Lawrence H. Summers, If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can? NYTimes, April 3, 2025.
The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. [...] The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means.
Summers asserts that elite universities do have problems with antisemitism, identity and diversity issues, and "have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order." Reform is needed. However:
...the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities. [...] Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act appropriately allows that federal funding of universities can be made contingent on their avoiding discrimination. But as a recent statement by a group of leading law professors points out, it also protects against this power’s being used to punish critics or curtail academic freedom. Among the law’s requirements are notice periods, hearings, remedies that are narrowly tailored to specific infractions and a 30-day congressional notification before any funding is curtailed.
None of this appears to be part of the Trump administration’s approach to universities.
The White House has not confined its efforts to claims about discrimination. The administration seeks to dictate what universities do on matters ranging from student discipline to academic organization to campus policing.
His penultimate paragraph:
Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?
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