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- [00:01]
A
This is on the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.
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B
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's been a heck of a year for the universities. To date, we've seen college presidents resign under pressure campaigns.
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James Ryan announced his departure today amid a Justice department investigation into UVA's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
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Foreign born holders of student visas indefinitely detained for exercising their free speech rights.
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A
Rumisa Ozturk and others identified as pro Palestinian activists have had visas revoked or their legal status challenged by the Trump administration.
- [00:35]
B
Hundreds of millions of dollars already allocated for research grants for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's rescinded. But none of the seismic shifts that have occurred this year at universities should have come as a surprise. The fault lines were there for all to see back when Donald Trump was still on the campaign trail last year.
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C
When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors.
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That have allowed our colleges to become.
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Dominated by Marxists, maniacs and lunatics.
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B
So far, the accreditors have kept their jobs. But as the evidence piles up, it's clear that Trump was not making idle threats against the universities. And it wasn't just the president setting off alarm bells.
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We have to honestly and aggressively attack.
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The universities in this country.
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B
In fact, there's a strain on the political right that has been gunning for universities for decades. Last year, we explored that history in season one of the Harvard Plan, which we made in partnership with the Boston Globe. The series focused on the short, tumultuous tenure of the first black president of the university, Claudine Gay, and the forces that arrayed to hound her out of that position. As a reminder, it was all unfolding in the wake of the anti war encampments, the accusations of anti Semitism on campus, and the disastrous congressional hearings that put university leaders like Gay in the firing line.
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E
It's when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
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B
What we Learned in Season 1 was that this campaign to force change on universities had allies in high places who were waiting for the pendulum to swing in their favor. Now, with Trump in the White House, it has given all of that. When our friends at the Boston Globe asked if we wanted to make a new season of the Harvard Plan, it was a no brainer. So over the next three weeks, the reporter and host of the series, Ilya Merits, will take us inside the pressure campaign on universities, big and small, public and private. We start off with the oldest and richest university and the only school that's fought back in court. Here's Ilya.
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Ryan looked forward to election night 2024. He expected a pleasant return to form, the way election nights used to be.
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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 terms come in and play like games.
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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.
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D
It seemed like this kind of tragedy for quantitative political science because it defied a lot of people's predictions.
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A
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.
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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.
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A
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.
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Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida.
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I can see their fingers probably bleeding because there's no more nail debate.
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He then walked a few blocks to where his poli sci grad students had their own smaller gathering.
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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.
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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.
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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.
- [05:17]
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He told the grad students, we're going to be okay.
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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.
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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.
- [05:57]
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Ah, it's all just drama. No, no. Last time around, nothing happened. Nothing's going to happen. It'll be fine.
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A
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. Czech men, and I say this from personal experience, my people come from there. Czech men can be very inventive.
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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 a type of glider.
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After university, Camilla came to the States for an internship at Boston Children's Hospital.
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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.
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As a younger person, you could share an idea and be taken seriously. Collaboration was encouraged.
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It was a big revelation for me, coming here and really experiencing that.
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And she went all the way, getting a PhD and then a faculty job at Harvard with her own lab.
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Here's our cell culture room.
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Oh, wow.
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Where we do genetic screens.
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You have the white lab coats on hangers.
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Yes, exactly.
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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.
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I lie down there all the time. I like my couch.
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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 and on her young family, not, it turns out, what was coming around the corner.
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I think some people knew, but most of us were just completely oblivious.
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Later, Camilla questioned her blase attitude about the incoming administration.
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Some of my more conservative colleagues were 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. Haha. 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. Yeah. 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.
- [09:02]
C
So let me just give you a quick orientation.
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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 at 3:45, 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.
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This is my office.
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Do you want to see the lab right quick?
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Yeah.
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Yes, absolutely. If a professor's lab is a mirror of their mind, Kit Parker's mind is restless, hungry for new things.
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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.
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On the walls are these big maps of world cities made, so I'm told, from living cell samples.
