Years ago, a friend asked me to name the two oldest and strongest global brands. My first guess was Coca-Cola. My second was Mercedes Benz.
Wrong and wrong, said my friend. The correct answer? Oxford and Harvard.
In a world where branding is everything, the Trump administration is trying to do to Harvard what Elon Musk is doing to Tesla: make the brand toxic throughout the world.
The Department of Homeland Security’s latest attempt to tarnish the Ivy League institution takes aim at its international students by revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification. If allowed to move forward, this move would 86 nearly 6,800 students—or just over a quarter of Harvard’s entire student body. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government would suffer the most, with a student body that was 59% international in 2024.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s letter asserted that “it is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard, not a guarantee” and re-iterated the administration’s call for Harvard to provide information on all foreign students—which Harvard claims it has largely done—as well as its allegations that the university is fostering an “unsafe campus environment.”
Educating the global elite has long been a form of Harvard’s soft power. The current leaders of Canada, Singapore, Ecuador, Greece, Moldova, Botswana and Israel are all Harvard alums. And what does it say about Harvard–and the United States educational system–that China’s president Xi Jinping sent his only child to complete her undergraduate studies at Harvard? Xi Mingze spent a year at Zhejiang University before entering Harvard under a pseudonym and surrounded by a security team who supposedly dressed to blend in with the student body. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 2014.
The recent DHS ruling would have forced her to transfer.
Harvard’s President Alan Garber responded to Secretary Noem’s order with fury. “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,“ he wrote in a letter emailed to alumni. Within a day, the University had filed a lawsuit, arguing that the Trump administration’s actions, “erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.” On Friday morning, a federal judge blocked the order from being implemented with more legal decisions to come.
But even if Harvard eventually triumphs in court, reputational damage has been done. Noem can lose the legal battle but win the marketing war. And that seems to be the administration’s goal. Branding is perception; Harvard’s biggest negative has long been that its graduates were arrogant and never missed an opportunity to mention where they’d earned their degrees. This often true conceit (see Bill Ackman) has often forced humbler alumni to downplay their connection. “I attended a small liberal arts college outside Boston” became code with a similar vibe to how many Tesla owners today feel the need to explain, “I bought it before Elon became an asshole.”
But now new negative feelings are associated with the school, jump-started by Harvard ‘06 grad Elise Stefanik’s congressional campaign accusing her alma mater of anti-semitism, which led to the grilling and resignation of the school’s president Claudine Gay.
With President Trump’s re-election, those accusations have turned into punishing demands—that often don’t make sense. Noem cited Harvard’s foreign students as a potential security risk and recommended that they “transfer or lose their legal status.” But if a student is a security risk at Harvard, aren’t they a security risk at any university? Plus, Harvard has agreed to many of the Trump administration’s earlier demands to the point that The Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate independent newspaper, labeled Garber’s response a “vain capitulation to the Trump administration.”
It’s important to remember that Trump is also a brand. Right now, that brand is bigger than ever, with real estate projects booming all over the world, his golf clubs raking it in and his meme coin exploding. At the same time, since Trump’s election, America’s brand has “taken a serious hit,” wrote Chris Jackson, Senior Vice President of Ipsos in the US. According to a recent Ipsos poll, there’s been a steep drop in foreign attitudes that the US is having a “positive influence on world affairs.” Moody’s just downgraded US credit rating from “stable” to “negative.”
So which will win—or even survive—in the long run: Tesla, Harvard or Trump?
We can toss Tesla out first. Musk’s work on DOGE has alienated formerly-enthusiastic, environmentally-conscious EV buyers. Tesla sales in the US are soft as protesters go hard, while in Europe, the Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD just outsold Tesla for the first time in April.
Harvard is a better bet. Founded in 1636, the institution predates the US government. In fact, without Harvard, there might not even be a nation. Seven signers of the Declaration of Independence had Harvard degrees, including John Hancock (now a brand of insurance) and Samuel Adams (now a brand of beer). Even among Trump’s inner circles, Harvard has important friends. Charles Kushner, the just-confirmed US Ambassador to France and Trump-pardoned felon, once pledged $2.5 million to get his son Jared through the prestigious gates. Don’t expect the younger Kushner to intervene on behalf of his alma mater, though. The New York Times reported in April that Garber contacted the president’s son-in-law, who declined to help.
But then again, democracy itself is crumbling. That makes the case for the Trump brand (and Trump’s America™) emerging victorious. As the late-Reverend Peter M. Gomes, long-time minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, once warned, “The worst that can be said about optimism is that, if we are not careful, it seduces us into looking at the bright side at the risk of failing to take reality seriously.”
Trump’s motivation for the attacks on Harvard are clear. Attacking “elite” universities has been a winning strategy for cementing authoritarian rule in Russia, Hungary and Turkey. None of the leaders of these countries attended Harvard, although Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s buddy (and dual US-Turkish citizen) Mehmet Oz did. Oz, a Harvard ‘82 grad like myself, currently serves in the Trump administration as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services,.
In fact, a good sign that the Trump administration has succeeded in destroying the Harvard name will be when Oz, Kushner, Stefanik, Ackman, Vivek Ramaswamy ’07, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’76, and Pete Hegseth, Masters in Public Policy ‘13, attend cocktail parties and mention that they went to that “small liberal arts college” not to appear humble, but because the Harvard brand has become toxic and reviled.
Harvard may be too big to fail entirely, but if the takedown works, it will reverberate throughout all academia. MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth has already voiced support for Harvard administrators, noting in an email to her community that she was in “profound disbelief” and calling the attack on Harvard’s international students “devastating for American excellence, openness and ingenuity.”
It’s not just one college’s brand, but those values that are at risk.
The post Opinion: Can Trump’s Political Brawn Really Take Down Harvard’s Brains? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
