Harvard University suddenly finds itself in the worst crisis of its nearly 400-year history.

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Having created a campus environment in recent years that is distinctly uncongenial to free inquiry in general and Jewish students in particular, America’s oldest university finds itself under severe fire from the Trump administration. This assault, in turn, has sparked a furious backlash from the school’s faculty, alumni, and fellow travelers who have vowed to #Resist the White House’s attack.

So are Harvard’s defenders right? Has the administration gone too far? Can Harvard actually be fixed? And does it even matter? In order: no, maybe, hopefully, and definitely.

The campaign

In March, President Donald Trump launched an unprecedented campaign against Harvard, announcing that the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would conduct a “comprehensive review” of some $9 billion in grants and contracts because of Harvard’s “failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination.”

Less than two weeks later, the White House followed up, asserting in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber that the school has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment” and proposing several corrective measures it expected to see. These included governance and leadership reform, merit-based hiring and admissions, viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring, discontinuing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and curtailing programs with “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias.” The administration also required the university to “submit to the federal government a report” on a quarterly basis that “documents its progress on the implementation of the reforms detailed in this letter.”

Then, five days later, the Department of Homeland Security initiated an investigation into Harvard’s enrollment of international students, accusing the school of “creat[ing] a hostile learning environment for Jewish students” and threatening to revoke the university’s immigration certification. DHS also required Harvard to provide, within two weeks, extensive information regarding every foreign student’s “known illegal activity,” “known dangerous or violent activity,” threats to students, disciplinary actions, and maintenance of the required level of coursework.

The next day, the Department of Education wrote another letter to Garber, this time seeking to enforce Harvard’s “ongoing statutory disclosure obligation for qualifying foreign source gifts and contracts.” The Education Department asserted that the school had filed “incomplete and inaccurate disclosures” about foreign donations it had received and demanded it immediately document its compliance with its responsibilities, including through detailed disclosures of a dizzying array of documents.

The drumbeat continued two days after that, when the Department of Health and Human Services announced its own investigation into whether Harvard was upholding its obligations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet more document requests were levied upon the school.

Over the following two weeks, the White House would seek to revoke $1 billion in Harvard’s health research funding, launch an inquiry through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission into the school’s hiring practices, and investigate race-based discrimination at the Harvard Law Review.

The coup de grâce, however, arrived in early May, when Trump declared on Truth Social, “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” To add insult to injury, DHS announced three weeks later that it would be revoking the university’s foreign student certification for the coming school year. For his part, Trump has variously called the school “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” “a threat to Democracy,” and an employer of “woke, Radical Left, idiots, and ‘birdbrains.’”

Under siege from all directions, the university vowed to fight the administration’s assault. In an April email to all students, faculty, and alumni called “The Promise of American Higher Education,” Garber insisted that “the University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Soon thereafter, the school filed suit against the administration, attempting to block the many measures imposed upon it, which Garber characterized in a second email as “illegal demands” that were “beyond the government’s authority.”

Harvard’s resistance generated huzzahs from the usual suspects among progressive media and intelligentsia. Writer Matthew Yglesias confessed that “I swore I’d never give Harvard money — Trump changed my mind.” MSNBC contributor Steve Benen blasted the White House’s “radical offensive,” its “ignorance,” and its “lengthy and aggressive efforts to deny the university federal grants.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proclaimed that “President Trump’s threats against universities are lawless” and expressed her hope that “more institutions step up to protect academic freedom.” Tech reporter Kara Swisher opined that “the Trump administration is going to pay for this behavior and will lose, lose, lose, lose, lose again in court.” And no less a figure than former President Joe Biden exulted over how “Harvard stepped up in a way no one else has,” telling students that “you should be really thankful.”

But even Harvard’s critics argued the administration had gone too far. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor who had authored “The Trouble With Harvard” and a “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” took to the New York Times op-ed page to condemn, in an essay titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” what he called “the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science” and its “poisonous” demands. Tyler Cowen fretted over the “escalation” represented by the White House’s campaign and the “collateral damage” it produced, decrying how the administration was “try[ing] to burn Harvard to the ground.”

These defenders all have a point. But they’re also missing the point.

The root of the problem: The omnicause

Allow me to start with what’s at the root of much of the debate: Harvard’s execrable handling of campus antisemitism and virulent anti-Israel activism, especially in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

In April, Harvard at long last released the final report of its Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, and the results were damning. Originally directed by Garber to “examine the recent history of antisemitism and its current manifestations on the Harvard campus,” “identify causes of and contributing factors to anti-Jewish behaviors on campus,” “evaluate evidence regarding the characteristics and frequency of these behaviors,” and “recommend approaches to combat antisemitism and its impact on campus,” the task force found in its 311-page report a “growing acceptance of stances once seen as outside mainstream debate,” the “social exclusion of some Jewish students and a resulting reluctance on their part to fully express Jewish or Israeli identities or pro-Israel views,” and “extensive levels of discomfort, alienation, and fear” among Jewish students.

It rightly decried “the ease with which ‘anti-Zionism’ slips into what is effectively antisemitism” and concluded that “the hostility about which we heard has had significant consequences that are degrading to the University.” Specifically, it found that more than a quarter of Jewish students felt “physically unsafe,” nearly 40% felt “not at home at Harvard,” almost half felt “uncomfortable expressing their beliefs or opinions,” and 60% reported experiencing “discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus.”

The myriad incidents of harassment, intimidation, and physical assault by anti-Israel demonstrators have at this point been well covered in this space and elsewhere, as has the embarrassingly cowardly reaction of school leadership, such as former President Claudine Gay, who resigned in 2024 amid the protests and a separate plagiarism scandal.

