The Harvard Plan: And so it begins…

Summary

Embedded – The Harvard Plan: And So It Begins…

Podcast: Embedded (NPR)
Date: November 17, 2025
Host: Ilya Marritz (with Kelly McEvers)
Collaborators: Boston Globe, WNYC’s On the Media
Theme:
An in-depth, real-time documentary on the escalating conflict between Donald Trump’s second administration and America’s elite universities—especially Harvard. The episode traces Harvard's journey from complacency to high-stakes resistance, exploring the impact on scientific research, academic freedom, and democracy through the lived experiences of faculty spanning the political spectrum.

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Episode Overview

The episode documents the fallout after President Trump’s 2024 reelection, focusing on the aggressive federal campaign against elite universities amid broader political battles. Through personal stories of Harvard professors—liberal and conservative—it follows the mounting tension, hard decisions, and existential questions facing academia and American democracy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Expectations vs. Reality: The 2024 Election Night

[01:29 – 03:47]

• Ryan Enos (Harvard Political Scientist) anticipated a familiar, academic election night—data, predictions, camaraderie.
  • “This is going to be elections being fun again. We're going to sit, we're going to drink beer. We're going to watch election turns come in and play like games.” (Ryan Enos, 01:39)
• Shocks and Models: 2016’s surprise loss, 2020’s pandemic election, then another miss in 2024—Trump wins again.
• Mood Shift: Students and faculty—overwhelmingly liberal—are deflated but initially recall surviving the previous Trump term.
  • “We went through four years of Trump, and it wasn't a big deal. Like, you know, it wasn't great, but, you know, the country got through it.” (Ryan Enos, 03:47)
  • Camilla Naxerova (Harvard Medical School): “Ah, it's all just drama… Nothing's going to happen. It'll be fine.” (Camilla, 04:23)

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2. Faith in American Institutions & the Blind Spot

[04:32 – 07:08]

• Camilla Naxerova shares her immigrant’s perspective: Coming from communist Czechoslovakia gives her deep faith in the US’s stability and scientific culture.

  • “As soon as I experienced the American scientific culture... I decided I'm never going back.” (Camilla, 05:08)

• Naïveté in the Harvard community: Many don’t see the threat coming (“if Harvard’s still here next year”—04:43).

• Growing Conservative Media Rhetoric: Only later do faculty realize parts of the conservative media have been openly calling for the radical remaking—or even “destroying”—of liberal institutions like Harvard.

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3. A Conservative Insider’s View

[07:22 – 09:54]

• Kit Parker (Bioengineer, Army reservist, Trump voter):
  • Explains his political alignment as rooted in ending the “forever wars.”
    • “I voted for President Trump the first time because I needed him to end the war in Afghanistan and he promised to do that.” (Kit Parker, 08:59)
  • Views campus culture as stifling of debate and intellectual diversity.
    • “Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.” (Kit Parker, 09:54)
  • Sees value in dialogue with the new administration (“If he talks to Putin and Kim, he'll talk to us.” – Kit Parker, 10:20), but Harvard does not pursue it.

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4. The Federal Pressure Campaign Begins

[12:33 – 14:13]

• Federal Task Force on Antisemitism led by Leo Terrell: “We are going to use every federal criminal statute to go after these anti-Semites... We're going to bankrupt these universities.” (Leo Terrell, 13:04)
• 60 colleges receive letters of investigation; federal funds and student visas begin to be revoked.
• For many researchers, the threat to indirect cost funding—which undergirds university research—seems more urgent than antisemitism probes.
  • “Why are we talking about antisemitism? We should be talking about indirect costs. Isn't that the problem that we're facing?” (Camilla, 14:13)

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5. First University Targeted: Columbia Falls

[14:22 – 16:03]

• Columbia University faces allegations of failing to curb antisemitism, loses hundreds of millions in research funding regardless of its efforts to appease the government.
• Climate of fear at Harvard and peer institutions: “It was clear that, you know, we might well be next.” (Camilla, 15:07)

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6. The Situation Worsens at Harvard

[16:23 – 19:30]

• Organizational Response & Pushback
  • DEI initiatives renamed or scaled back; Middle East studies leadership removed—seen as “complying in advance.”
  • Ryan Enos, traditionally “not a campus politics guy,” now acts: publishes op-eds, meets President Garber.
    • Harvard president Alan Garber listens but is not optimistic about resistance working.
      • “He had some pretty firm reasons about why Harvard probably would be futile for it to push back.” (Ryan Enos, 18:11)
  • Open letter from faculty: Receives 800+ signatures.
    • “We hit send to all the faculty we know and held our breath to see what would happen.” (Ryan Enos, 18:39)
• Government Ultimatum: Massive funding ($8.7b) threatened unless Harvard agrees to government audits and increases conservative presence.

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7. The Decisive Stand

[22:34 – 25:27]

• Harvard’s Response: President Garber refuses the ultimatum, becoming the first major university to outright reject the federal list of demands.
  • “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” (Alan Garber, read at 24:39)
• Wave of support from other college presidents.
• Mixed Faculty Emotions:
  • “This was the moment we'd been waiting for.” (Ryan Enos, 25:27)
  • “It felt a little bit like a natural disaster... It felt very similar to reading, we've been flooded or there's an earthquake coming.” (Camilla, 25:35)
  • Kit Parker faces a loyalty dilemma: Army officer, conservative, but loyal to Harvard—“This is gonna suck… It's like watching your parents fight.” (Kit Parker, 25:45)

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8. Federal Retaliation and Fallout

[27:02 – 34:24]

• Legal Escalation: Harvard sues the US government to restore funding, joined by its professor’s union.
• Federal Retaliation:
  • NIH halts all funding. Labs (like Camilla’s) forced to let people go, lose ability to plan long term.
    • “Would we just have to fire people overnight?” (Camilla, 28:38)
  • Foreign students barred: up to 27% affected; multiple agencies cancel grants.
• Academic Freedom Framed as War:
  • “They’re cutting over $3 billion in vital scientific research. This case is about academic freedom.” (Rally, 32:47)
  • Low participation at protests, indicating both demoralization and unique traits of scientists: “We all probably locked our office doors and just started emailing. We didn't physically emerge.” (Camilla, 33:37)

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9. Columbia’s Settlement – Pragmatism vs. Principle

[34:24 – 36:35]

