Harvard Does the Right Thing—Inadvertently
By Amity Shlaes
This essay is adapted from Amity Shlaes’s regular column “The Forgotten Book,” which she pens for “Capital Matters” as a fellow of National Review Institute.
Bravo, Harvard.
All these decades the educational establishment left Hillsdale College by its lonesome to reject federal funds in exchange for institutional independence. A few other intrepid institutions—Grove City comes to mind—have rejected federal aid in the name of both intellectual independence and faith.
But where were the other private universities? Not private enough to give up federal funding, whether for student tuition fees, quadrangle rhododendrons, wind tunnels, or NMR Spectrometers.
Especially not the Ivies.
Now Harvard has turned on the Trump administration, rejecting $2.2 billion in support in exchange for independence. Responding to a set of demands from the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, the university lawyers wrote back that Harvard will not accede because it “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
The blunt “no” apparently proved enough to unnerve Team Trump, which is already backpedaling with a claim that the White House didn’t approve the orders in the first place.
Of course, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, may be staging a temporary, theatrical, break, which is to say a stall until the Trump administration completes it cave. Or until midterms or the next presidential election. Perhaps Garber is banking on the likelihood that then, Harvard can run back into Democratic government arms.
How shrewd that would be of Garber. The ambiguity that Garber has left open reminds us all that when it comes to the Art of the Deal, President Trump has plenty of competition.
But in the meantime, what most scientists and just about all academics until recently dismissed as an absurd question—why can’t private universities actually be private?—is finally out there for genuine consideration. The Trump administration therefore gets a bravo here, too. The administration acted just obnoxiously enough to provoke a heavyweight like Harvard into doing what a big private university should have done long ago: turn its back on the federal government.
All the gifts Harvard has been receiving from sympathetic donors in recent days could be interpreted as progressive fealty. But we’ll take the polite interpretation and say that the private sector is finally stepping up when it should. So a third round of praise is in order: Bravo, Harvard donors!
Seymour Saw This Coming
One book that underscored the precious importance of university independence is dear to the heart of Capital Matters, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. As Buckley noted way back in the early 1950s, a president of that university, Charles Seymour, warned “urgently and repeatedly against accepting federal aid to education on the grounds it would bring federal interference.”
In 1948 Seymour advised Yale’s donor pool that taking Washington’s money would, soon enough, mean taking direction from the government on admissions: Yale must be “completely free to select those we regard best fitted for the privilege of a Yale education.”
Yale would itself therefore raise “very large sums” by old-style philanthropic drives, Seymour promised.
Seymour retired in 1950, and needless to say, Yale didn’t stick to his principles. Nor did the rest of the Ivies.
“The camel’s nose is into the tent,” National Review warned in 1958.
Why Private Universities Turned to Government Funding
But what drove our finest schools into the government’s arms in the first place? As Buckley noted, a college faculty that turned away from religion tended to fill the vacuum with a new faith in expertise—and government. University profs and administrators turned en bloc to the notion quoted by Buckley that “the road to Christianity on earth lies through the federal government.”
Defense funding itself became holy, especially after the Chinese Revolution, a shock to Americans, and, especially Yale, which had invested its soul in missionary and hospital work there. In 1957, the tension rose when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, followed by several others. In the same period came reports that the Soviet Union was testing the first intercontinental ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, the rocket carrying our own first such satellite, Vanguard, exploded on the launchpad.
Defense hysteria ensued. Galvanized by the thought of losing out to communists, on land or in the ether, Congress quickly doubled federal funding for research and development and tripled funding for basic research. Via the 1958 National Defense Education Act, Washington also increased loans, scholarships, and tuition support. “The camel’s nose is into the tent,” National Review glumly concluded in 1958 after passage of the NDEA.
What a pity Harvard and the other Ivies didn’t slap the nose of that even-toed ungulate. And pull the tent flap closed. The nation’s university presidents could have staged their rebellion at this point. And continued in Harvard’s old tradition, which, like that of Yale, was to grow through private philanthropy, Seymour’s “gifts.”
But they did not. And soon enough, as so often later, the surrender claimed its price. The Republican administration and education commissioner of that day required signature of a Cold War oath and affidavit from those who received funds—every professor, every lab—from the NDEA:
I , do solemnly swear that I do not believe in and am not a member of and do not support any organization that believes or teaches the overthrow of the United States government by force.
Many of us would say that the Defense Department had every right to require that counterparties, scientists in labs, sign an oath on sensitive contracts. But the NDEA, as President Trump today, went further, requiring that even students who borrowed federal funds to finance their educations sign the oath. In 1958, then-senator John F. Kennedy led a drive to remove the oath from contracts, and during his presidency the oath requirement was repealed. The colleges, relieved, accepted yet more federal money for research of all kinds. Even long after Cold War tensions eased.
