Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Harvard v. Trump
Winston Churchill is said to have observed that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else. That could be said of Harvard’s president Alan Garber, who kept trying to appease President Trump until he finally appreciated that appeasement only invited more extreme demands. So Garber became something of a hero, in spite of himself.
At Harvard’s commencement on May 29, the university managed a rare moment of unity. Garber did not mention Trump by name, but declared that “absolute certainty and willful ignorance are two sides of the same coin—a coin with no value but costs beyond measure.”
Garber was booed last year for denying degrees to 13 pro-Palestinian demonstrators. This time, he was interrupted by ovations.
On Alumni Day a week later, stickers proclaiming “Crimson Courage” were everywhere. The keynote speaker, surgeon and author Atul Gawande, took a sharper tone. “The past five months, I’ve had the misfortune to have a front row seat as the current regime has moved to weaken and even outright dismantle core foundations of humanitarian assistance, science, public health, law, and higher education,” he said. Gawande served as an assistant administrator for global health in the U.S. Agency for International Development until January.
Trump seems determined not just to punish America’s oldest, richest, and most celebrated university, but to destroy it. His weapons include shutting down all federal research funds to the university and its affiliates, trying to deny Harvard access to all foreign students, challenging its tax exemption, taxing its endowment income, blocking federal student aid, and effectively trying to take the university into receivership on grounds of bogus antisemitism.
At Harvard’s commencement on May 29, the university managed a rare moment of unity. Garber did not mention Trump by name, but declared that “absolute certainty and willful ignorance are two sides of the same coin—a coin with no value but costs beyond measure.”
Garber was booed last year for denying degrees to 13 pro-Palestinian demonstrators. This time, he was interrupted by ovations.
On Alumni Day a week later, stickers proclaiming “Crimson Courage” were everywhere. The keynote speaker, surgeon and author Atul Gawande, took a sharper tone. “The past five months, I’ve had the misfortune to have a front row seat as the current regime has moved to weaken and even outright dismantle core foundations of humanitarian assistance, science, public health, law, and higher education,” he said. Gawande served as an assistant administrator for global health in the U.S. Agency for International Development until January.
Trump seems determined not just to punish America’s oldest, richest, and most celebrated university, but to destroy it. His weapons include shutting down all federal research funds to the university and its affiliates, trying to deny Harvard access to all foreign students, challenging its tax exemption, taxing its endowment income, blocking federal student aid, and effectively trying to take the university into receivership on grounds of bogus antisemitism.
https://prospect.org/education/2025-06-17-harvard-v-trump-foreign-students-endowment-tax/