• Columbia’s Deal: Columbia settles, pays $200 million+ for research access and retains academic integrity.
  • “...this is about science. It's about curing cancer...” (Claire Shipman, Columbia President, 35:20)
• Harvard Holds Out: Ryan Enos frames settlements as extortion; fears giving in emboldens government overreach.
  • “That, of course, is absolutely the nature of extortion.” (Ryan Enos, 35:51)
  • “The mugger is not trying to undo democracy...I believe 100% firmly...that is what Donald Trump is trying to do.” (Ryan, 36:02 & 36:35)

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10. Personal and Structural Stakes

[36:42 – 43:55]

• Internal Fractures: Kit Parker reflects on Harvard’s culture wars, his own brush with cancellation, and the challenge for conservatives.
  • “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, just like, who has. If you're a faculty member and you haven't been investigated in the last 10 years at Harvard, what have you really done?” (Kit, 40:27)
  • He knows only “six” conservative faculty at Harvard (Kit, 41:33).
• Medical School Perspective: Camilla wants a deal to save research and jobs, even for a steep fine:
  • “Without a deal, it's dead.” (Camilla, 42:47)
  • She recounts the personal disillusionment and considers leaving the field or country if nothing changes.

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11. A (Temporary) Court Victory

[45:17 – 46:52]

• Judge orders NIH funding restored to Harvard, calling the government’s actions “arbitrary” and a “pretext.”
• New revelations about the government’s lawyer’s questionable history.

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12. Looking Forward – Limbo and Endurance

[46:52 – End]

• Ongoing Legal Stalemate: Government expected to appeal, the stalemate may drag on for years. Some speculate Harvard is “waiting out” the Trump administration.

• Compromises and Commitment: Kit sees Harvard’s internal reforms as insufficient:

  • “No one's making that kind of commitment [to academic freedom or ideological viewpoint diversity].” (Kit, 47:15)

• Wider Impact: While some schools accept settlements, none except Harvard have directly sued the government—Harvard is the national bellwether.

• Personal Stakes for Leaders: The fight has become personal for Harvard President Alan Garber, soon to be explored in-depth, especially his relationship and contrast with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

  • “This struggle is not academic or even particularly rational. It is a bare knuckle fight for money, prestige and power.” (Ilya Marritz, 49:11)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.” – Kit Parker (09:54)
• "The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights." – Alan Garber’s statement to Harvard community (24:39)
• "But if we can have a similar kind of deal, I think it's worth it, and I would like for there to be a deal." – Camilla Naxerova (44:00)
• "I have identified six [conservative faculty]." – Kit Parker (41:33)
• "That is the nature of extortion." – Ryan Enos (35:51)
• “If you haven't been investigated in the last 10 years at Harvard, what have you really done?” – Kit Parker (40:27)

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Key Timestamps

• Election Night at Harvard: 01:29 – 03:47
• Camilla’s Immigrant Perspective: 04:32 – 07:08
• Kit Parker on Conservatism/Harvard: 07:24 – 09:54
• Trump Admin Begins Pressure Campaign: 12:33 – 14:13
• Columbia University Targeted: 14:22 – 16:03
• Harvard Faculty Organize; Gov’t Ultimatum: 16:23 – 19:30
• Harvard Defies Trump Demands: 22:34 – 25:27
• Harvard Files Suit, Funding Cut: 27:02 – 34:24
• Columbia Settlement/Harvard’s Choice: 34:24 – 36:35
• Kit Parker Talks Censorship Experience: 36:42 – 43:55
• Camilla on Scientific Stakes: 43:10 – 44:17
• Court Orders NIH Restoration: 45:17 – 46:52

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Tone & Language

• Alternates between deeply personal, emotional accounts and measured, analytic insight.
• The tone shifts from detached anticipation, to shock, to resistance, to exhaustion, with undercurrents of cynicism, idealism, and practical fear.

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Conclusion

The episode lands at a moment of intense uncertainty—Harvard alone in the legal fight, research hanging in the balance, professors caught between ideals and survival. It sets up a second episode focused on the personal dimension of the conflict and lingering questions about the future of American higher education.

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Next Episode Teaser:
A focus on the personal conflict between Alan Garber and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, promising a close look at the human struggle behind institutional survival.

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For more on The Harvard Plan series, tune into the next episode on Embedded, or read the Boston Globe’s ongoing coverage.

Transcript

[Ryan Enos]

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[Ilya Merritz]

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[Kelly McEvers]

Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers and this is embedded from NPR. When President Trump campaigned for the 2024 election, he didn't just promise to overhaul the federal government, he said he would go after another sector, too.

[Ilya Merritz]

The time has come to reclaim our.

[Kit Parker]

Once great educational institutions from the radical.

[Ilya Merritz]

Left, and we will do that now.

[Kelly McEvers]

In his first year of office, President Trump has, of course, made good on that promise and targeted universities. Probably his biggest target has been Harvard, the country's oldest and richest university. The new season of a podcast series called the Harvard Plan looks at the pressure the president has put on Harvard and what it means for scientific research and free speech. The series was produced by our friends at WNYC's on the Media and the Boston Globe, and we are going to share it today. Ilya Merritz is the host.

[Ilya Merritz]

Here's Ilya Ryan looked forward to election night 2024. He expected a pleasant return to form the way election nights used to be.

[Ryan Enos]

This is going to be elections being fun again. We're going to sit, we're going to drink beer. We're going to watch election turns come in and play like games.

[Ilya Merritz]

Like I say, return to form because the 2016 election hit Ryan like a sucker punch. Not because he doesn't like Trump, although he definitely does not like Trump, but because the models failed so badly. Ryan Enos is a political scientist at Harvard, and specifically, he's a numbers guy.

[Ryan Enos]

It seemed like this kind of tragedy for quantitative political science because it defied a lot of people's predictions.

[Ilya Merritz]

Then came 2020, the COVID election, and after that, the false claims of a stolen election. Still, going into the First Tuesday of November 2024, Ryan felt good about the models. That evening he made his way over to Memorial hall, which is the most Hogwartsy building on Harvard's campus. They throw a big election watch party there every four years. A lot of undergrads turn out.

[Ryan Enos]

My role was to kind of tell them what they wanted to hear, which was that Harris was going to win, you know, which was, I wasn't just making that up. That's what, like, these models showed. But I think they were happy to.

[Ilya Merritz]

Hear that Ryan stayed just long enough for the early returns to show the models were off again. Trump was doing a bit better than expected.

[Ryan Enos]

Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I can see their fingers probably bleeding because there's no more nail debate.

[Ilya Merritz]

He then walked a few blocks to where his poli sci grad students had their own smaller gathering.

