The “Dear Harvard” Letter and Institutional Autonomy

Dismantling Society’s Compact with Higher Education

On Friday, April 11 Harvard University received a letter from the federal government accusing the university of ‘failure to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment’. The letter laid out 10 ‘provisions’ that Harvard must comply with to remain eligible for federal funding and ‘to return to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence’.

Taken together, these demands would effectively end the autonomous operation of a private university.

The provisions included specific actions to be taken in light of the anti-Semitic protests/activities on campus – and anti-Semitism, or any other form of discrimination, has absolutely no place on a college campus.

But going far beyond this specific issue, the provisions include major changes to Harvard’s governance, departmental structure, faculty hiring, student admissions, and student conduct policies. In addition, the demands require extensive and intrusive new reporting and audit requirements on all the above, along with punitive actions taken against particular departments based on the content of their scholarship.

A recurring theme is the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, in admission, hiring, and programming, while simultaneously requiring quotas in faculty hiring and student admissions based on a federally mandated conception of “viewpoint diversity”.

When Harvard informed the federal government they would not accept the proposed agreement, the Trump administration announced they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants along with a $60 million contract.

But it didn’t stop there. President Trump took to social media to propose eliminating Harvard’s tax exemption as a non-profit entity, in line with earlier efforts to tax away Harvard’s prodigious endowment. A day later this escalated to a Presidential demand, in violation of norms and laws meant to insulate tax treatment of individual persons and institutions from political retribution, a demand the IRS was considering as of this writing.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security threatened to revoke Harvard’s ability to host student visas, an action that would affect 6793 international students, 27% of Harvard’s enrollment, and likely eviscerate graduate programs on the campus.

Why Does this Matter?

It’s old, rich, elite Harvard. The vast majority of higher education institutions look nothing like Harvard with respect to financial resources, selectivity, student profile, research reputation, alumni achievements,…so?

Let’s be clear. This represents perhaps the most dangerous moment in the history of the modern university. The Trump administration is threatening nothing less than the financial destruction of the world’s leading university. That is, unless Harvard complies with what they (Harvard) regard as a series of clearly illegal and unconstitutional demands, and put every aspect of their operation under the systematic control of the federal government.

Again, you might think this is an Ivy League problem and not relevant to the rest of higher education, but that would be wrong. It is no accident that first Columbia and now Harvard have been targeted, with Penn, Princeton, Cornell, Northwestern, and Brown next in line, and the list of “concerning” universities growing by the day. If the strongest and best-resourced universities are brought to heel, the rest will follow. And as should be clear from Columbia’s capitulation, agreeing to the administration’s initial demands does not resolve matters. It invites additional penalties and more aggressive intervention.

You might also think that it’s possible for other universities to duck and cover, and just wait this out. After all, does a Department of Education that has laid off most of its workforce really have the manpower to micromanage thousands of institutions of higher education?

And it seems entirely possible that courts will intervene on Harvard’s behalf because the administration’s demands are so over-the-top and in contravention of clear statutory language preventing such interference. Civil rights law does allow penalties for universities that violate civil rights. But the legally required findings of fact, opportunity for response and redress, and permissible scope for punitive action have been thrown out the window. The “Dear Harvard” letter uses the veneer of the law to flagrantly break the law.

But while the Trump administration’s recent actions are extraordinary in their scope and severity and flouting of legal boundaries, they are best understood as a continuation of a whole host of government actions impinging on university autonomy. Higher education as we know it has been under increasing pressure the past decade with state governments taking on faculty tenure, DEI, curricular issues, and admissions practices.

Unlike the administration’s “Dear Harvard” letter, these state-level interventions are death of the university’s autonomy and self-governance by a thousand small cuts, and yet probably well within these governments’ legal authority.

Where We are Going in Finding Equilibrium

We will explore institutional autonomy and self-governance over the coming weeks. In this series of posts, we want to sort through the daily barrage of charges, changes, proclamations, accusations, threats and actual cuts to get to the heart of some issues that really matter to the autonomy of universities. We start with some history on the evolution of government-university relations and why fraying trust in higher education has opened the door to intrusions on autonomy.

Then in subsequent posts we will address a series of related specific issues: the value of autonomy and academic freedom, not just to universities but to society at large; university accountability; viewpoint diversity; and the link between funding and autonomy – and how universities might respond to the challenges presented in the current environment.

This week these issues are front and center for Harvard. In the months and years to come, they will be front and center for all of us.

Some History on US Universities and Government

Education is important to society and fundamental to a country’s economic development. Universities are expensive to establish and run. For these reasons, there has always been a close connection between government action and university function. We learned a lot about this history from this short piece highlighting the historical connections and tensions between higher education and government when it comes to who calls the shots.

While Harvard is widely considered to be the first private university in the US, it was initially established with an investment of 400 pounds from the General Assembly and Court of Massachusetts Bay to ‘serve the newly established colony’. Yes, Harvard was essentially founded as public institution, and notice that word “serve”.

In the nearly four centuries since that investment, many important pieces of legislation and many, many court cases have impacted the relationship between higher education and federal and state governments.

