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Harvard decides to decline Trump's administration's "agreement in principle" for continuing to provide Federal grants and contracts. The Trump administration freezes their $2.2 billion funds.
Unlike Columbia, Harvard is willing to send a costly signal that it is, indeed, an elite private university, and it plans to stay that way.
The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:
I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.
The way I see it, what makes Harvard University elite is that it both draws and correctly chooses the elite. The elite want to go there because other elite will be there, and admission of the non-elites is carefully curated for their usefulness. It's like an exclusive party that's awesome because a whole bunch of awesome people are there, and boring people aren't, with a few useful wingmen. If the party's host was required to invite a bunch of boring people, the party will break up as awesome people take off. There might be a brief party hiatus for the awesome people as they coordinate where to have the next awesome exclusive party, but awesome people seem to coordinate pretty quickly, so that party will resume. Just not at the current host's place.
So Harvard looked at the $2.2 billion, looked at their party, and decided to party on.
Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
Woke Right theory wins again?
The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening. They can probably fight and defeat a lot of Trump's demands in the courts, but I don't think they can fight them all.
-The total amount of funding to Harvard under review is 9 billion, 2 billion was just frozen, so there is another 7 billion for them at risk.
-Trump has also threatened their tax exemption status (501c3) per the BBC. From what I can tell there is precedence for stripping tax exemptions status due to racial discrimination in admissions. See the Bob Jones case below. Now connect the dots with SFFA vs Harvard.
-They can also threaten their accreditation status - no accreditation, no federal student loans.
-Another avenue would be sicing the DOJ on Harvard Professors. If you receive a federal grant and plagiarize or fake data then that is fraud. There is history of professors getting prison time in egregious cases. A bit further reach that I am not fully sure of would be charging plagiarists with wire fraud - if you knowingly plagiarize a paper, put that paper on your CV, and then got a job with that CV then wire fraud charges might be possible. I think it would be hard though, from what I can tell you would have to prove that the plagiarist got the job from your plagiarized paper. You'd have to prove knowingly plagiarism too, and I think that might be hard to prove to a jury. Even in the case of someone like Claudine Gay.
-Last, but still impactful, would be revoking or denying student visas. They have already been doing this. Foreign students are a quarter of the student body.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz01y9gkdm3o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United_States
Revoking Harvard's accredited status wouldn't harm Harvard, it would destroy the concept of accreditation.
Good. Accreditation is a scam anyway
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I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.
The story will not fully be "Trump targeted us unfairly and stripped our accreditation". It will also include "they already got sued and lost for being racist (SFFA v. Harvard), they refused to stop being racist, now they lost their accreditation. Also antisemitism." Yes Harvard will always be a prestigious institution, yes it would survive the loss, but its still a pretty big egg in the face. I'm not sure they can spin their way out of it. Especially after SFFA v. Harvard.
Students losing ability to transfer credits, losing federal subsidized loans, no student aid would all follow the loss. None of which I think would matter too much, of course everyone will still clamor for Harvard. But accreditation as a concept will survive for these things alone, Pell Grants and subsidized loans may not matter to Harvard students, but they sure do matter for almost everyone else.
And if accreditation were destroyed - what does the current administration lose?
The US News rankings would cease to be relevant if Harvard wasn't on them. They basically started the rankings by figuring out that Harvard, Yale, Princeton should be at the top and backwards engineering how to rank the other schools by what metrics make those schools the top schools. It's like taking the obvious undisputed champion out of your boxing federation, or FIFA kicking out UEFA.
None of the rankings or loans or grants really matter, as long as businesses keep hiring from Harvard, bar associations keep admitting Harvard Law grads, Medical Boards keep licensing Harvard Med grads, other schools keep admitting Harvard undergrads to grad school or hiring Harvard PhDs for professorships, etc.
If 90% of Harvard Law grads get prestige jobs out of school, but the rankings don't include Harvard, we'll just get new "true" rankings somewhere.
And that's pretty much the story top to bottom.
Ok in the context of what you are saying US News doesn't matter. I think Harvard and Yale etc. care for bragging rights. But big picture doesn't matter.
If Harvard Law loses accreditation then Harvard Law grads will absolutely not be hired. In most states, by law, you can't sit even sit for the bar if you don't graduate from an accredited law school. Likewise with Harvard Medical - graduation from an accredited medical school is a requirement for a license in most states. So if accreditation is lost, these schools are done.
https://www.princetonreview.com/law-school-advice/law-school-accreditation https://lcme.org/about/
The agencies that accredit HLS and HMS are given approval from the Department of Education. The DoEd has a lot of power over these institutions, but not direct power to just go in and delist Harvard. But it can apply a lot of pressure. Enough to kick out Harvard? No idea. My guess is not unless forced. The ABA seems very liberal, they're already fighting Trump tooth and nail.
