To much of academia, many on the left and some on the right, Harvard is a hero for standing up to the White House and rejecting its demands to reshape academic and student life.
After weeks of major law firms and other prestigious institutions like Columbia University acquiescing to President Trump’s demands, Harvard, in the eyes of Mr. Trump’s critics, had become the backbone of the resistance.
The Harvard Corporation, the secretive board that runs the school, said the list of changes the White House demanded in a letter on April 11 were so onerous — requiring faculty power to be reduced and government audits of university data — that the school would not agree to any of them and broke off talks with the administration.
Since then Harvard has held firm. Last week, White House and administration officials made at least three overtures to a Harvard representative in an attempt to restart talks. The school’s leadership rebuffed them all, according to two people with knowledge of the outreach. Most, but not all, members of the Harvard Corporation, emboldened, in part, by the positive reaction to the school’s combative response to the White House, are adamant that they will not so much as negotiate with Mr. Trump. On Monday, Harvard filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court, challenging its threats to slash billions of dollars from the school’s funding.
It has been a rare moment of glory for the Harvard Corporation, which is still reeling from the uproar in late 2023 that pushed the school’s former president, Claudine Gay, out of office. After that debacle, the board’s senior fellow, Penny Pritzker, an heir of the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a commerce secretary under President Barack Obama, told her colleagues privately that she was open to stepping down, according to three people aware of those conversations.
But the Harvard Corporation is, in many ways, an unwitting hero. For weeks leading up the April 11 letter, the corporation took a very different stance toward the Trump administration. At the urging of some of its biggest donors, the corporation frantically tried to cut a deal with Mr. Trump.
Harvard hired the same lawyer that the law firm Paul Weiss used to make its deal with Mr. Trump. Over the past month, as it became clear that Mr. Trump was ratcheting up pressure on Harvard, the school’s president, Dr. Alan Garber, looked for other ways into the White House — including a potential meeting with Mr. Trump himself, according to three people briefed on the matter. In late March, he called Jared Kushner, a Harvard alumnus and the president’s son-in-law, to ask for help. Mr. Kushner said he could not help.
Dr. Garber, a lifetime academic with business and medical degrees, has met with donors including John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager who had been on a short list to become Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary. He asked Mr. Paulson to help broker a meeting with President Trump. The meeting never happened, the people said.
Even now, some of Harvard’s most influential donors, including Mr. Paulson and William A. Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, believe it is a mistake to fight with the president, according to people who have briefed on their opinions. Those people and others who spoke for this story did so on the condition of anonymity to talk about discussions that were supposed to remain private.
On Thursday, Dr. Garber and Ms. Pritzker had a call with big donors, many of whom urged the corporation to settle the dispute.
In a statement, Ms. Pritzker said that Harvard’s “opposition to government overreach should not be seen as a lack of commitment to making the changes Harvard needs to make.”
“We remain firmly committed to our efforts to combat antisemitism and create a community that is strengthened by viewpoint diversity,” the statement said.
Frustrated Donors
The 13-person Harvard Corporation is its own unusual institution. It was chartered in 1650 and its members are called fellows. It picks Harvard’s president, who is a corporation member, and guides policy. Fellows check in constantly with its many powerful constituencies, including the school’s big donors and its former presidents.
Even with Dr. Gay gone, some donors remained uncomfortable with the way the corporation had handled the crisis. They were convinced that the fellows were not taking antisemitism at Harvard seriously and were ignoring the rightward shift of the country. They made their views known to the school’s administration and the fellows and sometimes snapped their pocketbooks shut.
Len Blavatnik, an oil billionaire and one of President Trump’s top donors, was so unhappy with the situation that he stopped giving money to Harvard and complained repeatedly to Dr. Garber that the school had not reacted quickly nor done enough. (He has since restarted a portion of his giving, according to someone with knowledge of his plans.)
Then there was Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard and former Treasury secretary. He, too, was worried about antisemitism, and he also warned that the mood of the country — outside the intellectual delights of Cambridge, Mass., — was shifting, people who have spoken with him said. Mr. Paulson, the hedge fund titan, said in calls with Dr. Garber that Harvard needed to welcome more conservative viewpoints.
Mr. Ackman, who was instrumental in Dr. Gay’s ouster, was no longer embraced by Harvard honchos on campus — one exception being rowing competitions since he had paid for the boat house — but he went public on X with his concerns, laying out the risks to the school in a slide deck. “There is continuing pressure on Harvard to change,” Mr. Ackman wrote.
The corporation heard all those concerns, and in 2024 added new blood. Joe Bae, a Republican and the billionaire co-chief executive of the private equity giant KKR, was brought on to lend a more conservative voice.
The corporation also appointed another new fellow: Ken Frazier, former chief executive of Merck. Mr. Frazier, who is Black, had made waves during the first Trump administration when he distanced himself from the president for failing to condemn the racist marches in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
In his first months on the corporation, Mr. Frazier and another Black fellow, Ken Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express, went public with their support for diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring and admission practices.
Soon afterward, two significant Harvard donors complained to Dr. Garber and corporation fellows that it seemed Mr. Frazier’s addition represented another liberal voice on a body that already had plenty, according to two people with knowledge of the complaints.
To some donors, Mr. Frazier’s appointment seemed like it could anger Mr. Trump and his Republican allies.
Another donor, Lloyd Blankfein, the former Goldman Sachs chief executive, told Harvard leaders that the university was not fully grasping that Republicans were questioning the role Harvard played in American society and that the school needed to do a better job making the case for its value.
