And on Thursday, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields criticized Garber for his “public outbursts” and said his shows of defiance “only fuel” the resolve of the Trump administration.
Trump himself has already signaled he has no interest in easing up on a battle he seems to be enjoying.
“Harvard wants to fight, they want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
And in many senses, he is right. International students are seeking to transfer to other schools. Researchers are shutting down their labs. Harvard leaders are bracing for an extended period of pain and austerity.
The question now is this: Can Trump apply enough pressure to force the university to cave or can Harvard, a nearly 400-year-old institution, outlast an aging, fickle president in his final term?
Nothing puts the fight in Donald Trump like someone trying to hit back. So when Harvard leaders stood up to the administration in April, rejecting a litany of intrusive demands with a strong, very public denunciation and a lawsuit in federal court, the president went into attack mode.
“There’s nothing strategic about this with Trump,” said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during the president’s first term.
“The way Trump views the world is, he hates Harvard, and he wants to punish them however he can,” Cobb said. “So he’s trying to divine all the ways that the federal government, which he feels imperial about, can punitively act with regard to Harvard.”
The campaign was initially led by the administration’s antisemitism task force, which sent Harvard a list of demands and cut more than $2 billion in research funding when the school refused to comply. Then, as Trump raged in private meetings, press conferences, and on social media, the scope and nature of the administration’s attacks intensified into what one former aide described as “a whole-of-government approach.”
Virtually every week this spring, the federal government opened another line of attack. The Treasury Department moved to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. At least four agencies began investigating alleged discrimination in Harvard’s admissions and hiring practices. The Department of Homeland Security revoked the certification that allows Harvard to enroll international students.
All of these moves hurt the school. They also seemed like overreach, even to some Trump allies — retaliatory measures riddled with legal vulnerabilities the university’s lawyers are now exploiting in court.
The government cut funding summarily, for example, without going through the procedures laid out in federal laws and regulations that could legally justify the cuts, legal experts said. It pulled Harvard’s international students certification without proving, or even alleging, that Harvard had violated specific regulations of the student visa program.
“There are instances of the administration not crossing its t’s and dotting its i’s, not jumping through all the legal hoops to accomplish what it wants,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, who describes himself as “sympathetic, maybe even totally aligned” with the Trump administration’s goals in its Harvard campaign.
Many legal observers expect Harvard will prevail in its two pending lawsuits: one challenging the funding cuts, the other fighting the international students ban. (On Thursday, a federal judge in Boston granted Harvard’s request to temporarily halt the administration from enforcing the ban.)
Harvard, by contrast, is trying to play a long game.
When the antisemitism task force sent its demands late on the night of April 11, Harvard leaders saw them as so extreme they deemed further talks with the administration untenable.
For Harvard insiders, the decision was inevitable, a principled stand the school was all but required to take. If Harvard had sacrificed its independence — as Columbia University had done weeks earlier — it might never reclaim it. Accepting the demands would have required Harvard to submit whole academic divisions, including Harvard Medical School, to federal oversight. The university would have ceded control over hiring decisions to federal government minders. It would have been forced to turn over extensive documentation about certain students to the federal government, including immigration authorities.
Harvard leaders publicly rejected the demands and sued — and then girded for blowback. Garber acknowledged in public statements that Harvard was signing up to endure legal and financial pain.
At the same time, though, a broadly held view took shape on campus and in the school’s larger community of alums, donors, and neighbors that whatever the costs of the fight, Harvard would survive.
The university is older than the United States. Its endowment — valued at more than $50 billion — is nearly 20 times that of the federal funding the Trump administration has cut so far. Its alums include Supreme Court justices, Fortune 500 CEOs, and a substantial portion of Congress. World leaders from Beijing to London clamor to send their children to Harvard.
The modern version of the school — a cosmopolitan institution with a world-leading research enterprise — dates to the end of World War II when the federal government began investing heavily in academic research. Since then, Harvard-trained scientists and leaders have fanned out and help seed waves of progress around the world.
Parts of that identity are now under threat. If the Trump campaign continues, said Larry Ladd, a former Harvard budget chief, the university “will go back to looking somewhat like the 1930s . . . with very little federal support [and] most research self-generated.”
“It will shrink. It will not be the same Harvard as it is now,” he said.
And competitors across the country and the world are not standing still. Already, universities in China, buoyed by lavish support from their government, are coaxing foreign students who feel unwelcome in the United States.
Still, virtually no one believes Harvard will perish. “Their DNA is too strong,” Ladd said. Even if the Trump campaign continues for another 3½ years, “they will exist.”
As Garber walked onstage Thursday at Harvard’s 374th commencement ceremony, accompanied by a cavalcade of deans and dons, the crowd, more than 30,000 strong, stood and applauded before he even said a word.