Equally well-covered has been the concomitant influence on campus of the “omnicause,” an agglomeration of all progressive movements — anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, radical gender movements, climate catastrophizing, DEI, and much more — into a single, uniform effort. It’s the omnicause that infected Elias Rodriguez, the suspect in the killing of two Israeli Embassy employees at a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., and a onetime member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, with his poisonous ideology.

And the omnicause has animated both policy and campus activism at Harvard. Long before Oct. 7, the school was already under fire for its naked embrace of racial preferences in hiring and admissions, which came to an end only after the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court ruling in June 2023.

All words, little action

But for all that the school has vowed to change its ways, Harvard has been dangerously slow to implement the many changes to which it has committed. The omnicause is still winning.

For instance, as I documented in a recent Boston Globe article, a powerful alumni group called the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, which has vigorously advocated racial preferences for Harvard faculty and students, singled out for opprobrium two Asian American candidates for school leadership positions. Their sin? Being endorsed several weeks earlier by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, a mainstream group that emerged after Oct. 7 to vindicate the rights and liberties of Jewish students on campus.

One of my findings, which the Boston Globe declined to publish, included the revelation that one of CDH’s founders also served as a member of the Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition. Last year, the Ethnic Studies Coalition called for Harvard to disclose and divest from its investments in Israel amid the war in Gaza and proclaimed on its Instagram account that “there is no Ethnic Studies without Palestinian Liberation” — a classic omnicause locution. (When reached by email, the founder stated that the current iteration of the Ethnic Studies Coalition is a “student group” of which she is not a member. She also stated that “some reports have erroneously reported otherwise.” I’ve found zero evidence supporting her claim.)

CDH’s advocacy had its intended effect, as the two targeted (and highly distinguished) candidates — Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution fellow and former director of domestic policy for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, and Allison Pillinger Choi, a City Journal contributor who was endorsed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — fell short in their respective races.

Meanwhile, one of the students who was charged criminally for assaulting a Jewish student on the Harvard Business School campus was recently awarded a $65,000 fellowship, designed to “serve the public interest,” by the Harvard Law Review. So much for accountability.

Harvard’s administration even diluted the antisemitism task force report by pairing its release with the publication of a sister report by a Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias. This was the school’s fatuous version of “All Lives Matter.”

There is therefore no doubt that, to make meaningful reforms, Harvard needs a good kick in the pants, and the activists, pundits, and politicians who have flocked to the school’s defense aren’t doing it any favors. Yes, Trump’s coordinated attack on the school may have overreached, will find itself entangled in a lengthy legal dispute, and has, perhaps gratuitously, elicited sympathy for the Kremlin on the Charles. But a major shake-up is absolutely necessary.

Can it be fixed?

What, then, is to be done? And why should anyone outside of Harvard actually care?

First, Harvard must promptly and verifiably implement the recommendations made by its antisemitism task force. It must redouble its commitment to protecting Jewish students from assault and hate, including by “incorporat[ing] into [its] code of conduct and values” the impropriety and consequences of harassment and threats. It must make its disciplinary processes transparent and accountable. And it must “support Jewish life on campus,” including by improving access to kosher food and showing respect for Jewish holidays.

Second, it must honestly and full-throatedly confront the problem of foreign students who make common cause with terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, including by expelling students who materially advance those groups’ interests.

Third, it must genuinely advance meritocratic practices in hiring and admissions and abandon its rearguard actions to circumvent the Students for Fair Admissions decision. Harvard can hardly criticize the Trump administration for supposed “lawlessness” when it fails to uphold the law of the land itself.

Finally, and more broadly, the school must restore a culture of truly open intellectual inquiry. As Pinker argues, Harvard should recommit itself to “free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I.” Pinker’s Council on Academic Freedom is a good place to start.

I consider myself deeply fortunate to have attended college and law school at Harvard a generation ago during what the task force labeled the “golden age for Jews at Harvard,” when we made up some 20% to 25% of the student body, “encountered little prejudice,” and were “well-integrated into everyday campus life.” As the chairman of Harvard Hillel, I presided over a delightful and peaceful campuswide celebration of Israel’s 50th birthday. My Jewish and non-Jewish friends from my time there include talented figures such as the aforementioned Chen, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and the brilliant writer Dara Horn. (It’s also where I had the great fortune of meeting the wonderful woman who would become my wife.) Jewish Harvard students both contributed to and absorbed the very best the school had to offer, and we formed part of a genuinely diverse environment in which religion, politics, culture, and much more were debated openly, vigorously, and in good humor.

For that reason, it’s so important that places like Harvard return to their roots of open, tolerant intellectual inquiry. As the country’s oldest university, and arguably its finest, Harvard sets the tone in many ways for the national discourse, both on and off campus. If politics is downstream of culture, then culture is downstream of academia, and only by shoring up the banks of our academic institutions can we hope for a healthy flow of ideas. Whether at Harvard, or at schools such as the University of Chicago or Vanderbilt that have redoubled their commitments to classical education, or at the fledgling University of Austin, this is a critical moment, and a ripe opportunity, to enact meaningful change.

Thus, those of us who are dedicated to ideological diversity must continue to insist that academia, the vanguard of ideas, incubate good ones. That they foster the good-faith exchange of viewpoints. That they welcome students of all faiths and ethnicities. That they curtail harassment and intimidation. That, in short, they do everything Harvard has rightly been widely criticized for failing to do.

The school must return to the spirit of its alma mater, “Fair Harvard”: “With freedom to think, and with patience to bear, and for Right ever bravely to live.” Here’s hoping.

Michael M. Rosen is a writer and attorney in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.