How Are Universities Trying to Fight Back Against Trump’s Mandates?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: We turn now to academia in the United States where elite colleges are standing up to pressure from the White House, some of them anyway. It comes as President Trump suggests he may stop giving grants to Harvard University as they resist his administration’s escalating demands. But what are the implications of their pushback? In an exclusive for the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin discusses exactly that. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to explain more.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Doug Belkin, thanks so much for joining us. You wrote a piece in The Journal this week, it was titled “Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration.” I guess the basics, who, what, where, when, why? I mean, who are the universities? How many are there?

DOUGLAS BELKIN, HIGHER EDUCATION REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: There’s about 10 universities, most of them are private schools in blue states that have been tapped by the Trump administration’s task force to combat antisemitism or fear that they’re going to be communicated with and investigated shortly.

SREENIVASAN: So, what is their goal in this private network?

BELKIN: Their hope is to coordinate responses so that they don’t kind of get picked off the way the law firms did. There’s a couple of things that they’re very protective of, and their hope is to be able to maintain integrity along those specific points so that they don’t negotiate them away one at a time.

SREENIVASAN: Well, did they learn anything or is this a response to what happened at Columbia?

BELKIN: It is. I mean, Columbia, as far as a lot of the schools are concerned, is a blueprint for how not to handle the situation and that a lot of schools feel like they have compromised themselves by negotiating with the task force. It should be noted they’re under tremendous pressure at Columbia internally and externally, and because they had such significant protests there. So, they’re in kind of a different category in some ways.

SREENIVASAN: So, why do you think there’s such a different direction that Columbia took from what Harvard is doing now?

BELKIN: Well, a couple things. First of all, they were first. Second of all, you know, ground zero for the protests and the encampments for Columbia. And the internal conflicts, internal politics with faculty — between faculty and trustees is probably more intense there than anywhere. So, they have a number of issues to deal with. There’s also a significant number of folks, faculty and trustees and administrators who believe that the school needs a course correction and that the Trump administration is offering things or suggesting that they move in a direction that they wanted to go in anyway.

SREENIVASAN: When it comes to the type of control that the Trump administration wants to exercise and what might be happening at Columbia or what might be agreed to, what is the thing that the universities that are in this new sort of consortium are really most afraid of?

BELKIN: They’re concerned of giving away their independence, their academic independence. What they don’t want if for the Trump administration or anyone else to dictate who they hire, who they admit, what they research, how they teach. These are the red lines that they’re sort of congealing around.

SREENIVASAN: This week, Harvard released a report following their internal probe into how the university dealt with antisemitism. What did they find?

BELKIN: Well, it was a really expansive report. And sort of the headline finding is that they found there was a lot of both antisemitism and the culture that produced it. So, they took the long view, they looked at the Jewish community at Harvard over time, they looked at the boycott, divest and sanction movement over the past 20 years and how that’s influenced the campus. They looked at the curriculum of some schools, the Divinity School, the public health school, and some of the classes there they found to be sort of offering the point of view of the Palestinians and not the Israelis, not the Zionists. And so, they found that there were some level of indoctrination in some of the classes.

SREENIVASAN: Has there been a response from the Trump administration to Harvard’s report?

BELKIN: They essentially are saying that Harvard needs to hold themselves to higher standards. They need to do better, they need to protect Jewish students, and that they’re going to be the recipient of billions of dollars in federal funds, they need to make sure that all students are treated with respect and don’t have to feel harassed on campus.

SREENIVASAN: You know, when you look at these institutions, they have the advantage in that they have massive endowments, that they are — they’re certainly going to lose significant sums of money if the Trump administration does what it says it’s going to do and withdraw some of the grant funding, et cetera. But they have the ability to absorb this shock way better than certainly public universities, smaller colleges, right?

BELKIN: I mean, they have $53 billion endowment. So, if anybody can endure what the Trump administration is threatening and moving on, it is Harvard University. What Harvard would say is that their endowment is essentially spoken for, not all of it, but huge chunks of it. You know, when you give money to the university, (INAUDIBLE) endowing a chair, of endowing a sports program, and that money is legally bound in that direction. They do, however, have billions of dollars at their discretion that they use for the operating budget. So, they have more latitude than almost any other university in the country.

SREENIVASAN: Now, what are some of the points of leverage the Trump administration still has left? I mean, I’ve heard that the tax exempt status, for example, that universities and nonprofit colleges enjoy, that’s one thing that they’re looking at.

BELKIN: There are a number of things. They’ve asked for reports from something called 117s, when a university gets $250,000 or more from overseas, they need to file paperwork. Essentially, the Trump administration said they didn’t do that, they haven’t done it correctly. As a result, they’re sort of out of step with the paperwork that the federal government demands when they get any kind of research grant. And so, that puts those grants at risk. They’ve also — they also have the ability potentially to turn off a veil for international students from coming on campus and potentially faculty. So, you know, there’s upwards of 10,000 people at Harvard who come in from other countries. They provide a lot of money, but even more importantly, they provide — these are brilliant people who are coming in from around the world to study and to do research. So, it really cuts Harvard off the knees if they were to shut that off.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are the ripple effects here? I mean, not that they have been able to do those things at Harvard yet, but really, even the threat of the potential that those things can happen, does that have a chilling effect on researchers who are thinking about taking a job at Harvard or another university that might be in the crosshairs?