[Ryan Enos]

By the time I got over here to the graduate students, there was some data that was just starting to come in that really meant, like, something extraordinary would have to happen for Harris to pull it out.

[Ilya Merritz]

The mood in the room was deflating rapidly. Harvard students and faculty are overwhelmingly liberal, progressive Democrats, but Ryan was not inclined to despair. To him, 2024 felt different from 2016.

[Ryan Enos]

Because in 2016, that actually really panicked me. I was like, this is something that could have significant effects for democracy in the United States and for our lives. And that actually didn't really turn out to be true. I didn't love the policies for four years, but I live with policies I don't like all the time.

[Ilya Merritz]

He told the grad students, we're going to be okay.

[Ryan Enos]

I said, you know, we went through four years of Trump, and it wasn't a big deal. Like, you know, it wasn't great, but, you know, the country got through it.

[Ilya Merritz]

Ryan told me, people can call me naive if they want to. We did this interview on a beautiful day outdoors just before the start of a new semester, with young people joining orientation activities all around us. You could almost convince yourself that since election night, nothing much had really changed in the life of this university. Camilla saw Donald Trump's second election to the presidency similarly to how Ryan did.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Ah, it's all just drama. No, no. Last time around, nothing happened. Nothing's going to happen. It'll be fine.

[Ilya Merritz]

She's a professor and researcher at Harvard Medical School. She studies cancer cells, not politics, and her lived experience gave her a lot of faith in the United States. Kamila Nakserova was born in Communist Czechoslovakia and emigrated as a young girl with her mother to West Germany. They were joined later by her father, who crossed the Iron Curtain by air.

[Camilla Naxerova]

He built his own plane. He carved a propeller out of wood. He took the motor out of an old car and built it onto, like, type of glider.

[Ilya Merritz]

After university, Camilla came to the States for an internship at Boston Children's Hospital.

[Camilla Naxerova]

And I was supposed to stay for three months. And as soon as I experienced the American scientific culture, really. And I'm not exaggerating here. I decided I'm never going back. I'm never going back to Europe. I'll stay here forever and I'll do science here forever.

[Ilya Merritz]

As a younger person, you could share an idea and be taken seriously. Collaboration was encouraged.

[Camilla Naxerova]

It was a big revelation for me coming here and really experiencing that.

[Ilya Merritz]

And she went all the way, getting a PhD and then a faculty job at Harvard with her own lab.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Here's our cell culture room.

[Ilya Merritz]

Oh, wow.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Where we do genetic screens.

[Ilya Merritz]

You have the white lab coats on hangers.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Yes, exactly.

[Ilya Merritz]

Naxarova lab is a series of bays punctuated by an industrial sink here, some advanced scientific gadget there, and a small crew of postdocs and lab assistants at computers. At the end of it, like a captain's quarters, is Camilla's office with floor to ceiling windows and a big couch.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I lie down there all the time. I like my couch.

[Ilya Merritz]

They have big goals here. It's about nothing less than life and death, really. To understand the way cancer cells spread from one organ to another. A lot of the work is in colorectal cancers, which have risen sharply in younger people. With any luck, her work will lead to a breakthrough in treatment. So last November, her focus was on that, on her young family, not, it turns out, what was coming around the corner.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I think some people knew, but most of us were just completely oblivious.

[Ilya Merritz]

Later, Camilla questioned her blase attitude about the incoming administration.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Some of my more conservative colleagues, who are actually reading the conservative press and just know what the discussion points are, had already told me as early as November next year, if Harvard's still here, then. Ha ha. And I remember thinking, what, what, what? I don't. I really. I couldn't even make sense of, like, what he meant by that. And only later it dawned on me. Oh, wow.

[Kelly McEvers]

Yeah.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I mean, there is a pocket of conservative press that has been talking about straight out destroying us and other institutions like us for a long time.

[Kit Parker]

So let me just give you a quick orientation.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit keeps military habits. When I met him on Saturday morning at 8 at his lab at the Harvard Engineering Building, he told me he'd risen at3.45, had already worked out and taken one meeting. He's a colonel in the Army Reserves who did two tours and two shorter deployments in Afghanistan. And he's also a professor of bioengineering.

[Ryan Enos]

This is my office.

[Kit Parker]

Do you want to see the lab right quick?

[Ilya Merritz]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If a professor's lab is a mirror of their mind, Kit Parker's mind is restless, hungry for new things.

[Kit Parker]

I got frustrated with the lack of creativity in my science engineering students, so I ripped out part of my lab and built a studio space for artists.

[Ilya Merritz]

On the walls are these big maps of world cities made, so I'm told, from living cell samples.

[Kit Parker]

These are pig and you know, they beat. And so you look in the microscope and the whole city is throbbing, you know, because they get synchronized in their beer.

[Ilya Merritz]

He showed me a 300 pound smoker he created with his students when he taught a class on barbecue. He has a patent on it. Actually, Kit has quite a few patents reflecting his eclectic interests.

[Kit Parker]

I've always been kind of interested in couture.

[Ilya Merritz]

A few years ago he taught a class on fashion.

[Kit Parker]

Worn a lot of camouflage. In 2009, when I was in Afghanistan, we were wearing this pixelated kind of blue uniforms and we were getting like shot at by these Chechnyan snipers from like a long way away because you could see us because of this uniform. It was like I had a road flare duct taped on my forehead.

[Ilya Merritz]

One thing that makes Kit conspicuous is this. He's one of the few Harvard professors known to be conservative to vote Republican.

[Kit Parker]

I voted for President Trump the first time because I needed him to end the war in Afghanistan and he promised to do that. I didn't think I was gonna have any peace in my own life until that war. Cause even if I wasn't going back there, it was always there and I needed it to end.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit voted for Trump again in 2024. That election night, he went to bed early, feeling that Trump would win and also feeling that very likely he'd take a look at universities and properly.

[Kit Parker]

So we're unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship and integrity of scholarship.

[Ilya Merritz]

Between the ever expanding bureaucracy and the leftward drift of campus conventional thinking, Kit felt stifled.

[Kit Parker]

We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion. While we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.

[Ilya Merritz]

So the next morning, when he learned Trump had been re elected in 2024, Kit felt upbeat. Trump shared his concerns. Kitt told colleagues Harvard should go to Trump and open up a dialogue.

[Kit Parker]

We need to go talk to him immediately. If he talks to Putin and Kim, he'll talk to us.

