The Trump administration has already permanently damaged Harvard

Harvard University is in crisis. The Trump administration has gone for the jugular, attempting to cut off the flow of federal funds. Perhaps most importantly, it has sought to cut this prestigious university off from its economic lifeblood: international students.

But this crisis is largely one of Harvard’s own making. It could have made an effort to avoid having a monolithically progressive campus culture that fostered savage behavior and terrorist sympathies in corners of the student body. It could have worked to ensure that it was not overly reliant on federal funding for its research endeavors and that the university’s financial stability was not contingent upon accepting thousands of international students who are willing to pay full tuition.

But over the decades, Harvard chose to have a monolithically progressive campus culture, a research division overly reliant on federal funds, and a model of economic viability that was overly dependent on international students paying full tuition. Now, this university is seeing the bill come due, and its status as the nation’s premier institution is in freefall.

The scale of the Trump administration’s assault against Harvard is breathtaking. It is hard to draw any conclusion other than that the administration is seeking to destroy the Ivy League university. Without federal funds or its sizable number of international students, Harvard will be forced to enact mass layoffs, likely sell off unused buildings, and otherwise downsize abruptly. To save its livelihood, the university has gone to court, seeking judicial relief from the Trump administration’s actions. 

But even if every court finds that the Trump administration failed to follow the law and that Harvard is entitled to its billions of federal funds and the international students who pay full tuition, the university’s credibility with the public is forever and likely irreparably damaged, and this will be the Trump administration’s greatest triumph.

For years, Harvard, Columbia University, and other colleges that populate the most exclusive echelons of higher education have coasted on the reputation they had established as the world’s premier institutions of higher learning. These schools have been a guaranteed ticket to the nation’s economic and cultural elite for generations. 

It is worth reviewing the degree to which the Ivy League has influenced the nation’s premier institutions. About 10% of Congress members attended an Ivy League institution. Only 1 of the 9 Supreme Court justices attended a non-Ivy League law school. President Donald Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania, Vice President JD Vance attended Yale Law School, and his wife Usha Vance did as well. 

In the president’s Cabinet, the Ivy League is still represented, but the contrast to the Biden administration is rather significant. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attended Yale University, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attended Princeton University, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended Harvard, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright attended the Ivy League-adjacent Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Under former President Joe Biden, Ivy League graduates filled far more positions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attended Harvard and Columbia, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attended Brown University and Yale, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo attended Harvard and Yale, acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attended Harvard, and so did Attorney General Merrick Garland, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Biden’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, was also a Harvard graduate.

And the web of influence goes beyond politics — highbrow law firms, Wall Street, major corporations, the entertainment industry, and Silicon Valley. Every professionalized, white-collar industry has its fair share of Ivy League graduates dominating prominent positions. Simply having a degree from one of these institutions automatically gives someone a competitive advantage in the workforce.

The economic value of attending an Ivy League institution is certainly there for many graduates, even when factoring in the $90,000 annual tuition costs. But even as Harvard and its ilk have coasted on their reputations, these institutions have continued to churn out graduates like a factory assembly line. Education, then, has become a product to be marketed and sold, rather than an endeavor of learning and critical thinking. One only needs to look at the political donations of Ivy League professors and the voting trends of these college towns to know that Harvard, Columbia, and Yale are all ideological monoliths that are completely divorced from the culture of the nation at large. 

Trump, while an Ivy Leaguer himself, along with his running mate Vance, was elected in no small part because he repudiated, ridiculed, and insulted the cultural and economic cocoon that Harvard and Columbia have helped build and have come to represent. 

In that sense, the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy Harvard’s very livelihood are an expression of the very populist currents that propelled the president to office. If the people in Mahoning County, Ohio, or Macomb County, Michigan, were hurt by the actions of elites in Washington, D.C., and on Wall Street, then attacking the institutions, such as Harvard, that helped create the elites of those cities is simply another way to right that wrong. To displace the current elite, one must also conquer its training grounds.

But at the same time, the connection between the two is not obvious. A Harvard education is still seen as a marker for the best and brightest, even among the cultural conservatives and the blue-collar populists who formed the backbone of Trump’s winning coalition. It is here that the Trump administration’s war on Harvard and elite higher education at large will yield lasting and permanent results.

No matter what happens in court, half of the country will always see Harvard as a partisan institution that also puts foreigners before Americans. 

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This is why the Trump administration’s war on elite higher education is already a success. The cultural and economic pedestal that these institutions have enjoyed for decades has hardly been reflective of the educational product they provide. Instead, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League have become a four-year training program that is designed to divorce its graduates from the cultural heartbeat of America and baptize them into the family of the new progressive and cosmopolitan global elite.

The Trump administration may say honestly enough that it is only concerned with forcing Harvard and Columbia to root out the culture of anti-American and antisemitic hatred that has become synonymous with their institutions. But the broader cultural effects of their war on higher education will prove to be the final destruction of the Ivy League’s reputation among anyone who values traditional cultural ideals. From now on, anyone who seeks to have an apolitical life, attending Harvard will be a mark of shame.