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These are pig and you know, they beat. And so you're looking the microscope and the whole city is throbbing, you know, because they get synchronized in their field.
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He showed me a 300 pound 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.
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I've always been kind of interested in couture.
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A few years ago he taught a class on fashion.
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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.
- [10:32]
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One thing that makes Kit conspicuous is this. He's one of the few Harvard professors known to be conservative. To vote Republican.
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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 going to have any peace in my own life until that war, because even if I wasn't going back there, it was always there, and I needed it to end.
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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.
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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.
- [11:28]
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Between the ever expanding bureaucracy and the leftward drift of campus conventional thinking, Kit felt stifled.
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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.
- [11:49]
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So the next morning, when he learned Trump had been reelected in 2024, Kitt felt upbeat. Trump shared his concerns. Kitt told colleagues Harvard should go to Trump and open up a dialogue.
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We need to go talk to him immediately. If he talks to Putin and Kim, he'll talk to us.
- [12:05]
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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.
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B
Would you describe yourself as an outdoorsman?
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D
No, I'd like to pretend that I am.
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Why are you making a podcast about being outside so much? Oh, well, it's what doesn't exist in my life that I know is missing. Our common nature from WNYC is a musical journey with Yo Yo Ma and.
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Me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.
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A
Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, 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.
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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 federal dollar.
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Then 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, apparently over their activism around Gaza, vandalizing universities, harassing students.
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Taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.
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We're not going to give you a visa. For Camilla, the first sign of trouble was delivered by the medical school's dean, who warned faculty that investigations into anti Semitism could affect their work. Camilla didn't see the connection.
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That's surprising. That can't possibly be a big issue.
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A
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.
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I remember being like, why are we talking about anti Semitism? We should be talking about indirect costs. Isn't that the problem that we're facing?
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In March, Columbia became the first university to be directly singled out by the government for alleged lapses in dealing with antisemitism on campus. To focus the minds of people at Columbia, the administration also canceled hundreds of millions of research dollars.
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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 canceled? Because we didn't really understand what was.
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Happening, 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.
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That's, I think, when we all started being very afraid because it was clear that, you know, we might well be next.
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For Camilla, there was one more complication. She was pregnant. She had a baby in March, her second kid.
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So I had a few weeks of bliss, you know, where I had actually decided this year, for the first time, I'm going to really just take time off. I'm not going to worry about work. I'm just going to be with a baby.
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A
But the pressure campaign was just heating up. All righty. Joining us now, my very dear friend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
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You are essentially taking out $400 million from Columbia University. Are you looking at some of the.
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Other elite schools who are having the same problems? We've now launched investigations into five different universities. Harvard being one.
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Columbia was one. What's Harvard got to worry about? Money. They've got an endowment of $51 billion.
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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.
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Not only have I targeted 13 schools, I'm sending letters to the mayors and the DAs of LA, Boston, New York, Chicago. Do your job or we'll do it for you. And we are going to file hate crimes.
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A
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.
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East studies center, essentially complying in advance with the Trump administration.
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It seemed wrong, and Ryan felt called to do something. But there was a problem. He's a political scientist.
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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.
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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 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.
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We sat down and made our case.
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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.
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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.
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So they debated pros and cons. Ryan says Garber left him feeling hurt, but not hopeful.
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He had some pretty firm reasons about why Harvard probably would be futile for it to push back.
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The pressure on universities seemed to be constantly ratcheting up. Ryan asked himself what more he could do.
- [19:14]
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Seemed like it was so imminent that Harvard was going to fold. It kind of seemed like it was going to happen any moment.
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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.
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We hit send to all the faculty we know and held our breath to see what would happen.
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One by one, people added their names. Eventually, the number passed 800.
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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.
- [19:49]
A
It was that same way. Week that the government turned its attention to Harvard. A March 31st letter from the Anti Semitism 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.
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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.
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Kit watched the Trump administration's pressure campaign approvingly, but also aware that his own values were being tested.