[Ilya Merritz]

With some prodding from the new administration, Kitt hoped Harvard could heal itself. Coming up, Harvard does not go talk to the new president. Instead, Trump brings the fight to Harvard. It's the Harvard plan from the Boston Globe and on the media.

[Kelly McEvers]

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[Ilya Merritz]

This took 3,000 years to get to this point. Can you believe it?

[Kelly McEvers]

But a month into this ceasefire, progress is stalling. Why is it so fragile? And what comes next for the people of Gaza? Listen now to the Sunday story on the up first podcast from npr.

[Ilya Merritz]

This is ON the Media. I'm Ilya Merritz, host of the Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe. Kit Parker, a Trump voting professor of bioengineering, was right that Trump was looking at higher ed. Shortly after being sworn in, the new president ordered the formation of a task force to investigate antisemitism at universities. It came under the umbrella of the General Services Administration. The chairman of the group was a lawyer named Leo Terrell, who did a lot of TV hits.

[Ryan Enos]

We are going to use every federal criminal statute to go after these anti Semites, these people who hate Jews. We're going to bankrupt these universities. We're going to take away every single.

[Ilya Merritz]

Federal dollar, then lie. Letters went out to 60 colleges and universities informing them they were under investigation by the Department of Education for allowing a climate of antisemitism to take hold. Then the Secretary of State began revoking hundreds of student visas, vandalizing universities, harassing.

[Kit Parker]

Students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.

[Ilya Merritz]

We're not gonna Give you a visa. For Camilla, the first sign of trouble was delivered by the medical school's dean, who. Who warned faculty that investigations into antisemitism could affect their work. Camilla didn't see the connection.

[Camilla Naxerova]

That's surprising. That can't possibly be a big issue.

[Ilya Merritz]

A much bigger problem in her mind was a new effort by the Trump administration to cut the money universities collect on top of government grants to cover overhead, like heat and electricity. It's called indirect costs.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I remember being like, why are we talking about antisemitism? We should be talking about indirect costs. Isn't that the problem that we're facing?

[Ilya Merritz]

In March, Columbia became the first university to be directly singled out by the government for alleged lapses in dealing with anti Semitism on campus. The administration also canceled hundreds of millions of research dollars.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Then we would all frantically reach out to colleagues at Columbia and try to find out, has your grant been canceled? How about this other person's grant, this person who works on cancer in a similar field as me? Has their grant been cancelled? Because we. We didn't really understand what was happening.

[Ilya Merritz]

Columbia soon relented. The school tightened its protest policies and adopted the broad, some say too broad definition of antisemitism favored by the Trump administration. The government froze all of Columbia's research funding anyway. No deal.

[Camilla Naxerova]

That's, I think, when we all started being very afraid because it was clear that, you know, we might well be next.

[Ilya Merritz]

For Camilla, there was one more complication. She was pregnant. She had a baby in March, her second kid.

[Camilla Naxerova]

So I had a few weeks of bliss, you know, where I had actually decided this year, for the first time, I'm gonna really just take time off. I'm not going to worry about work. I'm just gonna be with a baby.

[Ilya Merritz]

But the pressure campaign was just heating up. All righty. Joining us now, my very dear friend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon. You are ess taken out $400 million from Columbia University.

[Ryan Enos]

Are you looking at some of the.

[Ilya Merritz]

Other elite schools who are having the same problems?

[Kelly McEvers]

We've now launched investigations into five different universities. Harvard being one.

[Ilya Merritz]

Columbia was one.

[Ryan Enos]

What's Harvard got to worry about?

[Kit Parker]

Money.

[Ryan Enos]

They've got an endowment of $51 billion.

[Camilla Naxerova]

They don't really need to worry. But they are reading the tea leaves here a bit. They saw what happened at Columbia, yanking the 400 million.

[Kit Parker]

Not only have I targeted 13 schools.

[Ryan Enos]

I'm sending letters to the mayors and.

[Kit Parker]

The DA's of LA, Boston, New York, Chicago.

[Ryan Enos]

Do your job or we'll do it for you. And we are Going to file hate crimes.

[Ilya Merritz]

The second Trump administration was turning out so differently from what Ryan had expected. Not only were universities under pressure, so were news organizations, media companies, law firms, corporations. Many of them were capitulating. Doge's rampage through government had everyone on edge. Ryan was concerned by what was happening inside Harvard as well. DEI initiatives were renamed or scaled back. The university ended a partnership with a school in the West Bank. It removed the heads of a Middle.

[Ryan Enos]

East studies center, essentially complying in advance with the Trump administration.

[Ilya Merritz]

It seemed wrong, and Ryan felt called to do something. But there was a problem. He's a political scientist.

[Ryan Enos]

You don't do politics. And I always kind of thought I was somebody that especially didn't do campus politics. Like that was a waste of my time.

[Ilya Merritz]

He thought, eff it, I need to act. Together with a colleague who studies Latin American politics, Steve Levitsky, he published a series of opinion pieces in the school newspaper, the Crimson. The titles read like the beginnings of a manifesto. Harvard Must Take a Stand for Democracy. First. They came for Columbia Appeasing Trump Damages Harvard and America. One of those pieces resulted in an invitation to meet with Harvard's president, Alan Garber, in his office.

[Ryan Enos]

We sat down and made our case.

[Ilya Merritz]

Ryan found Garber to be very different from a lot of administrators who nod and write things down and don't really engage. He says it's frustrating.

[Ryan Enos]

And Garber, on the other hand, will argue with you about things like he'll tell you why he disagrees with you, or you'll say something, and then he'll ask you to justify it. Right. And then you have to start thinking on your feet about why exactly you said that.

[Ilya Merritz]

So they debated pros and cons. Ryan says Garber left him feeling heard but not hopeful.

[Ryan Enos]

He had some pretty firm reasons about why Harvard probably would be futile for it to push back.

[Ilya Merritz]

The pressure on universities seemed to be constantly ratcheting up. Ryan asked himself what more he could do.

[Ryan Enos]

It seemed like it was so imminent that Harvard was going to fold. It kind of seemed like it was going to happen any moment.

[Ilya Merritz]

Ryan and some others coalesced around the idea of an open letter from faculty to at least make it clear that surrender was not okay with them. He and Levitsky drafted it over spring break.

[Ryan Enos]

We hit send to all the faculty we know and held our breath to see what would happen.

[Ilya Merritz]

One by one, people added their names. Eventually, the number passed 800.