The thing is Harvard Law grads basically want to work in like three or four places (coming out of law school) and they're all in blue states. NYC and Cali big law and clerkships alone could easily absorb a few HLS classes. I'd imagine on the med school side it's similar. New York and California professional associations are unlikely to go along with Trump on the topic.
More likely Trump could manage to drag down the whole concept of accreditation and college rankings in this scenario. Which would be a good thing for the world, actually. But the schools most harmed would be schools like UVA or some of the UC campuses or Michigan, schools that have national profiles thanks to rankings, not the ivies Berkeley Stanford, which have a national profile independent of rankings. If anything the lesser ivies would benefit from a world where Ivy league carries more cache again without the rankings to interfere.
At any rate I support them for the same reason I supported Musk buying Twitter: what's the point of Fuck You money if you never say Fuck You?
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This only works as long as everyone who currently demands accreditation decides to edit it to be "accredited or Harvard", which might work for some duration (and also scales in difficulty as the list of exceptions lengthens), but probably still drops their prestige as red state post-graduate schools (law, medical) no longer accept their degrees and red administrations have a seemingly viewpoint-neutral ("non-accredited degree!") way to scour the civil service of their graduates: suddenly a degree from Yale is "just as good as Harvard, with a few more doors open" and its actual outcomes suffer.
Not saying all those outcomes are likely, but none of them strikes me as unforseeable. The alternatives would be the wholesale devaluation of accreditation, but I think that's spread widely enough (how many state laws would have to change?) that it'd be more painful than Harvard-aligned organizations tracking exceptions.
The thing about it is basically every Harvard undergrad would most want to go to Harvard grad school, and most of the rest of their choices will be other blue state schools. Blue states certainly have enough grad schools to keep it running.
Accreditation literally doesn't matter for Harvard or Stanford except as a technicality, it matters to East Sheepdick Bible College.
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Are they "too big to fail"?
No, but if a sports league gets rid of the best team, it hurts the league because you now know that the league champion is getting a tin belt, they're not the real best in the world.
Magnus Carlson chose not to defend his world championship. Sucks to be Ding Liren.
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They're Harvard. The US News college rankings list is irrelevant to them. US News would probably modify their policies to keep them there, because not having Harvard on the list would hurt the authority of the list more than it would hurt Harvard.
Thinking otherwise is, ironically, a form of woke reasoning.
I’m curious what you mean by this (sincerely).
Progressives see a measure of prestige that implies a hierarchy with some people or institutions ending up with less, and try to "fix" this by rejiggering the measure to be more fair on the grounds that prestige will then be more fairly divided, ignoring that some hierarchies are not purely arbitrary and can't be molded that way.
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Yes, it would create further divergence between academia’s idea of legitimacy and the ways the federal bureaucracy has created to make academic legitimacy legible and manageable. It would harm Harvard insofar as it made the bureaucracy unable to grant it money because Harvard’s reputation was no longer formally legible.
That raises the question: Does this form of legibility do more good or harm?
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That sounds like a positive to me.
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The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.
Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.
I don't agree with this, at least in terms of the war on higher education. Can you substantiate? Take what happened with Columbia:
March 7th: $400MM funding frozen to Columbia. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-cancels-400-million-grants-columbia-university-rcna195373
March 21st: Trump admin sends CU a list of demands to unfreeze funding. Columbia publicly agrees to Trump admin's demands. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-response-trump-demands.html
March 26th: Leaked conversations reveal that, internally, CU was singing a very different tune than what they publicly agreed to. CU president Katrina Armstrong minimizes and downplays changes. https://freebeacon.com/campus/what-columbia-university-president-really-told-faculty-members/
April 1st: CU president Katrina Armstrong deposed by congress and questioned, among other things, about the faculty meeting. Transcript (again) leaks. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/04/09/federal-government-questioned-armstrong-over-campus-antisemitism-on-april-1-according-to-leaked-transcript/
April 6th: Katrina Armstrong steps down as interim president of CU
April 9th: CU gets hit with another $250MM funding freeze https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/09/nih-freezes-millions-more-funding-columbia
This sequence of events does not read as CU gets hit, capitulates, and then gets hit with their belly showing. It reads as CU gets hit, lies that it will make changes, gets exposed for lying, and then gets hit again. There was never any capitulation by CU.
Do you have any examples of colleges who actually capitulated and got hit again?
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