On April 11, the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard University threatening to withhold Federal grants and funds if the school did not immediately implement a series of major changes and reforms. 

Among the many demands were modifications to the university’s governance structure and its admissions and hiring policies; an audit for bias and antisemitism of some of the university’s biggest and most well-known programs, including the Divinity School; and an end to diversity and equity programs. It also ordered the university to submit to a quarterly federal monitoring system to ensure that these demands were being met. 

Unlike Columbia University, which quickly capitulated to Trump’s demands, Harvard — after some early capitulations of its own — is refusing to cooperate, and is now facing the loss of more than $2 billion in federal grants as well as the possible loss of its tax-exempt status. In addition, the Trump administration is now threatening to place a ban on visas for foreign students at the college. 

Harvard President Alan Garber has said that their refusal to cooperate is about academic freedom, but the university is really caught between a rock and hard place. Reject Trump’s demands and face the loss of billions in federal grants; give in and run the risk of destroying Harvard’s reputation and losing valuable donors. 

Harvard currently has the largest endowment (more than $53 billion) of any U.S. university and so it has some ability to withstand these threats, but according to Harvard much of that is already set aside for other purposes, and these cuts, if implemented, would still have devastating effects on the university’s budget and significant consequences for the future sustainability of hundreds of research projects. 

In response to Harvard’s refusal, Trump doubled down on his claims of antisemitism and the Left, claiming in a Truth Social post that, “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds [sic].”

Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia. Harvard’s refusal to cooperate so far is a positive sign of the growing institutional resistance to Trump’s policies and could inspire other colleges and universities to fight back. However, actually defeating Trump’s attacks on higher education will require the self-organization and united action of students, faculty, and the broader working class. 

Whether or not Harvard will be able to continue to fight Trump’s demands, and what this means for the future of Trump’s Bonapartist attempts to bring academia to heel remain to be seen. It is quite possible that Trump may still win some demands in backroom deals, or that these threats will help him to extract concessions from less powerful colleges and universities. But one thing is certain: the U.S. government needs universities as much as those institutions need the government. Though Trump’s threats to withhold federal money may make for good political theater, actually doing so on any large scale would have long-term consequences for U.S. imperialism, which heavily relies on university research. 

Indeed, despite academic critiques of capitalism and the occasional student protest movement, universities like Harvard are by no means a threat to bourgeois ideology or the functioning of the capitalist state. On the contrary, they have always played a crucial role in the reproduction of capitalist hegemony and the imperialist agenda of the United States, and this is why even in times of campus revolt, the state has largely avoided interfering. Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

Likewise, as sites of cultural production, they lended a moral and aesthetic patina to the imperialist project. And of course, universities like Harvard and Columbia have directly cooperated with U.S. imperialist allies like Israel and have more recently played key roles in intellectually defending and legitimizing the Zionist project of Israel and the occupation of Palestine as well as directly cracking down on Pro-Palestine speech and protest. 

This unholy alliance between imperialism and academia is precisely why Trump’s threats to withhold federal grants in order to extract political concessions is so surprising and has caught so many campus leaders off guard. Where other U.S. presidents have sought a path of consent, happily giving commencement speeches, selling the lie of an enlightened democratic leadership committed to a vision of free enquiry and shared commitment to justice and progress, Trump is instead pursuing a path of coercion, using threats to win support for his agenda. 

Trump’s politicization of federal money is in this sense a violation of the tacit agreement made long ago between academia and the state: You leave us alone and we provide you with high-quality research and training. This is precisely what makes Trump such a wild card, since he seems genuinely willing to undermine the very foundations of U.S. imperialism in order to reshape the political landscape of the United States in his own image. Like his use of tariffs, he seems willing to take great risks in order to appeal to his populist base and to gain greater power for himself.

But such ideological attacks are not entirely unprecedented. During the 1940s, colleges and universities, including City College in New York, faced similar pressures to root out communist and socialist ideas in the academy. And in many ways, Trump’s current attacks are a throwback to that period. He is using the threat of withholding federal funds, alongside deportations and the revoking of student visas, to do away with, intimidate, and weaken what he and his MAGA minions deem to be internal enemies of the state, which includes not only student leaders of the movement for Palestine, but pretty much anyone to the left of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. This ideological battle is an important part of Trump’s right-wing populism, and it is no accident that so far he has chosen to pick fights with largely elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard. Of course, this doesn’t mean that he won’t come for less elite public institutions like The City University of New York, where already twenty international students have had their visas revoked because of their participation in the encampments. 

But this political battle, grounded largely in culture wars and resentment, is not just about Palestine and the Left. It is also part of a bigger experiment to directly increase his power as the executive. Like DOGE’s attempts to weaken and capture the federal bureaucracy, and like Trump’s deportations of political enemies and his use of tariffs to force concessions from trade partners, these demands are meant to shore up even further executive power over the institutions of civil society. 

Much of this program to build a more authoritarian state is without a doubt about Trump and the Republican party’s drive to consolidate political power, but there is also a more material and strategic reason for this drive toward authoritarianism and control of universities: the global ideological and technological competition with China. After the Second World War, U.S. universities played a vital role in the competition with the Soviet Union, and Trump knows that winning any such future competition with China will also require a pliant and cooperative university system. But while the U.S. had plenty of carrots to offer universities in the aftermath of the war, it has nothing but austerity to offer now. Thus the need to exert greater control over universities in order to make it more efficiently work for the interest of imperialism. In other words, these attacks on universities may be part of a longer term shift, whereby the capitalist social order, unable to any longer reproduce itself through consent, seeks to do so through coercion.

And this is why we cannot count on the bureaucratic administrations of the universities to fight this battle for us. Any battle to build truly free and independent universities must be led by the students, the faculty, the staff, and the entire working class. Building a class independent, defensive united front between labor, immigrants, students, and the oppressed to fight back against the Trump regime remains the order of the day.