The Trump administration is trying to fix what ails American universities by freezing billions of dollars in pledged research grants due to be paid to Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and other prominent institutions, on the grounds that the schools have not done enough to counter anti-Semitism on their campuses or have evolved into left-wing hothouses with little diversity of opinion. The administration froze the funds as the first step in negotiations designed to address practices that conflict with federal policy or impede the effectiveness of federally supported research. Trump took the confrontation further by calling on the IRS to suspend Harvard’s tax-exempt status because, he said, the institution has turned into a partisan political operation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the task force handling the negotiations for the administration told Harvard that to unfreeze the funds, the school would not only have to address anti-Semitism but must also begin “to reform the campus culture by making structural changes to governance, student admissions and faculty hiring.” Harvard’s leaders, apparently taken aback by demands that went beyond addressing anti-Semitism, rejected the administration’s approach. Attorneys for the university replied to the task force by letter, declaring that the school would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Harvard president Alan Garber promised to take the battle to federal court, where he hopes a judge will order the administration to unfreeze the money—and he might get his wish, since the funds have already been pledged (though not yet paid).

Critics of higher education over recent decades will not have much sympathy for Harvard and similarly situated universities in this contest. Beginning in the 1970s, liberal activists discovered that they could use the threat of withdrawn federal funds to induce colleges to reform their faculties by hiring feminists, blacks, environmental activists, and others associated with progressive causes—all for the purpose of promoting “diversity” on campus. Trump has now turned the tables by using these same tactics against them in a campaign to reform the universities from a different direction. As to Trump’s wish to lift Harvard’s tax exemption, he is merely citing a Supreme Court precedent (Bob Jones University v. United States, 1983) created by civil rights activists when they sought to withdraw that school’s tax status because of its racially discriminatory policies.

Large research universities are vulnerable to these threats because they are highly dependent on federal funding to sustain their complex scientific and medical establishments. All told, the federal government sent more than $60 billion to colleges and universities in 2023 for research and development alone, most of it in grants and contracts from the National Institutes for Health, the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services. (This does not include billions spent on scholarships and financial aid). Of the roughly $700 billion spent across the board on higher education in 2023, federal research grants made up almost 10 percent of the total. For the major research institutions, these funds contributed between 10 percent and 20 percent to their total annual expenditures.