Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 19

From the NY Times: As President Trump and his team dialed up the pressure on Harvard University last month, threatening to bar its international students, the school issued what was at once a warning and a plea. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” school officials wrote in a lawsuit asking a judge to stop the federal government’s actions. It left unsaid what Harvard, if it were no longer Harvard, would become. It’s a scenario that some inside Harvard are beginning to imagine and plan for as the Trump administration lobs attacks from all angles, seeking to cut the university off from both students and billions of dollars in federal funding... 

The school’s board of trustees, the Harvard Corporation, has discussed whether hundreds, if not thousands, of people will need to be laid off. And on 8:30 a.m. Zoom calls once or twice a week, administrative officials meet with senior leaders of Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate schools to share updates about the latest Trump developments, which keep coming rapid-fire. Individual schools at Harvard are also making their own contingency plans. The Harvard Business School is considering moving some classes online if foreign students are barred. Facing a loss of federal funding, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health is pursuing corporate sponsors, who officials hope would sponsor Ph.D. students and post-doctorate fellows for $100,000 a year...

“We would lose influence all over the world,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006. “Instead of being the world’s pre-eminent university, after a few years, Harvard would be just another school.”

...The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are also weighing changes to how much Harvard would have to pay in taxes, including a major increase in the tax on Harvard’s endowment. Mr. Trump has also floated the idea of taking away Harvard’s tax-exempt status entirely, although that proposal faces major hurdles. (The president cannot make the decision to revoke the tax exemption himself.) Even if only some of the scenarios came to pass, experts say, Harvard could be left in a weakened position with few modern comparisons. It would still be a big, Ivy League institution with a student body larger than, say, Dartmouth, which has 7,000 students, compared with Harvard’s 24,500 today.

But without federal dollars or international talent, experts say, Harvard could fall out of the top tier for research, where it currently sits with competitors like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By sheer dollars spent, its research budget could shrink to something similar to that of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which spent just over $800 million on research in 2023, roughly half of what Harvard spends now...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/harvard-funding-trump-administration.html.