The Morill Act Land Grant Act of 1862 not only involved a major federal financial commitment (in the form of grants of federal lands) to create universities nationwide, it specified both curriculum and admissions criteria. Support was given only for colleges teaching “agriculture and the mechanic arts”, training in military tactics was a required part of the curriculum, the admission target focused on students from the farming and industrial classes.

The Second Land Grant Act of 1890 tied federal funding for a state’s higher education institutions to non-discrimination in admissions on the basis of race, while also establishing separate but similar ‘land-grant’ colleges to serve African American students – what we now know as the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Which is to say, the first widespread DEI policies in higher education were federal mandates leveraged by the threat of lost funding.

The National Defense Act of 1916 established Reserve Officer Training Corps programs (federal funding to create departments and direct curriculum) and the GI Bill of 1944 created a massive infusion of federal financial aid targeted at a specific student population (returning veterans of the war). University research played a key role in weapons innovation during World War II, and that, plus the shock of the Soviet Sputnik launch, led to large and escalating federal investments in science and engineering research.

Finally, a wave of civil rights laws enacted over the last six decades have regulated conduct within the university, including race (Title VI), sex (Title IX) and disability (ADA). In each case, federal funding is used as leverage to discipline behavior within the university.

The Way it Was

This history makes clear that government has always been involved in the affairs of US universities. Not just founding and funding them, but broadly influencing what is taught, who is taught, and what is researched, as well as what conduct is prohibited.

Yet even given these various laws and policies that constrain behavior, US higher education has enjoyed relatively broad freedom to compete, operate, and self-govern. This autonomy rests on two critical pillars: expertise and intellectual freedom. Faculty experts are in the best position to make decisions about curricula and hiring, and the best scholarship is unconstrained by political, economic, or social agendas.

More than 30 years ago, Menand (page 8) described higher education’s ‘compact’ with society this way:

• Universities have, essentially, a compact with the rest of society on this matter: society agrees that research which doesn’t have to answer to some standard of political correctness, economic utility, or religious orthodoxy is a desirable good and agrees to allow professors to decide among themselves the work it is important for them to undertake.

Or to state the converse, research (and presumably teaching) that *does* have to answer to some standard of political correctness, economic utility, or religious orthodoxy will ultimately be less desirable to society.

What Happened?

One way to view the current change is that people, and the politicians they elect, stopped believing in the social compact Menand wrote about. Which is to say, the public stopped believing that the research and teaching of the university was generating goods of value to society.

We can see this in a wide variety of concerns. On the student end critics point to spiraling tuition prices, rising student debt, low completion rates, worries that graduates are ready for work, whether we guard against discriminatory behavior and ensure the safety of all students. On the faculty end of things, critics question the reliability of our research, whether we exclude certain viewpoints, and ‘indoctrinate’ students into certain perspectives.

We’ve written about many of these issues extensively and believe the evidence shows that a lot of the concerns are overblown. Still, some are real and haven’t been taken seriously by higher education. Others are rooted in seeds of truth, and the real issues combined with those seeds have grown into increasing public distrust of higher education.

Higher education has gotten caught up in the culture wars, cancelling speakers, dealing (or not) with protests on campus, going further with DEI efforts than some are comfortable with. Of course, many stakeholders applauded these efforts, but culture “war” means these efforts infuriated others. And it doesn’t help that the political sphere has become increasingly polarized around education, with a growing share of the population without college degrees voting for one party.

Ultimately, all this would only be grist for opinion columns and animated dinner conversations, except for funding. It was inevitable that someone in the political sphere would recognize that universities overwhelming dependence on public funds would create leverage. And, as we note above, the expansion of civil rights laws into a university context used precisely those funds as leverage.

What is different today is that leverage is not being used to address some serious, indeed dangerous, discriminatory behaviors at the margin. Rather, the American people elected an administration that saw the massive federal investments as a hammer to restructure the US higher education model in a way aligned with the administration’s vision. The “Dear Harvard” letter speaks to the scope of that vision – nothing less than remaking the university in its entirety.

Reducing F&A, shrinking research investments, withholding federal funds … these actions hit higher education where it truly hurts: their budgets. And, very, very few institutions have the financial resources to push back on these changes. As Menand put it…

• …academic freedom will be killed by the thing that, in America, kills most swiftly and surely, not bad ideas, but lack of money.

We (higher education) lost the trust of those who provide the funding. The values higher education holds dear are now at risk because they drifted from the values held by those in power. We think those in power are wrong about the value higher education provides to society, but they have the checkbook, and with it the ability to remake higher education.

So What Then Do We Do?

In our next four posts we take this on directly. We start with Menand’s compact and argue for the social value of a (relatively) autonomous university, along with evidence about how creeping intrusions are already undermining that value.

We then tackle accountability, what mechanisms society already has in place to ensure universities are adding value, and what we can do to increase and make visible that accountability. We will dig into the issue of viewpoint diversity, the composition of our faculty, what we teach, and how we hire. We close with the funding lever, and examine what strategies universities might use in light of it.

Despite its flaws, US higher education has long been regarded as the best system in the world. Whether or not we maintain that position will depend on how the current crisis plays out. Universities (and their stakeholders) can’t be spectators as it does – and the response will need to be more than complaints and pushback – relevant criticisms will need to be addressed and trust rebuilt.

Research assistance provided by Marley Heritier.

“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.