[Ryan Enos]

You could see them coming in. You know, I was watching these and, like, typing them into an Excel spreadsheet in my in laws living room and thinking that, like, oh, we really are going to make a statement here.

[Ilya Merritz]

It was that same week that the government turned its attention to Harvard. A March 31 letter from the Antisemitism Task Force informed Harvard that $8.7 billion in federal funding was under review. A letter on April 3rd offered some preconditions for continuing to receive public money, including abolishing DEI programs. Another document that same day offered a choice between installing new leadership in problematic departments and entering receivership.

[Kit Parker]

Does anyone in America think that Harvard's capable of fixing itself? Other than the folks at Harvard? Nope. No one thinks Harvard can fix itself.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit watched the Trump administration's pressure campaign approvingly, but also aware that his own values were being tested.

[Kit Parker]

Does a Republican who's against big government want federal intervention and monitoring of this campus? No. It's not what conservative ideas about the role of government should be.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit, Camilla, and Ryan, they each have different ideas about what's most at stake. For Kit, it's academic freedom and the intellectual cage match. For Camilla, it's serving the public through research and innovation only. Ryan had a critical mass of people on campus feeling the same way he did and organizing. Their thing is the independence of the university. Saturday, 12 April, the no surrender people held a rally on Cambridge Common. Under gray skies with spitting wind and rain, in an insulated canvas work coat, Ryan climbed to the lectern. He told a story about growing up in a California town that had fallen on hard times.

[Ryan Enos]

But you know what we heard? We heard that the University of California was going to open a new campus somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley to bring education to the region. And people dreamed that that new university would be in my town. So people organized and they lobbied and they worked. And that university did open, and that transformed my community.

[Ilya Merritz]

It brought knowledge and jobs and pride, he said. And that is what Donald Trump wants to take away.

[Ryan Enos]

We are waiting on you, Harvard. When will you speak up? If you don't speak up, who will? That was the first time I'd ever spoken at a rally. I didn't even know I was capable of that.

[Ilya Merritz]

But there was something important Ryan and the others did not know. That day, the night before, Harvard had received yet another letter from the government. This one was more like an ultimatum. If the university wanted to keep its financial relationship with the government, it would have to submit now to government audits for three years and bring in an unspecified number of conservative students and faculty. There would be no more delaying, no punting. It was yes or no time.

[Kelly McEvers]

Harvard stand up, follow the rule of law.

[Kit Parker]

If Harvard faults, then others are definitely gonna fold.

[Ilya Merritz]

Don't give in without a fight. Coming up after the break. Fight or fold, Harvard's leaders make up their minds. This is the Harvard Plan from the Boston Globe and On the Media.

[Ryan Enos]

Foreign.

[Kelly McEvers]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Adobe introducing the all new Adobe Acrobat studio. Now with AI powered PDF spaces. Need to turn 100 pages of market research into 5 insights with the Click templates for a sales proposal that'll close that deal or an AI specialist to tailor the tone of your market report. You can do all that with the all new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat.

[Ryan Enos]

Hey.

[Kit Parker]

It'S Ray from Car Talk. Are you tired of all the depth and thoughtful care that goes into NPR shows?

[Ilya Merritz]

Want some good old fashioned goofing around and stumbling to figure out what's going on? Well, I've been taking occasional car questions again.

[Kit Parker]

You can hear them by signing up.

[Ilya Merritz]

For NPR along with lots of other bonus content. Just go to plus.NPR.org you ever get.

[Kelly McEvers]

To the pharmacy and you're expecting your medication to cost 20 bucks, but instead it's 200 or 1,000?

[Ilya Merritz]

And you're like, wait, really? Like, are you sure? Is there some kind of mistake?

[Kelly McEvers]

This week on the Life Kit podcast, what to do when youn Prescription Costs way more than you expected. You can listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ilya Merritz]

This is on the Media. I'm Ilya Maritz, host of the Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe. Before the break, professors and students held a rally pleading with Harvard not to give in to government pressure. That was on a Saturday. The following Monday, at exactly 1:30pm Eastern time, thousands of people faculty, students, really anyone who's ever had any kind of Harvard affiliation received an email from Harvard's president, Alan Garber. It was an answer to the government's ultimatum. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights, he wrote. Harvard became the first university to outright reject the Trump administration's demands.

[Kelly McEvers]

Harvard said tonight that it was rejecting a list of demands from the administration.

[Camilla Naxerova]

On sweeping changes and would fight back.

[Kelly McEvers]

Against them will not be repressed. Today we can stand up and say no. In a show of solidarity, hundreds of university and college presidents have now signed onto a message that reads, in part, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. One of the signatories is Harvard's president, Alan Garber.

[Ilya Merritz]

For months, everyone wondered what Harvard would do. Now Harvard President Alan Garber was speaking out. It's less that I chose to take on the fight than that the fight came to me. Ryan says he felt an immense swelling of pride. Those are his words.

[Ryan Enos]

Like, this was the moment we'd been waiting for.

[Ilya Merritz]

For Camilla, the email was unsettling. No way there would not be consequences for her work.

[Camilla Naxerova]

It felt a little bit like a natural disaster. It felt very similar to reading, we've been flooded or there's an earthquake coming.

[Kit Parker]

And for Kit, I thought, this is gonna suck. I mean, I'm torn, right, because I'm in the army. The President is my commander in chief. I also believe a lot of the last 10 years of changes at Harvard have been, for the most part, maladaptive to our scholarly mission. But I'm a committer. I committed to Harvard. I committed to the United States of America. It's my country. So, like, you know, you got two warring factions which you care deeply about. So I thought, this is gonna suck. And it has sucked. It's tough. It's like watching your parents fight, you know?

[Ilya Merritz]

The New York Times later reported that the fateful Friday ultimatum to Harvard may have been sent by accident.

[Kit Parker]

It looked like a drunk text, but.

[Ilya Merritz]

Even if it was that, Kit sees it as a tactical success.

[Kit Parker]

Look, Trump is a master negotiator. He didn't think Harvard was going to cave. He's smarter than that. Right, but did he shape the terrain for the negotiation? Oh, yeah. He gave a master class. He took an extreme position. He knows the courts are going to backstop him from anything illegal. And he put Harvard in a terrible negotiating position.

[Ilya Merritz]

A week after saying no to the government's demands, Harvard went further, suing the government to restore billions of dollars in funding. The Globe's Hilary Burns and Mike Damiano went to talk with Alan Garber in his office. So what is the Trump administration's campaign that it says is about combating anti Semitism?

