Name: Trump Took On Harvard. The Fight Isn’t Over.
Uploaded: 2025-12-29T17:00:00Z
Duration: 8 min 52 s
Description: By withholding billions of dollars from Ivy League universities, the president is attempting to rebuild the ladders to success in America. As part of our video series on Trump's second term, The Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Belkin goes inside the Crimson corridors to see what comes next.

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By withholding billions of dollars from Ivy League universities, the president is attempting to rebuild the ladders to success in America. As part of our video series on Trump's second term, The Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Belkin goes inside the Crimson corridors to see what comes next. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251224/4b4679a1-f185-488f-be3f-30e4fb10cadc/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

By withholding billions of dollars from Ivy League universities, the president is attempting to rebuild the ladders to success in America. As part of our video series on Trump's second term, The Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Belkin goes inside the Crimson corridors to see what comes next.

Trump Took On Harvard. The Fight Isn’t Over.

Datta: Like most researchers doing biomedicine in this country, I would consider myself almost entirely dependent on the federal government. I can't emphasize enough how distracting and disruptive this current era has been.

Belkin: For scientists like Bob Datta, President Trump's campaign to crack down on the culture at universities has generated tremendous uncertainty.

We're also going to stand up to the radical-left communist, Marxists, fascists, and frauds who have taken over our universities. They've taken over our schools.

Belkin: When Trump got into office, he began canceling billions of dollars in federal research funding.

I think this was a good shot across the bow. We got the appropriate attention that we were looking for.

No school has been hit harder than Harvard University, and no part of Harvard has been impacted as much as the medical school, which has become ground zero for control of higher education in America.

Datta: Hey, David, what you up to?

David: So these are some of the , I'm just slicing them up.

Belkin: Neurobiology professor Bob Datta heads a research lab at Harvard Medical School focusing on how the brain works.

I'm a brain scientist. For many diseases like Alzheimer's and like autism, we don't really understand the causes. We do long-term scientific experiments that simply aren't feasible for industry to do or to fund.

Belkin: In April, the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in federal grants at Harvard University. About two thirds of the lab's budget is funded with federal grants.

Our research has nothing to do with partisan politics. I think one of my big worries is that this uncertainty is going to really reduce our ability to innovate, |which is essential for progress.

Protesters: Hey, hey, ho-ho. The occupation has got to go! Hey, hey, ho-ho...

Belkin: The fight over research funding began after the rise of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. During the presidential campaign, Trump said universities must stop protestors from harassing Jewish students.

I will tell college presidents that they must end the anti-Semitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and they will lose all federal support.

Belkin: Trump delivered on that promise, and the administration froze billions of federal dollars at top universities.

If they were looking at what was going on at Columbia, where you had students actually locked into a library and other students pounding outside on those glass windows and doors and Jewish students that were locked in, afraid to leave, and couldn't go across campus. And that antisemitism behavior was absolutely unacceptable on any campus.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon is leading President Trump's pressure campaign. The administration made demands to Harvard that went beyond stopping antisemitism and called for merit-based admissions and viewpoint diversity in hiring. In response, Harvard sued the administration. In July, Columbia University settled with the Trump administration to get federal funds reinstated. Other schools like Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern followed suit. There are universities that say the actions that the Trump administration has taken are eroding independence that has made American universities so great. What do you say to the critics who look at what happened at Columbia or other places and say we're heading in the wrong direction?

It's not taking away independence. It's actually enforcing law, civil rights law. I think we're under an obligation to do that and not take away independence of universities. Far from it.

Belkin: With some universities agreeing to settlements, the administration moved to a new tactic in October called the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. This 10-point memo was initially sent to nine universities. It outlines priorities for the government's relationship with universities, similar to demands for Harvard, and calls on examining admissions as well as the protection of conservative ideas. If a university signs onto the compact, it could get preferential treatment for federal funding.

We've just moved back into this office about three months ago and still are getting settled. But high priority for me was to get the hats back up on the wall.

Belkin: Ted Mitchell represents more than 1,700 universities, as the president of the American Council on Education. Mitchell sees the compact as partisan government overreach.

First of all, federal grants should always be made on the basis of merit, not on political preference. So this just flipped that on his head. But more important, it attempts to really break through all four of those red lines. Who's taught, who teaches, what's taught, and what research is done. And I think rightly, our colleagues in institutions said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

So, has academic independence been subordinated to political agendas in the case of Columbia or others?

You know, Doug, I think that that's the game that's afoot, this administration moving to make universities instruments of the state. And in this case, it's not just the government, it's this government and this administration with its priorities.

Belkin: From the point of view of the Trump administration, the compact is an attempt to rebalance a higher education sector that has moved too far to the left.

One of the issues with Harvard was, you know, 3% of their faculty, only 3%, you know, have conservative ideas. It just needs to be more balanced. And I think especially in universities that are teaching teachers, we want to make sure they know how to teach, but that they're not teaching ideology, that they're teaching facts.

I think the complainant across higher education was that this crossed that line where merit was subordinated to a political agenda. How do you answer that?

Merit should, I think, always be above, you know, the politics of it. I mean, when the compact went out, it went out to a very, very small group of universities, but then it managed to be widely distributed. And the intent it had been was to get feedback so that it was more of a listening and learning session with different universities. We wanted to make sure also that there were opportunities for American students who weren't being turned away for less qualified students, perhaps coming in internationally.

Belkin: Part of the new version of the compact called for a cap on international undergraduates. This year, new international student enrollment fell by 17%.

We have put up barriers to international students, and I think that that's very shortsighted. In addition to the legal barriers that we're throwing up, people are afraid to come to America. That's not the place I grew up in, and that's not the place, I think, Americans want to be.

I think my concern with the current moment is that the center of gravity for science is going to shift from America to places like Europe or China, where there is continued sustained investment in science.

So there's a $55-$57 billion endowment here. Why shouldn't Harvard be picking up the tab for your work?

So, most of that endowment is essentially locked up and allocated to areas that are unrelated to science. And certainly spending down the endowment is not a way to maintain, over the long term, the kinds of large scale investments that are needed in order to allow science to move forward quickly and to get us to the cures that we all want. And so, in the end, that only is really accomplishable by the federal government. Lots of my students are wondering whether they'll be able to do science in the future. Who's going to do the next great experiment, right? It's going to be the kids out in the lab. And without ongoing support from the government, they're not going to be able to do science.

Government funding was restored to Datta's lab after a federal judge ruled in September in favor of Harvard, saying the administration's funding freeze was unconstitutional. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling. Are you concerned that by reducing or canceling or freezing research grants, there could be downstream effects in the economy that are, you know, not thought of now but may come home to roost?

Universities had pledged for years and years and years that they were going to change and do other things, and they didn't. Not all colleges or university paid fines or had funds frozen. It is not the administration's goal, nor was it ever, to restrict innovation and research. It was simply a means to get attention and to say there's going to have to be... There's a reckoning here now.