, is going very, very low.
He has called the university a “joke”, accused it of teaching “hate and stupidity”, and claimed it supports terrorism and what he called, puzzlingly, “sickness”.
The potency of this is not only that he is pumping it out to his almost 10 million Truth Social followers, or that it is being amplified by the media to the 77 million people who voted for him in November. His stream of invective is also exploiting a vulnerability that for years has troubled Harvard and other prestigious universities – their disconnect with public sympathies.
Confidence in US higher education has been on a steady decline in the past decade. Gallup polls have traced the fall, from 57% who had a great deal of confidence in it in 2015, to just 36% in 2024.
It is perhaps no coincidence that in the same timespan the cost of a private college or university education has risen astronomically. Next academic year, Harvard undergraduates will pay close to $90,000 a year for tuition and living costs.
That has left top schools accessible to super wealthy students on the one hand, and paradoxically on the other to lower-income students who can benefit from full rides. But it leaves the vast middle swathe of Americans in the lurch.
Allen said that this mounting crisis had been known for a quarter of a century, and yet the solution remains elusive.
“We’ve tried to take whacks at that through financial aid, but it hasn’t addressed the needs of the middle class,” she said, adding that it was time to think out of the box. As a starter, she suggested three- instead of four-year courses, on the UK model.
The conundrum is that these structural problems run deep and will take time to fix – the one thing you don’t have in the UFC ring is time.
As round two opens, Trump is certain to double down on his denigration of Harvard as a woke liberal bastion detached from the American people. No matter that he and his henchmen are all beneficiaries of the very elite education they now deride: Trump at the University of Pennsylvania, his vice-president, JD Vance, at Yale, Miller at the “Harvard of the south”, Duke University.
Harvard must act quickly and nimbly to hit back. For Enos, that means striking Trump at his core.
“When authoritarians attack free speech at a university, they are attacking the very system that undergirds freedom in the United States,” he said.
“That is something that all Americans, regardless of political view, should reject.”