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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.
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A
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. 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.
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D
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.
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It brought knowledge and jobs and pride, he said. And that is what Donald Trump wants to take away.
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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.
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A
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.
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Harvard. Stand up.
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Follow the rule of law.
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If Harvard faults, then others are definitely gonna fall.
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Don't give in without a fight.
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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. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Zadie smith looks back 25 years to her debut novel.
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I always think of it like Gene Kelly, like running into New York, like Gotta Dance.
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That was my vibe, age 24, and.
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I'm just not there anymore. You know, as you get older, you have a different kind of feeling about the world.
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A
Zadie Smith joins me next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is on the media. I'm Ilya Merritz, 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.
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Harvard became the first university to outright.
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Reject the Trump administration's demands.
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G
Harvard said tonight that it was rejecting a list.
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Demands from the administration on sweeping changes.
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And would fight back against them will not be repressed.
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Today we can stand up and say no.
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In a show of solidarity, hundreds of university and college presidents have now signed on to a message that reads in.
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Part quote, we speak with one voice.
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Against the unprecedented government overreach and political.
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Interference now endangering American higher education. One of the signatories is Harvard's president, Alan Garber.
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For months, everyone wondered what Harvard would do. Now Harvard President Alan Garber was speaking out.
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It's less that I chose to take on the fight than that the fight came to me.
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Ryan says he felt an immense swelling of pride. Those are his words.
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Like this was the moment we'd been.
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Waiting for, for Camilla, the email was unsettling. No way there would not be consequences for her work.
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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.
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C
And for Kit, I thought this was 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?
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The New York Times later reported that the fateful Friday ultimatum to Harvard may have been sent by accident.
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Looked like a drunk text.
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But even if it was that, Kit sees it as a tactical success.
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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.
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A week after saying no to the government's demands, Harvard went further, suing the government to restore billions of dollars in funding the globes. Hilary Burns and Mike Damiano went to talk with Alan Garber in his office. So what is the Trump administration's campaign.
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That it says is about combating anti Semitism? What is it really about?
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It involves things like asking us 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 anti Semitism. 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.
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A
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.
- [28:21]
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And so what happened is that they just stopped.
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She explained how it had worked for years. Decades, actually.
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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.
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A
Now the money had ceased to flow.
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And it was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight to. Would we have to stop doing everything or would there be some sort of help?
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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.
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Enough just because I can't provide the security, job security that I usually aim to provide for everybody who comes to the lab, which is basically a 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.
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A
Time horizons are long in the sciences. Not only had Camilla lost funding, she also lost the ability to plan.
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D
How much pain can Harvard absorb?
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Here, we don't know how much we can actually absorb, but what we do know is that we cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights.
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A
The government found more ways to make Harvard pay for its recalcitrants.
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They will no longer be allowed to participate in this student exchange visitor program, and that's up to 27% of their enrolled students.
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A
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.
- [30:16]
G
This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together.
- [30:19]
A
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.
- [30:43]
F
Members of the class of 2025 from down the street, across the country and around the world. Around the world, just as it should.
- [31:08]
A
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. Velcik 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. When I say hands off, you say Harvard.
- [32:49]
E
Hands off.
- [32:50]
A
Harvard, hands off. Hands up. 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.
- [33:43]
E
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.
- [33:52]
A
Camilla's pretty sure she lay down on her office couch at some point.
- [33:56]
E
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.
- [34:04]
A
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.
- [34:30]
E
Columbia University is now the first school to reach a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration over claims of anti Semitism.
- [34:37]
A
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.
- [34:50]
G
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, with.
- [35:13]
E
A lot more than that, billions of.
- [35:14]
G
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.
- [35:26]
A
Shipman was asked, why not do what Harvard did and join the fight?
- [35:31]
G
Look, we, and I've said this to our community openly. We kept all options at all times open.
- [35:36]
A
Shipman said. We might have had some victories in.
