Early in the spring, an aggressive and polarizing new presidential administration drafted a menu of demands, many of them very specific, designed to reshape the culture at Harvard, the nation’s richest university.
With billions of dollars in research funds in jeopardy, the university’s leaders are now negotiating with the White House. But an eventual deal may not fully capture the changes, small and large, already enacted at Harvard before any papers are signed.
The university has recoiled at some of the sweeping changes the Trump administration demanded. Harvard’s president, Dr. Alan M. Garber, has singled out several as intrusive and unconstitutional, including demands that might influence whom the university hires and admits.
But it has also taken a host of steps that align with the White House’s desires, checking off items on the administration’s detailed menu, which have ranged from eliminating diversity offices to ousting program leaders. In some cases, students and faculty members worry, the new, Trump-inspired policies may interfere with the freedom of expression that is central to the university’s mission.
President Trump and his appointees have made their attack on Harvard a totem for the changes they want to see across America’s elite universities, using the government’s blunt power to force compliance in a manner never before seen. Universities across the country are watching closely, to see what Harvard might do and what it might be willing to sacrifice, as they seek a way forward for their own campuses.
The Trump administration’s demands included eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In April, Harvard renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, which is now called the Office for Community and Campus Life. More recently, Harvard also took down websites for its Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, as well as websites for companion offices for gay and female students, and said they were merging them into a new, single center.
The government has also sought leadership shake-ups in certain departments, including the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, after Jewish alumni and others accused the programs of sponsoring antisemitic programming. Harvard removed two of the center’s leaders, including Cemal Kafadar, a leading Turkish scholar, in March.
And Trump officials asked for an end to Harvard’s partnership with Birzeit University, a top Palestinian college in the West Bank. Harvard said it had suspended the relationship and had struck up new ones with institutions in Israel.
The university has announced some of the changes, arguing that they were needed to make the campus more welcoming and more open to different viewpoints. But Kirsten Weld, a Harvard history professor, says that while the university says it is independently adopting measures that mirror some of the White House demands, that’s a slippery contention.
“The term ‘capitulation’ is getting thrown around a lot these days,” said Dr. Weld, who leads the university chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which has also sued the Trump administration and, in court papers, accused Harvard of exactly that — capitulating in a way that harmed professors’ free speech and academic freedom.
Officials at Harvard declined to comment for this article, but some have argued privately that some changes were already underway before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Dr. Garber has also acknowledged that he agrees with some of the White House’s positions, among them that Harvard has shut out voices that liberals disagree with and that it had failed to adequately restrain campus antisemitism.
The legal context around race and diversity is also shifting, as the Trump administration has launched investigations and lawsuits into programs centered on race, arguing they are discriminatory. As the administration threatens schools and fights play out in court, the uncertainty has led a number of institutions to overhaul those programs.
The A.A.U.P. is, for now, pressing forward with its own lawsuit against the Trump administration, even as Harvard would be likely to resolve, as part of any deal with the White House, the two federal court cases it filed. One seeks the restoration of $2.2 billion in funding that has been frozen or withdrawn by the federal government. Another opposes the Trump administration’s efforts to block international students.
The Trump administration turned its sights toward Harvard and other elite universities in the early days of its administration. On Feb. 27, the Justice Department sent Dr. Garber a letter demanding a meeting on campus antisemitism.
“We are aware of allegations that your institution may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination,” Leo Terrell, a Justice Department lawyer, wrote.
At the beginning of April, following discussions between representatives for Harvard and the administration, Trump officials sent the university a four-page private list with some demands for changes, like centralizing the university’s student disciplinary process and changing the leadership in what it called “problematic” departments. It also itemized what it said Harvard had already accomplished, in some cases just days earlier.
Then, on April 11, the administration’s antisemitism task force sent another list, with a set of intrusive demands that threatened the withdrawal of federal funding.
A third memo, released in court documents by the Trump administration, laid out another set of broad recommendations for change at Harvard that included providing security for Hillel, the Jewish campus group, and establishing a campus think tank for conservative scholarship similar to the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Neither the date nor the author of that memo — which also identified 20 to 30 professors as “involved parties” in problems at Harvard — was disclosed. The names of the professors were redacted in the court documents. (A similar list identified “involved students,” whose names also were redacted from the public court file.)
In public, Harvard reacted strongly to the cascade of demands, suing and setting up a new website with the tagline “upholding our values, defending our university” that describes the university’s resistance to the federal government.
But it also continued to make changes, such as agreeing to pay for security for Hillel. It is also reportedly considering the establishment of a center for conservative thought. And some campus discipline that had previously been handled by individual colleges was centralized, another suggestion that was disclosed in court papers.
The lengths to which Mr. Trump’s appointees would go to shift the philosophical tilt of academia has shocked college administrators and professors across the country, not least because it has illustrated the incredible power and the many levers the federal government has to pressure universities, most of them exerted infrequently in earlier administrations.
Still, Harvard has stopped well short of submitting to everything the government has insisted upon.
For example, an administration proposal that Harvard reduce alumni involvement in the selection of university overseers has not been implemented. Nor has a provision that anyone selected as Harvard’s president have 15 years of relevant experience, a requirement that most likely would have disqualified Claudine Gay, Dr. Garber’s predecessor, and possibly Dr. Garber himself.
The Trump administration has also sought detailed information on the disciplinary records of international students, along with videos and other information about their participation in campus protests. Harvard has refused to hand over much of that information, although it has provided some data, school officials have said. And it seems unlikely that the university would agree to auditing the viewpoint diversity of its faculty.
Even so, several professors have expressed worries that Harvard’s moves, which they see as designed to appease the administration and other critics, have created a chilling effect that will carry over into the classroom.
“Am I going to find myself in the cross hairs of the federal government because a student doesn’t like a position I’ve taken?” said Nikolas Bowie, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on federal constitutional law. “It’s certainly become part of my approach to thinking about classes.”
Students are worried about changes outside of class too, after Harvard-funded offices catering to gay, minority and female students were merged.
In the past, the Harvard Office of B.G.L.T.Q.+ Student Life has sponsored programming such as a National Coming Out Day open mic, speeches by gay politicians and actors and a vigil for Trans Day of Remembrance.
A spokesman for Harvard said programming had not been finalized for the newly merged office, so the fate of previous events is unclear.
Eli Johnson-Visio, who serves as president of the Harvard College Queer Students Association, said he was “incredibly disappointed.”
“I think that irrespective of the logic Harvard used for dissolving the offices, the queer community is under attack at the federal level,” he said. “It kind of feels that Harvard is capitulating, in a sense, in an effort to get their funding back.”
Dr. Weld said she worried that “the result of this very public and hyper-scrutinized rebranding sends a message about what are the ways that are now permissible to speak about identity or background or community affiliation on this campus.”
Among some students and others, however, there is sympathy for the university as it faces an unprecedented attack for which there is no playbook.
Noah Harris, a Harvard law student, viewed the changes in the diversity offices as more of a “label shift,” for example.
“I don’t think it’s going to be complete elimination if Harvard can help it,” said Mr. Harris, a 2022 graduate of Harvard College who was the first Black man to be elected student president. “My guess is that the school is trying to allow for student life to go on as unchanged as possible.”
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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