Harvard frantically tried to avoid a showdown with the Trump administration. Now many of its big donors are pushing the university’s leaders to back down and renew talks with the White House.
To much of academia, many on the left and some on the right, Harvard is a hero for standing up to the White House and rejecting its demands to reshape academic and student life.
After weeks of major law firms and other prestigious institutions like Columbia University acquiescing to President Trump’s demands, Harvard, in the eyes of Mr. Trump’s critics, had become the backbone of the resistance.
The Harvard Corporation, the secretive board that runs the school, said the list of changes the White House demanded in a letter on April 11 were so onerous — requiring faculty power to be reduced and government audits of university data — that the school would not agree to any of them and broke off talks with the administration.
Since then Harvard has held firm. Last week, White House and administration officials made at least three overtures to a Harvard representative in an attempt to restart talks. The school’s leadership rebuffed them all, according to two people with knowledge of the outreach. Most, but not all, members of the Harvard Corporation, emboldened, in part, by the positive reaction to the school’s combative response to the White House, are adamant that they will not so much as negotiate with Mr. Trump. On Monday, Harvard filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court, challenging its threats to slash billions of dollars from the school’s funding.
It has been a rare moment of glory for the Harvard Corporation, which is still reeling from the uproar in late 2023 that pushed the school’s former president, Claudine Gay, out of office. After that debacle, the board’s senior fellow, Penny Pritzker, an heir of the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a commerce secretary under President Barack Obama, told her colleagues privately that she was open to stepping down, according to three people aware of those conversations.
But the Harvard Corporation is, in many ways, an unwitting hero. For weeks leading up the April 11 letter, the corporation took a very different stance toward the Trump administration. At the urging of some of its biggest donors, the corporation frantically tried to cut a deal with Mr. Trump.