- [35:39]
G
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.
- [35:57]
D
It's understandable people would want to say we just want to move on. That, of course, is absolutely the nature of extortion. Right.
- [36:04]
A
Ryan sees what he calls the collective action problem.
- [36:08]
D
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.
- [36:41]
A
Then Kristen, my Globe colleague, tossed Ryan a curveball.
- [36:44]
F
Have you ever stood up to a bully before?
- [36:48]
D
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 reflect on that a little bit. You know, I was always tall guy in the classroom.
- [36:57]
A
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.
- [37:10]
D
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. For society more generally.
- [37:27]
A
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 means to an end?
- [37:41]
C
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.
- [37:52]
A
I feel like your answer is like, yes, it's ugly. But like, this is how you get to change.
- [37:57]
C
You're forcing me towards a yes answer. And you're doing so successfully.
- [38:03]
A
I don't think I could force you to do anything.
- [38:05]
C
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.
- [38:20]
A
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.
- [38:41]
G
Counterinsurgency cops in one of the most crime ridden cities in New England.
- [38:46]
A
The program got results, and that got the attention of 60 Minutes.
- [38:51]
G
Last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab.
- [38:57]
C
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.
- [39:09]
A
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.
- [39:30]
F
Reform is not Good for communities of color unless it is a means to abolition.
- [39:35]
A
There was a case to be made that this kind of policing was good for the community.
- [39:39]
F
But right now, it's not a story Harvard plans to help.
- [39:42]
A
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.
- [39:52]
C
I passed to 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.
- [40:09]
A
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.
- [40:28]
C
After that. And then, you know, me being investigated by the university, and I was very open.
- [40:32]
A
You were investigated?
- [40:33]
C
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?
- [40:41]
A
His alleged offense, in his own words.
- [40:43]
C
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.
- [40:50]
A
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.
- [41:15]
C
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?
- [41:20]
A
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, Harvard should be. Are there conservative faculty at Harvard?
- [41:39]
C
I have identified six.
- [41:42]
A
Okay.
- [41:44]
C
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?
- [41:57]
A
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.
- [42:28]
E
I really hope there is a settlement, and I hope that you can put this on 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?
- [42:45]
A
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.
- [42:53]
E
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 don't have any 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.
- [43:16]
A
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.
- [43:29]
E
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?
- [44:01]
A
Camilla paid attention to Columbia's settlement. She says it was reasonable.
- [44:05]
E
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.
- [44:21]
A
To be a deal, even if that happens. She has been changed by this experience.
- [44:27]
E
You know, like, 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, but. 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.
- [44:56]
A
She is starting to think about the alternatives.
- [44:59]
E
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?
- [45:23]
A
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, Velczik wrote that Mein Kampf 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.
- [46:58]
C
Question is, are they trying to wait out Trump in the administration? That's the issue right now. That's the big question.
- [47:05]
A
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.
- [47:21]
C
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.
- [47:56]
A
The engineering school no longer asks for DEI progress reporting.
- [48:00]
C
So, yeah, I'm still skeptical.
- [48:06]
A
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.
- [48:32]
C
I'm sure he has emotions just like everybody else, but he's just very rational.
- [48:36]
A
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.
- [49:00]
F
Here with me, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, Dr.
- [49:02]
E
B. I think you were probably on the show, I don't even know how many times.
- [49:06]
F
That makes Alan and Jay extremely special. They are not ideological about answers. They are extremely data driven and empirical about answers.
- [49:17]
A
But this struggle is not academic or even particularly rational. It is a bare knuckle fight for money, prestige and power.
- [49:26]
C
And I have seen a number of the compacts that have been circulated and we made a conscious decision not to sign them.
- [49:33]
E
How did you get the invitation to Mar A Lago?
- [49:36]
A
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 Chris 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 Globe's 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 NYC now.
- [50:21]
G
Delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening, with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC Now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship wnyc. Org to get in touch and find out more.