Trump's pressure campaign against universities hits a Harvard-sized snag

The money quote: "Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions. ... Let's hope other institutions follow suit," former President Obama posted on X.

Zoom in: In the last few weeks, American institutions have steadily buckled under pressure from the Trump administration.

• Columbia ceded control of an academic department and expanded campus police powers to try to unfreeze federal funding. The University of Michigan shut down its expansive diversity, equity and inclusion program. Several Big Law firms offered nearly $1 billion in pro bono work to get on the administration’s good side.

But Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, rejected the administration’s demands tied to its federal funding, saying Harvard is committed to combating antisemitism but will not concede academic freedom.

• "No government—regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," he wrote.
• The Trump administration's Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism is freezing more than $2 billion in response.

Driving the news: Support for Harvard — and resistance to the Trump administration — is bubbling at other universities.

• 60 current and former university presidents co-signed an op-ed in Fortune backing Harvard.
• Stanford, which faces funding threats itself, came out in support of Harvard on Monday. "Harvard’s objections to the letter it received are rooted in the American tradition of liberty, a tradition essential to our country’s universities, and worth defending," Stanford’s president and provost told The Stanford Daily.
• So far, 950 Yale faculty members have signed a letter to Yale’s president and provost asking them to "resist and legally challenge any unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance."
• Several universities — including Cornell, Brown, MIT and Michigan — are joining a lawsuit against the Department of Energy to challenge cuts to indirect costs or academic research.

The other side: The administration's allies are vowing to hold the line, The Wall Street Journal reports.

• "I think Harvard got bad advice to take a different approach," Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.), a Harvard alum, told the Journal.
• "These are all fairly simple requests the administration is making to Harvard to follow the law," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), also a Harvard alum, said Wednesday morning on Fox.

The big picture: "If an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list," The N.Y. Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller writes.

• Last week, the university secured a $750 million loan from Wall Street to bolster its finances, The Washington Post notes.

What to watch: Several other institutions, like Cornell and Northwestern, have hundreds of millions of dollars of funding on the line.

• Their next moves will reveal whether Harvard's defiance was enough to set off a chain reaction.

Go deeper: American progress in peril

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details.