The Wall Street Journal reports:

Harvard University has drawn a line in the sand against the Trump administration and its sweeping demands for cultural change. Now it is counting on its peer institutions for backup.

In Washington, Republicans say the nation’s wealthiest and oldest university has just made a serious error in judgment and is about to learn the cost of crossing Trump.

The collision between the president and America’s most iconic university had barely begun when it immediately escalated. Trump on Tuesday threatened to withdraw the university’s tax-exempt status, a move that would hit Harvard’s finances far beyond the $2.26 billion in federal cuts the Trump administration had announced Monday night after Harvard’s president said the school wouldn’t bow to a broad list of demands.

Trump’s allies are also vowing to hold the line against the Ivy League university, which has an endowment of more than $50 billion. “I think Harvard got bad advice to take a different approach,” said U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), herself a Harvard graduate, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “But what they don’t realize is the level of seriousness—it is dead serious.”

Now that Harvard has stuck its neck out, it is waiting for support. The institution is working with Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump that the university hired earlier this year. It is also leaning on its own team in Washington to reach out to potentially sympathetic Republicans in the administration or in Congress who might be willing to help, according to people familiar with the matter.

The pitch to Republicans, according to a person familiar with the matter: Don’t overreach, this is a private institution.

Harvard’s defiance seems to have emboldened Columbia University, which has been in protracted negotiations with the Trump administration to restore $400 million in funding cuts over antisemitism allegations.

Following Harvard’s public stance, Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, told the university community that it will not let Washington call the shots on who Columbia hires or what it teaches.

The university might have to make a difficult decision to secure its future, Shipman wrote, “But we would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution.”

The day the Harvard news broke, MIT, Princeton and other universities sued the Energy Department to block cuts to federal research grants the agency said would save $405 million annually. And on Tuesday, Stanford University President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez expressed support for Harvard and vowed to resist Trump.

“Harvard’s objections to the letter it received are rooted in the American tradition of liberty, a tradition essential to our country’s universities, and worth defending,” they said.

The expressions of allegiance have been building for weeks as Trump has scrutinized universities.

“Higher education has been waiting for an institution to take on the Trump administration,” said Teresa Valerio Parrot, a principal at higher-education firm TVP Communications. “It was going to have to be a well-resourced institution with a strong brand.”

Negotiations between Harvard and the Trump administration began in late March with cautious optimism and a sizable amount of common ground.

Harvard had already spent months making good-faith efforts to quell campus antisemitism and implement structural changes to stop it from rising again. The tactics broadly met the requests that arrived in a letter from a new Trump bureaucratic panel called the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Both sides wanted to see a mask ban and a winding down of diversity, equity and inclusion in admissions and faculty hiring.

The task force believed Harvard would concede, just as Columbia had, according to someone familiar with the negotiations. And indeed, Harvard’s initial complaints to the task force were that the demands were too vague. Could it have more details?

Late this past Friday, Harvard finally got the real ask—and was shocked by the demands detailed in a five-page letter, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. The list included requirements that Harvard allow federal-government oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff. [Continue reading…]