Comment: Trump doesn’t want to fix Harvard; he wants to control it

By Gautam Mukunda / Bloomberg Opinion

Imagine if China or Russia tried to destroy a U.S. asset that generates tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, plays a major role in American leadership in science and technology and turbocharges our prestige and soft power.

We’d expect our government to go to war to defend it. But in attacking Harvard University, that’s exactly what the Trump administration is trying to do. Despite the school’s failures and flaws, it remains a vital national asset; and the administration’s actions are far more dangerous to America than they are to Harvard.

When you tour the United Kingdom’s Cambridge University, your guide will show you niches containing nothing but stone fragments. They’re the remnants of statues smashed by Puritan fanatics during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century. But Cambridge survived and flourished. Universities are enormously resilient and count time in centuries, not electoral cycles. Long after the Trump administration is gone, there will still be a Harvard. But an America deprived of everything Harvard contributes will be far poorer and weaker.

I have a stake in this battle: I spent seven years on the faculty at Harvard Business School and still teach in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Senior Executive Fellows program. But I’m also the first to agree with colleagues who say the university has fallen short of its ideals. Its own reports on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus contain devastating revelations about the school’s inability to maintain an orderly and safe learning environment for everyone. Harvard should better protect its students; even, when necessary, from each other. It must guarantee freedom of speech on campus. And it should find ways to have more diverse political representation among students and faculty.

But the Trump administration isn’t trying to fix Harvard. It’s trying to control it via blatantly illegal tactics. Authoritarians have always feared universities because of their role as centers of dissent. It’s not an accident that (Ohio State and Yale University graduate) J.D. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy” in 2021. If President Trump breaks America’s oldest and wealthiest school, no other university and few institutions of any kind will dare stand against him.

The administration’s ostensible concern about antisemitism is so obviously a pretext that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s letter declaring Harvard ineligible for federal funding never mentions it, even as it attacks the school for giving fellowships to Democratic politicians. Three of the last four Harvard presidents were Jewish (including the current one), as is Penny Pritzker, chair of the Harvard Corporation, the ultimate authority over the university. This makes it an odd target for those whose primary concern is antisemitism. And an administration sincerely concerned about the issue might start by not hiring multiple senior staffers with close ties to antisemitic extremists.

Government control would destroy what makes Harvard — and any other school — valuable in the first place. Universities play a disproportionate role in producing revolutionary ideas because they embrace freedom of thought and dissent. Taking orders from politicians is antithetical to that spirit.

Crippling Harvard, and along with it, American higher education, would be a grievous blow to the U.S. The university’s contributions to American history and wealth are difficult to overstate. It has produced eight presidents and countless members of Congress, governors, Supreme Court justices, CEOs and entrepreneurs, along with more Medal of Honor recipients than any school except West Point and the Naval Academy.

Over the last 20 years, Harvard founders have averaged nine unicorns — startups valued at more than $1 billion — every year. That’s first among all world universities. And in just the last five years, companies founded by Harvard alums have gone public with a combined value of $282 billion. (I’ll also note that a quarter of all unicorn startups have a founder who came to the U.S. as a foreign student; exactly the population Trump is threatening at Harvard and other schools).

Both the U.S. economy and the country’s international preeminence depend on primacy in science and technology. That leadership is under threat as never before: American universities, long leaders in basic and groundbreaking research, are falling behind. When Nature ranked the top 10 research universities in the world in 2023, eight were in China. Well, most of them are falling behind; Harvard was No. 1. If you really believe in America first, attacking it is the last thing you’d do.

Then there’s the university’s global reputation, which functions as an emissary of American excellence. I once spent time as visiting faculty at Tsinghua University, China’s MIT. While I was there, the dean would routinely bring visiting dignitaries to my office so he could show off the Harvard professor teaching at Tsinghua. (I used to joke that I expected them to toss me peanuts like an elephant at the zoo.)

The school is also a powerful instrument for the propagation of U.S. values. In the last 25 years, the leaders of countries from Canada to Taiwan have studied at Harvard. The next generation will look similar: The future Queen of Belgium is a current Harvard student, and the daughter of China’s President Xi is an alumna. The global elite, in other words, pays for the privilege of sending their children to Harvard to experience the best of American life and be indoctrinated with American values.

The attack on Harvard is really an attack on America. Harvard, like every old and important institution, including our nation, is far from perfect. But like America, Harvard is worth fighting for.

Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.”