[Kelly McEvers]

What is it really about?

[Ilya Merritz]

It involves things like asking us to. To change who we hire, who we recruit as students to the university. And it includes the potential to actually monitor what we teach. It has impacts on so many different aspects of university life that it is hard to say it is only about antisemitism. And he didn't ask this. But I would also say that attacking a research enterprise in the name of attacking antisemitism really gives rise to skepticism about what the goal is here. Meanwhile, Camilla's worst fears were coming to pass. Trump turned scientific research funding into an improvised weapon. Specifically, billions of dollars of grants from the National Institutes of Health.

[Camilla Naxerova]

And so what happened is that they just stopped.

[Ilya Merritz]

She explained how it had worked for years. Decades, actually.

[Camilla Naxerova]

The NIH pays bills every week. So every week we basically submit to them. Our administration submits to them what we're spending on the grants that we have at the nih, and they pay the bills on a very regular basis.

[Ilya Merritz]

Now the money had ceased to flow.

[Camilla Naxerova]

And it was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight? Would we have to stop doing everything, or would there be some sort of help?

[Ilya Merritz]

For weeks, they were in a kind of low information limbo. Eventually, Camilla felt forced to ask two people who had recently joined her team to leave. She got a year of bridge funding from the university. But it's not really enough, just because.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I can't provide the security, job security that I usually aim to provide for everybody who comes to the lab, which is basically promise on my end that I will train them, I will work with them until they're ready to apply for a job, which for a postdoc would be a professorship somewhere. And so that can take five years or longer.

[Ilya Merritz]

Time horizons are long in the sciences. Not only had Camilla lost funding, she also lost the ability to plan.

[Ryan Enos]

How much pain can Harvard absorb here?

[Ilya Merritz]

We don't know how much we can actually absorb, but what we do know is, is that we cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights. The government found more ways to make Harvard pay for its recalcitrants.

[Kelly McEvers]

They will no longer be allowed to participate in this student exchange visitor program, and that's up to 27% of their enrolled students.

[Ilya Merritz]

In May, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved to block Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students because of the university's pro terrorist conduct.

[Kelly McEvers]

This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together.

[Ilya Merritz]

The departments of Energy, Defense, Agriculture, and NASA all got in on the action, canceling grants and programs, launching investigations. All of these departments became respondents in Harvard's lawsuit. And for a few weeks at least, Alan Garber became a kind of resistance hero. At commencement, he was loudly cheered, especially when he talked about foreign students being a part of the community. Members of the class of 2025 from down the street, across the country and around the world. Around the world, just as it should. So it's a beautiful Monday morning in Boston in July. I'm about to go inside the Moakley U.S. courthouse, and over the summer Harvard's lawsuit to restore Camilla's funding and all of its research dollars moved ahead. In court, I watched Harvard's lawyers argue that the Trump administration had violated its First Amendment rights, Title VI of the Civil Rights act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The professor's union was also a plaintiff in what became a combined lawsuit. Their lawyers sat together in a group. The table was full. On the other side of the courtroom, a single man sat at the government bench. Lonely over there, huh? The judge said to him by way of an opener. The whole room chuckled. Yeah, and he said something to the effect of the executive branch speaks or has one voice or something like that. Aiden Ryan is with the Globe. Like me, he was in court that day when he rose to make the government's case. Michael Velcik, the Trump administration's lawyer, came in hot, emphatically, vehemently, like just those. Those adverbs came up quite a bit. Velczik is tall and slender and young and a Harvard college and Harvard Law graduate. His first words after being invited by the judge to speak were, harvard is a rich college. Belchick talked a lot about money. Harvard wants billions of dollars. He said, ultimately this is a problem of economics. He said it was a contract dispute and it shouldn't be heard here in district court at all. It should be in federal claims court. Judge Allison Burroughs was skeptical. She didn't understand his argument, but he was arguing it well and said that his Harvard education was serving him well. And that got a laugh.

[Kelly McEvers]

When I say hands off, you say Harvard.

[Ilya Merritz]

Hands off, Harvard. Hands up.

[Kelly McEvers]

Hands up.

[Ilya Merritz]

When court let out, there was a rally just outside by faculty, grad students and undergrads angry that potentially life saving research had been turned into a tool. They're cutting over $3 billion in vital scientific research. This case is about academic freedom. I was impressed with the speaker's passion, but not by their numbers. I thought of the tens of thousands of people just in Boston who work in biotech, medicine and other industries where government funding is critical. I counted only about 100 participants at this rally. Camilla was not one of them. She said after final word came from the NIH that their grants had been terminated. The scientists in her building did not spontaneously gather in the lobby to get organized. She herself is not inclined to this kind of activism.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I think scientists, they're a particular kind of animal. I think that we all probably locked our office doors and just started emailing. We didn't physically emerge.

[Ilya Merritz]

Camilla's pretty sure she lay down on her office couch at some point.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I Certainly felt like I just want to hide under my blanket and this doesn't feel good and I don't want to see anyone because I knew my colleagues couldn't help me.

[Ilya Merritz]

Over the summer, a lot of things happened. President Trump signed a law allowing big college endowments like Harvard's to be taxed at a much higher rate. A number of college presidents resigned or were pressured to do so, including the leaders of Northwestern, the University of Virginia, George Mason University, and Columbia's interim president, the one who had tried and failed to appease the government back in March. And then there was this breaking overnight.

[Kelly McEvers]

Columbia University is now the first school to reach a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration over claims of anti Semitism.

[Ilya Merritz]

In July, after initially being rebuffed, Columbia did get a deal with the government at a cost of over $200 million. The school's new president, former journalist Claire Shipman, defended the agreement on cnn.

[Kelly McEvers]

I think there are a couple of really important things about this agreement from our point of view. One, it doesn't cross the red lines that we laid out. It protects our academic integrity. That was, of course, essential to us. And two, it does reset our relationship with the federal government in terms of research funding. And that's, you know, there's many headlines, about 400 million. This is really access to billions. It was a lot more than that, billions of dollars in future funding. And it's not just money for Columbia. I mean, this is about science. It's about curing cancer, cutting edge, boundary breaking science that actually benefits the country and humanity.

[Ilya Merritz]

Shipman was asked, why not do what Harvard did and join the fight?

[Kelly McEvers]

Look, we, and I've said this to our community openly. We kept all options at all times open.

[Ilya Merritz]

Shipman said we might have had some.

