Harvard and the great Trump university shakedown

Presidents of wealthy, elite universities are in a pickle. On one hand, they have to balance faculty members demanding their institutions make no deals with what most professors likely see as the devil in the White House.

On the other, they know the federal government has access to so many levers of epic institutional disruption that due care of their institutions virtually demands making a deal with the ideologues in the Donald Trump administration, according to the Tribune News Service.

Take the high road and the labs dependent on federal funding shutter. Not only are jobs lost but institutional missions are compromised. Plus lawyers love multimillion-dollar settlements, as we’ve learned away from the campus, too. So what we’ve seen so far are public protestations of defiance and the importance of academic freedom from university presidents — of varying intensity — accompanied by quieter, behind-the-scenes dealmaking.

Ergo, Harvard’s reported openness to dropping a stunning $500 million to make its fight with the Trump administration go away, following on from Columbia University’s agreement to cough up $200 million with the same aim. Reportedly, though, the Harvard leaders have now bristled because Brown University, which everyone knows is among the most progressive of the Ivy League institutions, apparently has gotten away with paying only $50 million (and paid to more palatable “state work force development organizations,” rather than the feds), one tenth of what Harvard apparently was willing to shell out to the federal government.

Sure, Harvard has a much larger endowment and a bigger political profile, but its sins against the Trump crew are no greater. So how, people in Cambridge are asking, can that be fair?

Harvard, it seems to us, has now taken to negotiating in the media, coaxing out sympathetic stories that express misgivings over whether Trump can be trusted, presumably hoping to save itself some money.

If you read between the lines of what The New York Times reported Monday as Harvard’s position, you can see the university’s lawyers arguing that whereas most settlements put an end to disputes, which is why people agree to them, this one offers no guarantees that the Trump administration won’t come back six months from now making additional, perchance slightly revised, demands and, again, leaving Harvard little choice but to comply and write a big check. To put all of that in terms of realpolitik, Harvard is arguing for a discount in the light of ongoing future risk and hoping the other side reads the story and sees its point. This is why the federal government should not be engaged in crude dealmaking with some of the best universities in America.

All of the above paragraphs, of course, would have been unimaginable even in the first Trump administration, prior to the current administration’s decision to target schools with which it feels it has the biggest beefs, a list that also includes Northwestern University. The Evanston university currently is trying to unfreeze $790 million in federal funding, the loss of which has caused it to shed more than 200 jobs in order, it says, to self-fund that research.

Like his peers, Northwestern President Michael Schill clearly is motivated to make a deal. (He also had to deal with being summoned back to Washington Tuesday by the House Committee on Education and Workforce to answer questions on campus antisemitism.)