‘Stormy Times Ahead’
But by the time Mr. Trump was re-elected, it was too late.
Kenneth Griffin, a Republican and the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, told the Harvard president in a call around the start of the year that there were “stormy times ahead” for the school, according to a person familiar with the call. Mr. Bae of KKR, one of the new members of the corporation, also told the board to prepare for the worst.
In mid-February, Dr. Garber flew to Miami to meet with donors and alumni at the Fontainebleau hotel. He took no questions from the audience and, according to an attendee, his remarks barely touched on antisemitism. “He purposely downplayed it,” said a Floridian Harvard alumnus, Rhys L. Williams.
During that trip, Dr. Garber had dinner in Palm Beach with Mr. Paulson and other big donors. He asked Mr. Paulson to help connect him with the White House, but he also told Mr. Paulson and others that Harvard was optimistic about avoiding a showdown. Dr. Garber told one donor that the devil would be in the details in what the White House asked of Harvard.
Columbia turned out to be Mr. Trump’s first target. On March 7, his administration canceled $400 million of the school’s federal grants.
Columbia agreed to many of the Trump administration’s demands and critics blasted the school for capitulating.
Harvard worked behind the scenes to avoid a similar fate. In late March, a Harvard donor reached out to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for advice. She urged the school to set aside politics and emotions and to think of the money the school could lose.
Also in late March, Dr. Garber abruptly canceled a long-planned trip to meet with alumni in India. Harvard hired William A. Burck, a lawyer who serves as an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization, and instructed him to start engaging with the administration. Harvard Corporation members were briefed that there was some early progress.
Harvard then made an offering of sorts to its critics. The school said the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies would be leaving his position. Conservatives had been pushing for such a move for months, arguing that the center fomented antisemitic views on campus.
Not long after, Dr. Garber called Mr. Kushner, the Harvard alumnus with perhaps the most direct connection to President Trump, to ask for help.
On April 3, the White House sent Harvard an early list of demands. The administration didn’t cut federal funding, as it had done at Columbia, and the fellows at Harvard took that as an encouraging sign. The quiet back-and-forth between Harvard’s representatives and the White House continued for another week.
Then, on Saturday, April 12, Ms. Pritzker woke up to find that a letter had arrived via email overnight from the White House’s new task force formed to combat antisemitism. It was addressed to Dr. Garber and contained a series of demands that would require Harvard to “immediately” shut down D.E.I. programs and conduct a review of “viewpoint” diversity. The government also wanted a review of admissions of overseas students.
Ms. Pritzker was shocked, according to a person familiar with her reaction. The corporation had been expecting a letter laying out the next steps in its talks with the administration. But to Ms. Pritzker, the letter read like the start of a hostile takeover.
The board hashed out how to respond in calls and texts on Saturday. Ms. Pritzker and Dr. Garber still were not sure of their next moves as they prepared to leave that night for their respective Passover seders.
On Sunday, the corporation held a video meeting to make its decision. Ms. Pritzker wanted to fight. Most of the other fellows vociferously agreed, including Mr. Chenault and Theodore V. Wells Jr., a high-profile partner at Paul Weiss, the law firm that had made a deal with Mr. Trump only a few weeks earlier. The fellows decided that Dr. Garber should release a fiery rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s demands, according to people briefed on the decision. The world should know, Ms. Pritzker told her fellow corporation members, that Harvard was in the fight.
Within hours of Harvard releasing its rebuttal, the Trump administration announced that it was freezing $2 billion in federal funding.
Yet, as the White House ramped up the pressure publicly, it was making overtures to the school privately. Last week, White House and administration officials made three attempts to signal to Harvard representatives that it wanted to restart talks. Each was rebuffed.
One administration lawyer told a Harvard representative that the April 11 letter was sent by mistake, an admission that confused some corporation members. But it didn’t change the corporation’s minds about fighting. After that letter went out, the White House only escalated its attacks on the school.
Mr. Bae, the private equity executive, was one of the few fellows who still wanted to explore a deal. He worried, as do many of Harvard’s major donors, about the school’s financial future. But Mr. Bae told a donor that he did not feel that he was in a position to sway the corporation because he was a new fellow, according to a person briefed on that discussion.
Harvard’s lawyer, Mr. Burck, also tried persuading the corporation to re-engage with the White House, warning that litigation could be risky. The corporation told Mr. Burck they wanted to sue.
But many of the school’s powerful donors want the corporation to find ways to lower the temperature, and restart talks.
On a call last Thursday, Ms. Pritzker and Dr. Garber asked for input from about a dozen large donors. Many of the donors implored the corporation to slow down and negotiate for the sake of the institution, according to three donors on the call.
Mr. Paulson, who has given $400 million to Harvard, encouraged the corporation to soften its stance and seek “productive” discussions, according to two donors on the call. Michael Bloomberg was one of the few pushing for a fight.
Dr. Garber seemed to concede that the White House had raised reasonable issues about antisemitism. “We agree with a lot of what is in the government’s letter,” Dr. Garber said, according to a person on the call.
On Monday, Harvard was back to the barricades. The university sued the Trump administration in federal court, accusing the president of trying to gain “unprecedented and improper control” of the school.
Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The Times, writing about Wall Street and the banking industry.
Maureen Farrell writes about Wall Street, focusing on private equity, hedge funds and billionaires and how they influence the world of investing.
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.
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