[Kelly McEvers]

Victories in court, but we worried we would have long term damage. For example, we could have faced the loss of any future relationship in the coming years with the federal government, and that would have effectively meant an end to the research mission we conduct as we know it.

[Ryan Enos]

It's understandable people would want to say, we just want to move on. That, of course, is absolutely the nature of extortion. Right.

[Ilya Merritz]

Ryan sees what he calls the collective action problem.

[Ryan Enos]

When a mugger comes to you and says, give me your wallet, if you give them your wallet, rather than fighting back, they move on to the next person and take their wallet as well. And they just keep doing it until somebody fights back. The nature of extortion is that the extortionist extracts pain from you. And in many ways, these analogies about the mugger don't just quite capture it because the mugger is not trying to undo democracy. And as somebody who studies politics and studies Democracy, I believe 100% firmly there is no doubt that that is what Donald Trump is trying to do.

[Ilya Merritz]

Then Kristen, my Globe colleague, tossed Ryan a curveball. Have you ever stood up to a bully before?

[Ryan Enos]

Have I ever stood up to a bully before? Well, I mean, when I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time bullying people. So maybe I reflect on that a little bit. I was always the tall guy in the classroom.

[Ilya Merritz]

Ryan is tall and white and a man, and a Harvard man at that. He says friends and family are concerned for him becoming that guy who's always criticizing the president. But Ryan sees it differently.

[Ryan Enos]

I have been very fortunate to have this position where I have the ability to be a little bigger than myself for a period and try to do what's right for society more generally.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit Parker has not had direct funding cuts, but he's watched them hit scientists all around him. Are you okay with that, like, as a, as a, as a means to an end?

[Kit Parker]

I haven't thought through an alternative strategy to apply pressure to universities to potentiate the change required to secure them on the geopolitical terrain.

[Ilya Merritz]

I feel like your answer is like, yes, it's ugly. But like, this is how you get to change.

[Kit Parker]

You're forcing me towards a yes answer and you're doing so successfully.

[Ilya Merritz]

I don't think I could force you to do anything.

[Kit Parker]

I just wish I hadn't come to this point, you know, I don't think it had to. And I like President Garber a lot. I think he's a good dude. I don't know how much freedom to operate he has right now given the corporate governance of Harvard.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit's view that Harvard has a lefty groupthink problem is rooted in direct personal experience. More than a decade ago, he began teaching a class that presented his engineering students with a different kind of problemgang violence in the Massachusetts city of Springfield. Police there were, using techniques borrowed from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

[Kelly McEvers]

Counterinsurgency cops in one of the most crime ridden cities in New England.

[Ilya Merritz]

The program got results and that got the attention of 60 Minutes.

[Kelly McEvers]

Last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab.

[Kit Parker]

Help me understand what kind of intelligence I need to collect when I'm in the field, whether it's in the north end, I'm on Main street standing by the taco truck, or if I'm in Kandahar City, that's the kind of data I need.

[Ilya Merritz]

But a decade later, the national conversation on policing had changed. It was the time of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Kitt's course listing in the catalog caught the attention of some activists who started a petition to cancel the class. Here's how One Boston station, WGBH, covered the story in 2020. As one critic said on Twitter, police reform is not good for communities of.

[Ryan Enos]

Color unless it is a means to abolition.

[Ilya Merritz]

There was a case to be made that this kind of policing was good for the community. But right now, it's not a story Harvard plans to help. Tell Adam Riley, gba To Kit, it was clear that social media noise, not the quality of the syllabus or the teaching, was what counted with Harvard leadership.

[Kit Parker]

I passed through another administrator. I said, make a statement about academic freedom. Make a statement in support of my students that are working on this stuff. Make a statement in support of this black and brown community in Springfield that's trying to fix itself. Maybe make a statement in support about me. And they wouldn't do it.

[Ilya Merritz]

The class had to be withdrawn after one of the instructors dropped out. The following year, Kit managed to resume teaching about policing in Springfield. But he says the whole experience has made him less ambitious, less creative in the classroom.

[Kit Parker]

After that. And then, you know, me being investigated by the university, and I was very open.

[Ilya Merritz]

You were investigated?

[Kit Parker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, just like, who has. If you're a faculty member and you haven't been investigated in the last 10 years at Harvard, what have you really done?

[Ilya Merritz]

His alleged offense, in his own words.

[Kit Parker]

I speak bluntly. I give blunt feedback. And that's not always received well by folks at Harvard. As a matter of fact, to be.

[Ilya Merritz]

Clear, we haven't seen the complaint, but we have independently confirmed the outlines of what Kit told us. The upshot was that Kit had to meet with a sensitivity coach. He had a pay reduction and a hiring freeze at his lab, which hurt. The penalty, he says was overseen by Claudine Gay, who was then a dean and went on to become Harvard's president, albeit briefly. Kit realized he was far from the only one.

[Kit Parker]

And then I had all these other faculty members come to me and say, hey, I'm being investigated, too. I'm like, what is this?

[Ilya Merritz]

This, too, contributed to Kit's sense that something had gone badly awry with administrators driving a process that felt bureaucratic and far removed from the vibrant community of scholars that, in his mind, was Harvard should be. Are there conservative faculty at Harvard?

[Kit Parker]

I have identified six.

[Ilya Merritz]

Okay.

[Kit Parker]

No, I mean, I. So, I mean, President Garber and I had a discussion about putting conservative voices on some of these committees. And so Alan asked me, can you put together a list of conservative factors?

[Ilya Merritz]

He's working on it. We asked Harvard what Alan Garber plans to do with the names of conservative faculty. They did not respond to this or to other requests for comment. At some point in the summer, it became clear that Harvard was not simply fighting the administration in court. The two sides were also talking out of court. Shortly before students returned to campus, there was a flurry of news stories about how a settlement, perhaps similar to Columbia's, could be imminent.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I really hope there is a settlement, and I hope that you can put this in your podcast, because I think that the world doesn't hear enough about our side of the river. I feel like in the newspaper, I always read about, what do the students in Cambridge say?

[Ilya Merritz]

The medical school where Camilla's lab is is located in Boston proper, south of the Charles River. The main Harvard campus is a few miles north in Cambridge.

[Camilla Naxerova]

You know, there's a letter that's being organized, and, you know, faculty don't want to deal, et cetera. But I think over here at the medical school, I certainly don't want to speak for my colleagues, but I suspect I have a hard data on it. I suspect that feelings may be a little different. So I definitely want a deal. I think that what we do here is extremely valuable. And the reality is that without a deal, it's dead.