At the lectern, Garber smiled and clasped his hands over his heart. Then he addressed the graduating seniors. “Members of the class of 2025 from down the street, across the country, and around the world,” he said. Then he paused and repeated for emphasis: “Around the world, just as it should be.”
The audience again erupted in applause.
It was a clamorous show of the near-unanimous support Garber has received from Harvard students, alums, and faculty since he became an emblem of resistance against Trump. Senators and governors have praised him. Professors who disagree with his politics say they admire his stand.
For some in the Trump administration, however, Garber’s new status as a kind of folk hero is a source of deep irritation. His every public comment is a provocation.
“Colleges are hooked on federal cash, and Mr. Garber’s public outbursts only fuel the push to shut off the taxpayer money propping up their institution,” Fields, the White House spokesperson, said on Thursday shortly after Garber’s commencement address.
Where liberal critics see the Trump administration’s campaign as an authoritarian takeover of an institution that fosters free thinking, Trump aides say they are merely acting as responsible custodians of taxpayer money at an institution that has lost its way.
They say Harvard’s diversity programs illegally discriminate against white people, Asian Americans, and men. That the university’s culture is intolerant of conservative or pro-Israel viewpoints.
“Given what’s happening at Harvard, especially under this leadership team, we are making the decision to get out of business with them for now. Harvard can’t seem to comprehend or acknowledge the severe and alarming civil rights issues on its campus,” said Josh Gruenbaum, a member of Trump’s antisemitism task force and a top official at the US General Services Administration, which has helped the government cut hundreds of millions of dollars in Harvard contracts in recent weeks.
Garber has said he agrees with some elements of the Trump critique of universities. Antisemitism is a “serious problem” at Harvard, he said; there isn’t enough ideological diversity on campus; he wants greater tolerance for dissent and debate.
He and Harvard board members have made some changes — critics call them capitulation — aligned with the Trump administration’s demands. Harvard recently renamed its DEI offices to focus more on inclusion than diversity and equity. On Thursday, the university appointed to its top board a new member who has extensive ties to the Republican Party.
Still, the idea the Trump administration could oust Garber is not outlandish, given the political hellscape elite college leaders have confronted since the Hamas attacks on Israel and the retaliatory war in Gaza set off a massive student protest movement 18 months ago and brought intense scrutiny to controversies over campus culture. Republicans and their allies have taken down four Ivy League presidents, including Garber’s predecessor, Claudine Gay, in the past year and a half.
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who has sometimes criticized Garber’s leadership, said the “breadth of the coalition behind President Garber and the administration’s position is very striking.”
Even without removing Garber, the Trump administration can still inflict more pain. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is slowing approval of student visas for international students and moving to revoke those of students from China, two methods that would somewhat circumvent the court order blocking the total ban on Harvard’s foreign enrollment. A major escalation would be to cut off financial aid for all students, which would cost Harvard about $120 million per year.
Harvard’s lawsuits and the Trump administration’s investigations could drag on for years. And even if Harvard eventually wins in court, it may sustain significant and irreversible damage along the way, especially to its research enterprise, which has now lost virtually all of its federal funding.
There is also damage to the allure Harvard holds out to so many. For a high-level researcher here, securing federal funding has always seemed like a sure thing. Now, not so much. In a letter to Garber, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said Harvard researcher are no longer eligible for new grants. International scholars, crucial contributors to the research enterprise, may conclude Harvard is no longer a safe.
In the meantime, Harvard has taken some steps to absorb the blows. It borrowed an extra $750 million in the bond markets and set aside $250 million from its budget to save some research projects. They are appealing to alums for donations. Garber flies to Washington to meet with lawmakers and federal officials, including powerful Harvard graduates from both sides of the aisle. Lately, he has been making his case publicly through the media.
The university does have significant untapped reserves. Harvard leaders do not want to raid the school’s endowment, which is meant to exist in perpetuity. Much of the money is locked up in long-term investments that are hard to liquidate, and the university relies on the investment returns to fund the annual budget.
But as a last resort, the university could draw down billions of dollars to fund the university’s war chest.
Even though much of the endowment is restricted by donors for specific purposes, there is an “escape valve” that could free up the funds in an emergency, said Jill Horwitz, a professor and former administrator at the University of California Los Angeles’s School of Law.
Harvard would need to convince the Massachusetts attorney general and a state judge that its ability to pursue its core mission is endangered in order to spend restricted funds.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on whether the university would pursue that strategy. It would be an extraordinary course of action, Horwitz said.
But these are extraordinary times. Given the “existential crisis coming at universities,” she said, it may be the best way for the university to preserve its talent and reputation as an unshakable institution. One that can outlast a mere presidential administration.
Jim Puzzanghera of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.