Higher Ed Makes a Bad Bet
Later, however, the susceptibility to federal lucre was due to another cause: the economy. In the 1960s and 1970s the Dow Jones Industrial Average proved a disappointment, straining toward the 1000 line but never crossing it for good. That plodding progress made the military-industrial complex seem the best funding game in town.
Perhaps the wise men of the 1960s and 1970s lacked confidence that the private sector could ever fund labs and lawns, not to mention financial aid for tens of thousands. They failed to foresee that the Dow would not only pass 1000 but rise by 40 times, to the 40,000 level that held until recently. Nowadays, when billion-dollar science start-ups are a dime a dozen, the forecast of smarty-pants university administrators and scientific geniuses on their payroll two generations back that “only Washington can do it” looks like a blooper.
In those same decades, Washington, of course, did not content itself with bossing universities. It ensnared, bribed, and tortured just about every other sector of the economy, from doctors to builders in like fashion.
Just one example, mentioned by Buckley in later editions of God and Man: real estate. In the 1970s the Carter Justice Department—led by, of all people, a former university president, Edward H. Levi, of Chicago—pressed the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers into rewriting sections of its core textbook, The Appraisal of Real Estate. Among lines to be struck from the primer were any references to “racial, religious, or ethnic factors” as relevant to appraisal, which meant dropping references to any “churches,” as well as the phrase “prestige and pride of ownership.”
So dependent did bankers and municipal governments become on federal housing money that they would do just about anything to avoid a war with Washington. Those who were in turn dependent on the banks and cities for their own pay, appraisers, therefore couldn’t do much more than bleat—and then cave. The new politically correct template for appraisal may have purged the trade—but only for the moment—of any susceptibility to allegations of racism. But the forced virtue signaling cost the appraisal profession. Since people do sometimes like to settle near relatives or coreligionists, professional appraisals became less useful, and less accurate.
The Problem with the Big Stick
To fast-forward to today’s Republicans, the Trump administration, and Harvard: Many conservatives and plenty in the commonsense center abhor Harvard’s hospitality to pro-terror groups, its DEI programs, and its move away from merit as the key admission criterion. Therefore, such thoughtful people might greet Trump’s tough terms for Harvard with praise. For them, however, as in so many other arenas, the illiberal, near-cruel fashion in which the administration moves undoes much of the charm of the undertaking.
An example: The HHS letter required that Harvard “commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government…to audit the student body, faculty, staff and leadership for viewpoint diversity.” The danger there is that Trump’s third-party contractor turns out to be just as crude or chilling as the DEI consultants who have been brought in by the hundreds to police educational institutions from the left.
Irony City! It was the GOP and Ronald Reagan, after all, who stood up for free speech in the past. After decades of work, Republicans under President Reagan finally pushed through a repeal of another Cold War institution. That institution was the Fairness Doctrine, an FCC rule that required radio and broadcasters to present commentary from both sides every time a policy matter was addressed on the air. The doctrine’s repeal made media far more interesting, enabling the rise of conservative talk radio—and Fox. How ironic to find Fox offering itself up as the stage for the administration’s hired Nurse Ratched treatment of Harvard.
And that’s not the only cringer. For more recently it was, again to their credit, Republicans who opposed the Biden and Obama drive for DEI commissars on campus. It’s therefore odd that a GOP administration would now sic on Harvard external parties—i.e., new commissars—to oversee the Trump iteration of DEI. The administration’s relish in torturing “the elite” won’t stand the GOP in good stead.
Antisemitism on campus is worse than a problem. But DEI, and universities’ umbilical connection to the government, are worse and broader challengers. The administration is all too evidently using antisemitism as a pretext for a nasty populist spree, complete with a Trump threat of top-down IRS lawfare worthy of Richard Nixon. That won’t improve the administration’s standing in other negotiations, or its legacy. To know this one only has to recall what Joe McCarthy’s tactics did for the GOP reputation.
But if the administration’s big stick provokes a complacent Harvard into seeking more independence, that at least will be useful. After all, the science and research part of Harvard is precious to the world, but less so to undergraduates’ daily lives. Supposing Garber of Harvard fights to the end. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a plan under which Harvard’s mighty hospitals and labs become independent. Grad students could collect pay for their labor in the labs. The independent scientists could either find their own funding from Washington or, better yet, from private investors.
As for Harvard College, it would have to take its private donor alumni, who ought, as per Buckley’s view, be the primary stakeholders, slightly more seriously. Anything wrong with that?
Amity Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation, is the author of Great Society, and is a fellow of National Review Institute. A version of this article first appeared in National Review’s “Capital Matters.”