[Ilya Merritz]

In Camilla's lab, they analyze tissue donated by people with cancer, most of whom will not be alive for much longer. They're looking for evidence of how metastasis happens, and they've learned a lot.

[Camilla Naxerova]

We have come this far, and actually, a lot of the funding that was terminated recently was enabling us to now look in more depth for the molecular basis of the liver metastatic. So the next step would be to throw the molecular biology kitchen sink at these cells that we now know are special and dangerous and really try to map out what about the cell's properties is different. Is it something about the DNA? Is it something about the rna?

[Ilya Merritz]

Camilla paid attention to Columbia's settlement. She says it was reasonable.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Nobody's dictating their faculty hiring. They, it seems like, retained most of their freedoms. They had to pay a very steep fine, which I think we will have to pay also. But if we can have a similar kind of deal, I think it's worth it, and I would like for there to be a deal.

[Ilya Merritz]

Even if that happens, she has been changed by this experience, you know, like.

[Camilla Naxerova]

When you're a kid, everything that your parents say, that's the truth and you believe. And there are these amazing figures in your life and you don't question them. And so a part of growing up is to realize, oh, well, maybe they're not as perfect and maybe I can't trust them on absolutely everything. And so it feels a little bit like that too. It's like, oh, maybe it was a little bit naive to think that just because it's the government for sure, I can like absolutely 100% count on it.

[Ilya Merritz]

She is starting to think about the alternatives.

[Camilla Naxerova]

I don't know what I would do. Maybe I would have to go back to Europe after all. But Europe is right now flooded with all the people who are trying to go back. And then it would be kind of depressing to go back. I do love America, so I would probably look for a job in industry. Maybe I would become a stay at home mom. Who knows?

[Ilya Merritz]

In September, Harvard won a round in its fight with the government. A judge ordered the canceled NIH grant money to flow again. The judge wrote, to upend the long standing collaborative relationship between the government and Harvard and its partner institutions without considering alternatives or articulating a connection to the problem of antisemitism sounds in arbitrariness and reeks of pretext. Days earlier, a story came to light from the past of the man who represented the Trump administration in court. As my Globe colleague Hilary Burns learned when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, Michael Velczik turned in a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler. The assignment was to write a piece in the voice of a controversial figure. Two sources the Globe spoke with found Velczik's paper disturbing. We learned that the instructor asked him to redo it separately. In an email to a friend about a year and a half later, Velcik wrote that Mein Kampf was was his, quote, favorite book I've read this year. The email didn't mention the Holocaust or Hitler's role in the murder of 6 million Jews. Velczik didn't respond to our request for comment. The Department of Justice told us in a statement, Michael has handled some of the Civil Division's most important cases, defending the president's agenda in court with the utmost respect and professionalism. It is almost certain that the government will appeal the decision if there's no settlement. Harvard's litigation with the government could last for years.

[Kit Parker]

The question is, are they trying to wait out Trump in the administration? That's the issue right now. That's the big question.

[Ilya Merritz]

Kit would have preferred for Alan Garber and Donald Trump to sit down and dialogue without lawyers. The same behavior that Ryan might call obeying in advance, Kit thinks is honestly not very impressive. Doesn't go nearly far enough.

[Kit Parker]

We changed the Middle East Studies Institute. We've changed the name of the DEI offices. No one's been fired, no one's been retrained. There's been no by name accountability for what's happened over the last 10 years. No one has proposed that staffers, administrators and faculty write statements of commitment to academic freedom. Hadn't happened. Hadn't happened yet. No one has had to write down, I will support academic freedom and ideological viewpoint diversity. You just have to write down your statement every year in a practice report about what you did with DEI this past year. But no one's making that kind of commitment.

[Ilya Merritz]

The engineering school no longer asks for DEI progress reporting.

[Kit Parker]

So, yeah, I'm still skeptical.

[Ilya Merritz]

American higher education remains in limbo. While Columbia and a few other schools have taken settlements, most have not. But no one besides Harvard has gone as far as to sue the government. And so all eyes remain on the nation's oldest and richest school and its leader, Alan Garber, a 70 year old man who has seldom made waves and who gives away very little when he speaks. Some even call him stoic.

[Kit Parker]

I'm sure he has emotions just like everybody else, but he's just very rational.

[Ilya Merritz]

It just so happens that Harvard's fight is more than that for Alan Garber. It's personal, putting him in direct conflict with a close colleague, someone he once mentored. Alan's also a human being and it's gotta be like, there's gotta be part of him that's gotta be struggling with this. In the coming weeks, we'll go deep on that personal relationship and its central role in the battle for Harvard soul. Here with me, Dr. J. Bhattacharya.

[Camilla Naxerova]

Dr. B. I think you were probably.

[Ilya Merritz]

On the show, I don't even know how many times. That makes Alan and Jay extremely special. They are not ideological about answers.

[Kit Parker]

They are extremely data driven and empirical about answers.

[Ilya Merritz]

But this struggle is not academic or even particularly rational. It is a bare knuckle fight for money, prestige and power.

[Kit Parker]

And I have seen a number of the compacts that have been circulated and we made a conscious decision not to sign them.

[Ilya Merritz]

I see a bit of cowardice in a lot of other universities who are like, thank God it's Harvard, not us. If we stay quiet, this will go away. The Harvard Plan Season 2 is reported and written by me, Ilya Merritz. The series is produced by on the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for the Boston Globe and Katja Rogers, on the Media's executive producer, Mixing and original music by Jared Paul. Tom Colligan is the fact checker. Thanks to the Boston Globes editor Nancy Barnes and to Ryan Huddle for episode art. And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers. I'll see you next week for Part two of the Harvard Plan. This is on the Media.

[Camilla Naxerova]

So I.

[Kelly McEvers]

Just want to check in really quick. Are you okay? Or are you suffering from sleep deprivation, a stack of bills, or political propaganda? If so, you may be stuck in the parent trap. On the It's Been a Minute podcast, we're diving headfirst into the anxieties of modern parenting and how that trickles out to all of us. Even if you don't have children. Come find some relief. Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Wildcard is where big name interviews feel like conversations with a friend.

[Ilya Merritz]

I mean, I can't believe how lucky I've been. You didn't say goodbye the right way, McConaughey, she told me. I don't think you're Princeton material.

[Ryan Enos]

I'm nothing if not open, I guess.

[Kelly McEvers]

I'm Rachel Martin. Watch or listen to Wildcard on the NPR app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.