Harvard, Trump, and the Battle Over Bias

Demanding viewpoint affirmative action is not the correct response to Harvard’s longstanding political bias.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

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A high-stakes confrontation has recently erupted between the Trump administration and Harvard University, often considered America’s most prestigious academic institution. The administration, through the U.S. Department of Education, issued a series of sweeping demands aimed at reshaping Harvard’s governance, admissions, and hiring practices—threatening to freeze over $2.2 billion in federal funding if the university did not comply. These demands were framed as efforts to bring Harvard into compliance Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in institutions receiving federal funds, and Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination on similar grounds. According to the administration, Harvard had failed “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” among other concerns.

The initial list of demands, issued on April 3, called on Harvard to dismantle programs fostering antisemitism, enforce its own student conduct policies, adopt strictly merit-based hiring and admissions practices, eliminate all preferences based on race, sex, religion, or other immutable traits, and shut down its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. A second list, released on April 11, went further—demanding audits of admissions and hiring data, investigations into faculty plagiarism, and the elimination of “ideological litmus tests.” It also required that every department and teaching unit found to lack “viewpoint diversity” be restructured by hiring or admitting a “critical mass” of faculty and students with divergent views.

When Harvard President Alan Garber rejected these demands on April 14, citing violations of academic freedom and First Amendment protections, the administration responded by freezing the university’s federal funds. President Trump escalated the conflict the next day by threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

Garber and others framed these actions as a political power play, portraying Harvard as standing up to an administration wishing to enforce its ideology onto them. But this framing misses the mark. The Trump administration’s initial demands weren’t about imposing a competing ideology—they were, at least on their face, about removing ideology from university policy altogether. Asking Harvard to comply with federal law as a condition of receiving taxpayer dollars is not unreasonable.

However, while the first round of demands focused on removing bias, the second veered into troubling territory. The call to assess and rectify viewpoint disparities introduces a paradox: to achieve ideological balance, Harvard would need to actively recruit individuals based on their political beliefs, a practice that violates the administration’s demand to eliminate “ideological litmus tests” and mirrors the very kind of affirmative action they oppose in racial contexts. This approach is not only impractical, it risks violating the principles of free inquiry the administration claims to defend.