Trump has declared war on Harvard, but there are degrees of concern in Australia

The intensity of Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University has become so feverish that some commentators have suggested it is due to the simplest and most ancient of motivations: payback.

Are these the actions of a president who was rejected as a young man by this storied Cambridge institution, unlike, say, his predecessor Barack Obama and his wife Michelle? Presidential biographer Michael Wolff thinks so, as do some on social media.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

The White House would not comment on whether Trump had applied to Harvard, saying only: “The president didn’t need to apply to an overrated, corrupt institution like Harvard to become a successful businessman and the most transformative president in history.”

Right then.

Wolff, the bestselling author of Fire and Fury, has also been mischievously spreading a “joke” he claims to be currently circulating the White House: “What do all the universities that Trump is targeting have in common? Baron didn’t get into them.” (Melania Trump broke her customary silence to insist Baron Trump had never applied.)

It should be noted that there is no hard evidence Trump applied to Harvard. And the White House has previously called Wolff a “a lying sack of shit”.

At any rate, the Harvard “club” is not one that Donald Trump has ever been a member of, and his loathing for it ices his public statements – even though many of his advisers, and indeed, his son-in-law, went there. For the record, he went to Fordham University in the Bronx before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

Demonstrators at Harvard protest against Donald Trump’s attempts to influence the Ivy League college.Credit: AP

Whatever the motivation, the attacks on this, and other Ivy League institutions, are alarmingly short-sighted and counterproductive. The consequences will be far-reaching, affecting universities across the world. The Trump administration claims it is targeting: “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-terrorist agitators on [Harvard’s] campus”. American conservatives have long complained that universities are too “woke”, biased against Republicans.

On April 11, Harvard received a letter from the Trump administration with a series of demands, ordering them to cancel diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, allow in an external auditor to vet the political views of staff and students, and to bar any students found to be “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence”. The question then, is if “American values” are considered to be the same as Trumpian values. What about freedom of speech?

Harvard refused. Other universities lined up to support them.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Yurong “Luanna” Jiang addresses classmates at a Harvard graduation ceremony on Thursday.Credit: AP

Since then, Trump has moved to cancel Harvard’s federal contracts, ban foreign students and threatened to cancel the university’s tax-exempt status. A temporary order has paused the foreign student ban, but a chill has gone through all future and current Ivy League students.

Many Australians are scratching their heads at what seems like, at its heart, a further muffling of any potential critics, along with the media, the courts, various experts and veteran bureaucrats.

Why wouldn’t you want the best minds in the world working on your problems?

Cramping – let alone ideologically controlling – higher research simply undercuts potential economic growth and leadership, productivity, innovation, scientific advances, and a free contest of ideas essential in any pluralistic democracy. Harvard has seeded breakthroughs in health, artificial intelligence, astronomy, and epidemiology, and educated the thinkers and dreamers who have shaped the way we see the world.

Harvard has educated eight presidents, Republican and Democrat, as well as Bill Gates, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mark Zuckerberg, T. S. Eliot, Helen Keller, Robert Oppenheimer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Margaret Atwood, Michael Bloomberg and Ben Shapiro.

Australians who have studied there have gone on to be cabinet ministers, premiers, silks, magazine editors, authors, economists, corporate leaders and a president of the World Bank.

We cannot be naive about how this might affect us. America is also our most significant research partner, especially in STEM. Last year, Australian research partnerships with the US drew almost $400 million in biomedical and clinical science funding.

Ten Australian universities have already had US federal funding for research cut off, following Trump’s declaration in March that support must go only to researchers who promote “American influence, trust, and reputation”. Numerous Australian academics across a range of disciplines have cancelled trips to academic conferences in the US.

Here, the problem is not contempt for universities – in the main we do not, thankfully, have the same culture wars – but an erosion of quality and lack of funding. Overall, we spend significantly less than other countries on R&D. The OECD average is 2.7 per cent of GDP – we spend 1.7 per cent. It’s not enough. Academics report being stretched, with months regularly wasted crafting research proposals that are routinely rejected, fighting for a narrow pool of funds. Morale is low. Have we too forgotten this is our future? That these are the minds we rely on to cure cancer, combat climate change, forge new ways to solve problems?

As the US grows more insular and antagonistic towards creative, diverse global research, we should be throwing open our doors and inviting the brightest minds into our labs, libraries and lecture halls, and creating a climate in which they, and we, can flourish. And we can’t flourish if we treat the curious, clever and hungry with suspicion.

This week, Chinese graduate Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, who studied international development, spoke at the Harvard graduations. She said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she could become part of the generation that would “end hunger and poverty for humankind”. At Harvard, surrounded by students from countries around the world, “global challenges suddenly felt personal”.

But now, she said: “We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently – whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us – are not just wrong: we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Julia Baird is a regular columnist and former fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Centre for Press and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard

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