BELKIN: Yes, this affects the university at every level. From what you just mentioned, research is taking it on the chin right now in a couple of ways. You know, there are major grants that are, in some cases, global or certainly link schools around the country that have just been shut off or are threatened to be closed. So, careers are at stake in terms of the researchers and how they’ll continue to move forward if that money doesn’t happen. Some of them will try eventually to move to different universities, potentially in different countries. One of the more longstanding potential impacts could be the graduate students, these research fund, these grants funded research. And they — and that money is used to hire PhDs, post-grads who do a lot of the work in the laboratories. If they don’t have the money to pay for them, then they can’t enter into the research, potentially squelching their careers in the United States before they really get started.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, I, I saw Ursula von der Leyen in the EU essentially inviting scientists to come over to European universities and countries. Is there, you know, is it too early to see any kind of active poaching going on?

BELKIN: The attempts are happening. We’re beginning to see things like this around the country. There’s a couple of professors who’ve suggested they’re going, I think a couple who have it’s not such a small thing to pull up a research laboratory. The, the, just think for a second, the process of getting a grant that would fund a research lab doesn’t take a week or a month or a year. It takes years. It’s a tremendous investment in time and brain power to get these things. It’d be much more efficacious for the universities and the researchers if this things gets negotiated to some kind of compromise.

SREENIVASAN: You kind of point out in this article too that this issue of the White House versus Harvard, it might be coming to a head now, but it’s a long time in the making. Explain.

BELKIN: Yes. The reason this is such an interesting issue and such a politically powerful issue for Trump is because the university’s lost public support over the past 15 years. Faith in higher education plummeted by something like 25 points, according to Gallup, between like 2015 and 2023. A lot of things — when — because these universities have lost the public, there’s anger toward them. There’s frustration. Folks feel like, you know, there’s a contract that universities — an implicit contract the universities have with the public in exchange for significant funding and freedom, they need to graduate students who are both prepared for the labor market and prepared to be good citizens. And there’s — a large swath of this country believes that they failed on both those counts, and they’re angry about it and they want to see them punished.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a next move here between where this group of universities want to get to, whether they think that they have any kind of negotiating power or leverage or ability to talk to the administration?

BELKIN: So, this — first of all, there’s a court case happening right now. Harvard sued the Trump administration, and that’s being heard in federal court in Boston. That’s going to play out over time. The negotiations are happening between universities. These universities are major employers. So, Congress people, senators, governors, business leaders are all invested in some kind of settlement, some kind of way forward. The entire economy of Massachusetts, to some extent, is contingent on the success of Harvard. You can multiply that by pretty much every major research institution in the country and every city — in every state rather. So, the stakes are enormous. The stakes for the American economy are tremendous. The research that comes out of these universities is the foundation for a lot of the businesses that power our economy and keep the country, you know, the hegemon that we are. So, there’s a lot playing.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a sense at these universities that this is a blip, this is something they can weather, they can negotiate through, or that this is a watershed moment, that there’s going to be a before and an after where they will have to structurally and tactically think differently?

BELKIN: I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think that this is not a watershed moment. There has been some pushback from the federal government with regards to issues around Title IX, but it just didn’t go to this extreme. The relationship between universities, research universities and the government has been so tight for so many generations that the shot that Trump is calling now is from a playbook that had not been written before.

SREENIVASAN: And so, you know, I mean, when, when you, when you think about kind of what American academia brings, not just to college students, but really when you think about innovation and the economy and future jobs, right? Whether somebody decides to come up with an idea in a research lab here versus in Europe somewhere, what the effects of that are? I mean, is there anybody that’s trying to quantify the kind of value that universities operating the way that they do today are bringing to the US economy? And if this structural change happens, what the consequences might be?

BELKIN: There’s a couple of hard numbers in this equation. Universities are maybe the eighth largest export business in the country. It’s a funny way to think about it, but there’s about 1.1 million students from overseas who study American universities, and they bring their dollars into this country, about $48 billion. I think we spend around, we get about $120 billion for fuel and gas. It’s a huge export industry. So that alone is enough to put a significant dent in, in the economies of, of these universities. Adding on that, the research, you know, if you look at your, your iPhone there’s hundreds of patents that were developed at universities. It’s quietly done. You know, everyone knows what Steve Jobs did. He assembled the collective brain power of the inventions and the insights generated at these universities across the country. So you could make a pretty strong case that there wouldn’t be the iPhone that we’re holding, the internet that we’re speaking on, unless these universities had done the research that is now being threatened.

SREENIVASAN: Are the presidents and the boards concerned about brand damage and how future classes of applicants or students, or professors or research assistants are going to measure them in what seems like a politically unwinnable situation?

BELKIN: Trump isn’t — there’s a reason that this task force exists with regard to antisemitism on campus. And the report yesterday found significant antisemitism. They found Islamophobia. They released two reports. Behind that was a decline in standards of curriculum and teaching, which is very damaging to Harvard’s brand. This is the greatest institution of the western civilization. If you ask folks at Harvard yard. And so, if they’re compromised on the integrity of their teaching, then their brand is absolutely tarnished as a result. So, it’s half the equation.

SREENIVASAN: What’s the other half?

BELKIN: If the universities are seen by folks on the left as compromising too easily or quickly, then they will consider universities to be sellouts, they’ll say, you know, you have this tremendous wealth and privilege and power, and if you’re not willing to leverage it, to stick your necks out collectively against what a lot of folks would consider to be a sort of creeping fascism, then it’ll look like cowards and that will damage the brand from the other direction.

SREENIVASAN: Doug Belkin, reporter from The Wall Street Journal, thanks so much.

BELKIN: Thanks very much for inviting me on.