In one of his gloomier moments – and there were many – Lyndon Johnson reportedly grumbled that “all the historians are Harvard people”. He feared for how the official – or most significant – chroniclers would record his presidential legacy.
“Poor old [Herbert] Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd,” he said before concluding, “nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn’t fair.”
Perhaps not. Harvard represents many things, all at once, to Americans. It’s been “up there” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1636 and its archives and story serve as an umbilical cord to the embryo of the new world. For the vast majority of people, it’s an unachievable badge of privilege and success, in the far northeast where the brightest and best and richest get to go.
More than 30 years have passed since Jack Nicholson, playing a peeved army general in A Few Good Men, upbraided Tom Cruise’s character for standing before him with his “Harvard mouth”. And 2027 will mark 30 years since Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon’s brattish, “wicked smaht” janitor stood in a Cambridge bar humiliating a preppy Harvard type for dropping “a hundred and fifty grand on a f**ken education you could have got for a dollar-fifty in late charges at the public library”. (Damon, like Gram Parsons and Mark Zuckerberg, attended Harvard but left before graduating).
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The trick for Harvard has been to preserve its reputation for maintaining the highest levels of collegiate education and research and standards while batting away the criticisms of elitist privilege.
Now comes the most problematic critic, in the shape of the 47th president of the United States. Seemingly not sufficiently preoccupied with a mounting trade crisis with China and dissipating peace negotiations on the eastern front, Trump renewed his attacks on America’s oldest university with a blistering social media post on Thursday. “Harvard is an Anti-Semitic Far Left Institution, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart,” he wrote.
“The place is a Liberal mess, allowing a certain group of crazed lunatics to enter and exit the classroom and spew fake ANGER AND HATE,” he went on. “It is truly horrific! Now, since our filings began, they act like they are all ‘American Apple Pie.’”
Two weeks have passed since the Trump administration sent a letter addressed to Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, warning that federal investment (of $2 billion a year) “is not an entitlement”. The letter made demands that the Harvard Gazette synopsised as including “audits” of academic programmes and departments, as well as the viewpoints of students, faculty and staff, and changes to the university’s governance structure and hiring practices.
Failure to do so would jeopardise $9 billion in government contracts that were under review, including money for hospitals affiliated with Harvard’s medical school. In essence, the Trump administration wanted to supervise who was hired, who was admitted and who among the faculty should be fired.
Harvard rejected the demands. This week, the university filed a lawsuit against the administration. In an interview on NBC, Garber acknowledged there was a “real problem with anti-Semitism at Harvard” but argued there was no connection between that problem and punitive cuts to vital medical research funding.
Harvard’s endowment now stands at an eye-popping $53 billion (€47 billion). Full tuition fees for last year were listed at $53,000, with on-campus room and board a further $20,000. However, its operating budget for last year was $6.4 billion.
The next move from the Trump administration could well involve an attack on the university’s tax-free status (long the source of disgruntlement among local Boston politicians) and on foreign donors. If the fight with the White House becomes protracted, that rainy day fund will become necessary. However, the guardians of that endowment stress that access is strictly limited and complex: it is not as though Garber can simply dash down to the ATM at Harvard Square.
So, a classic fight is brewing between old and new. The blueprints for Harvard’s 400th birthday celebrations in 2036 have, one imagines, already been drawn up. The political era of Donald Trump is scarcely over a decade old. The old place has its critics, but it couldn’t simply fold to the bellicose demands of a new administration that it abandon everything it holds as coveted and right.
[ Harvard’s decision to resist Trump is ‘of momentous significance’Opens in new window ]
It worked out just fine for Lyndon Johnson. Robert Caro, Princeton-educated but also a Harvard Nieman fellow, is beavering away on the fourth volume of a biographical series that has been acclaimed as a peerless masterpiece of the form.
As for current leaders of the “Harvard people” Johnson once bemoaned, they are facing into the toughest battle in the history of the institution.
“I don’t know the answer to this question,” Garber said, when asked if Harvard can win. “But the stakes are so high that we have no choice.”
