Harvard faculty members who fear school’s destruction urge Trump deal

WASHINGTON – Dr Kit Parker is used to being an anomaly on Harvard University’s campus. The physicist – an army reserve colonel who served in Afghanistan – is a long-time critic of the school’s hiring practices and what he sees as liberal biases. 

For months, he has urged the university to address criticisms from the White House, even as the vast majority of his colleagues applauded

Harvard’s decision to resist President Donald Trump’s efforts

to reshape higher education.

These days, in Dr Parker’s telling, he finds himself less isolated as Harvard confronts the harsh realities of a sustained fight with the US government.

Three months after university president Alan Garber struck a defiant tone by vowing not to “surrender its independence or its constitutional rights”, an increasingly vocal group of professors across schools, including engineering, law and medicine, say Harvard should reach a deal. 

Faculty such as Dr Parker and Dr Eric Maskin, an economics and mathematics professor who won a Nobel Prize in 2007, want Harvard to resolve the clash with Mr Trump before punishing financial penalties cause irreparable damage to the school and the US. They and other faculty agree that reform is needed to address issues including anti-Semitism, political bias and academic rigour. Harvard declined to comment on negotiations with the government.

The stakes for

Harvard will be in focus

on July 21, when a federal judge in Boston hears arguments on whether the Trump administration illegally froze more than US$2 billion (S$2.57 billion) in research funding, as the university claims.

In a sign that the Trump administration is not running out of ways to challenge the school, government agencies in July threatened Harvard’s accreditation and subpoenaed data on its international students.

Just last week, Dr Garber warned that the combined impact of the federal government’s actions could cost the school as much as US$1 billion annually – a figure that takes into account federal research cuts, a higher endowment tax and the government’s continuing attempt to ban it from enrolling foreign students. Dr Garber said the school will continue to slash expenditures and that a hiring freeze will remain in place.

“There’s a point at which the grant cuts destroy Harvard as a leading university,” said law professor Mark Ramseyer. “That point is far below US$1 billion. So we were already fully in the disaster zone.”

Faculty members like Dr Parker, Dr Maskin and Dr Ramseyer – all members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a campus group that says it supports free inquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse – remain a minority in the wider Harvard community. 

In a survey of professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), 71 per cent said they believed Harvard should not try to reach an agreement with the Trump administration. The poll was conducted by the student newspaper in April and May, and less than a third of some 1,400 professors it was distributed to responded, meaning it might not be a representative sample of views overall. FAS houses 40 academic departments.

An alumni group called Crimson Courage continues to urge Dr Garber to fight, and many students would find a settlement unpalatable. “Standing strong is not merely an operational exercise: it is a moral imperative,” Crimson Courage said in June in a letter to Dr Garber and the board that oversees the university. “The world is watching and needs Harvard’s leadership and courage now.”

The splits hint at the delicate position Harvard’s leadership is in after months of standing up to the Trump administration, including by suing the government for cutting off federal funding and to prevent a ban on international students.

In the hearing on July 21 in the federal funding case, Harvard is poised to argue that the administration’s freeze violated its First Amendment rights and failed to follow proper procedures under civil rights law. But the administration argues that Harvard failed to address anti-Semitism, and the US acted properly under federal law in terminating funding.

Harvard has said it is working to combat anti-Semitism with steps like updating its rules on use of campus spaces, reviewing its disciplinary processes and funding projects aimed at bridging campus divisions.

For Dr Garber and the Harvard Corporation, the powerful governing body led by Ms Penny Pritzker, striking a deal quickly would offer significant benefits.

Students are set to start returning to campus in a matter of weeks, so reaching a settlement before then would potentially allow the school to provide a measure of clarity to international students before the start of the academic year. If funding were restored as part of an agreement, it could also end months of uncertainty for researchers.

Mr David Bergeron, a former acting assistant secretary at the Department of Education in Mr Barack Obama’s administration, pointed to another advantage for Harvard of arriving at an agreement soon.

“There are fewer faculty and students around in the summer to object,” Mr Bergeron said. 

Now that the school has become an avatar for resistance to Mr Trump’s efforts to transform higher education, a settlement will be perceived by some key constituencies as a capitulation. 

Dr Bertha Madras, who has been a professor at Harvard Medical School since 1986, said she thinks some of the changes that could stem from an agreement would benefit the university – even if she thought Mr Trump’s tactics for achieving them were aggressive. 

“This new reality calls for institutional pride to yield to negotiations,” said the professor of psychobiology, adding that she sees “an opportunity for timely self-examination and fast-track reforms”.

Dr Maskin, who is one of seven co-presidents of the Council on Academic Freedom, holds a similar view. 

“There are plenty of things that Harvard could be doing and should be doing. To go ahead and do them is not caving. It’s making the university better,” he said. 

Still, it’s not clear how much progress Harvard and the Trump administration have made towards a deal.

While President Trump said in June that Harvard was close to a “mindbogglingly” historic deal, Bloomberg News later reported that talks between the administration and the school had stalled. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in July that the administration was “negotiating hard” with both Harvard and Columbia University. 

“I think we’re getting close to having that happen. It’s not wrapped up as fast as I wanted to, but we’re getting there,” she added. BLOOMBERG