Published April 21, 2025
President Trump and Harvard University are at daggers drawn, and the battle promises to play out on the national stage for some time. Trump wants Harvard to change its ways, not only when it comes to the lax handling of disruptive demonstrations and antisemitic harassment, but also in the matter of the university’s pervasive leftist bias. Harvard, which seemed at least tentatively open to changes in its disciplinary practices, has drawn the line at the Trump administration’s insistence on monitoring and redressing its ideological imbalance. With virtually the whole of academia in chorus, America’s oldest university boldly insists on defending its First Amendment rights and academic freedom.
Harvard’s protestations of academic freedom ring hollow. Like the rest of the academy, the school has abused its liberties for decades, not to create a marketplace of ideas — the very purpose of academic freedom — but to consolidate an intellectual monopoly of the left. On the other side, however, the Trump administration’s more ambitious demands would put the federal government in effective charge of the intellectual inner workings of a private university. Although Harvard has richly earned that rebuke and that discipline, the Roberts Court may well be reluctant to entrench so troubling an arrangement in law.
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Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow in the Education and American Ideals Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For over a decade, he has been a national leader in the reform of both K-12 and higher education, authoring or co-authoring model legislation designed to protect campus free speech, reintroduce the study of Western civilization, restore the reading of classic literature, prevent high school walkouts for purposes of political protest, block mandatory DEI indoctrination, bring public policy debate back to college campuses, and more. He writes regularly on education issues for a wide range of outlets, particularly National Review Online, where he has been a contributing editor for over two decades.
