Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 206

From the Harvard Crimson:

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/16/harvard-legal-fees-2026/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 205

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard is privately weighing a rapid-fire fundraising push to secure $500 million for University-wide scientific research priorities, according to two people familiar with the matter. The $500 million target has been floated internally in recent conversations, the two people said, but is not a finalized goal. The two said the University was hoping to raise the money by the end of the academic year. The short-term fundraising campaign would arrive in tandem with a sweeping University effort to rethink how Harvard will support its science and medical research in the wake of massive federal grant cuts.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 initiated a faculty Science Advisory Committee this summer to map out a long-term vision for scientific research, and the University set aside $150 million last week to fund cutting-edge projects. The tentative fundraising initiative mimics a successful Faculty of Arts and Sciences campaign this spring to raise $100 million for endowed Ph.D. fellowships. That campaign, launched in February, met its goal within four months, and the FAS promptly announced another $100 million challenge. The newest push appears to apply that template — short-term fundraising for targeted needs — more widely. As it stands, the University will seek fundraising support for defined scientific research occurring across Harvard, the two people said...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/9/science-fundraising/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 204

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard faculty members were divided on whether freedom of speech in classrooms remains a problem at the University in an “Open Inquiry” panel discussion at the 15th annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching... Government professor Ryan D. Enos... sparked debate after he said that he believed open inquiry was not “much of a problem” at Harvard, despite having previously raised concerns about conservatives’ ability to share their views on campus... But Enos faced pushback from multiple faculty members in the audience, including Economics professor Jason Furman ’92 — who argued that “we need to be harder on ourselves internally while defending ourselves externally” — and raised concerns about persistent ideological slant in Harvard’s classrooms.

Claybaugh opened the discussion by asking panelists about effective strategies for designing balanced courses and avoiding projecting their individual political opinions onto students. But the most contentious topic was whether “open inquiry” remains an area of concern at Harvard... In open discussion in the second half of the event, Furman argued it did — pointing to examples of what he characterized as liberal biases in course catalogs and syllabi as evidence that there remained room for the University to improve...

Enos acknowledged that there was room to improve at Harvard, though he emphasized the importance of setting realistic expectations — especially in comparison to other institutions of higher education... “If we have a faculty that’s 90 percent liberal, and that’s the world we live in — and maybe that’s the problem we want to solve, but that’s a different problem — if that’s the world we live in, then do we do better than another institution with 90 percent liberals out there?” Enos added...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/1/harvard-open-inquiry-conference/.

H-1B at UC-D

From the NY Times: Vice President JD Vance announced [last] Thursday that Microsoft would be suspended from using a visa program that allowed foreign workers to permanently reside in the United States after an investigation found that the tech giant had “abused” the system... Mr. Vance took aim at the embattled H-1B visa program, which allows companies to hire skilled foreign workers in hard-to-fill jobs...

Schools [also] under investigation are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Arizona State, Brown, M.I.T., the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, and the California Institute of Technology... UC Davis... said [it has] complied with visa program rules...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/us/politics/microsoft-visas-green-cards.html.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 203

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 said... that she has not met with members of the Trump administration recently but would be open to meeting with top White House officials in the future. Pritzker’s brief remarks came as she left a weekend convening of the University’s two highest governing boards and as Harvard continues to stare down several legal battles with the Trump administration.

Approached by a Crimson reporter as she departed a dinner at the Faculty Club following a day of meetings, Pritzker said she was “always open to meeting with people.” Asked specifically about a meeting with Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon, she again said she was open to any meeting... Top Harvard leaders have not met publicly with members of the Trump administration since the White House began their pressure campaign against the University last year, though [Harvard President] Garber spoke by phone with McMahon that spring...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/28/pritzker-open-to-white-house-meetings/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 202

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 quietly convened a University-wide committee of faculty members to develop a new vision for scientific research over the next several years, according to six people familiar with the matter. The group, known as the Science Advisory Committee, formed over the summer, one person said, and includes roughly 15 to 20 faculty members. It is chaired by former Provost Steven E. Hyman and Immunology Department Chair Arlene H. Sharpe ’75, that person and one other said...

The push to develop a coherent, University-wide strategy for the next era of scientific research — and one explicitly tied to fundraising — is the most concrete step the University has taken to rethink its approach to research since the government froze nearly $2.7 billion in Harvard’s funding in spring 2025. University officials have said for the past year that Harvard will need to diversify its funding sources in response to unreliable government support for scientific research... There are now early signs of that work around the University. The Alumni Affairs and Development office launched a new team focused on “transformational giving” after a spring reorganization...

Earlier this week, one of the University’s biggest donors, Kenneth C. Griffin ’89, who paused his giving to Harvard to 2024, announced a $3 billion gift to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest single gift in the history of U.S. higher education...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/2/garber-science-advisory-committee/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 201

From the NY Times: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asked a federal judge to compel Harvard to hand over records in the agency’s investigation into what it described as “systemic discrimination” in the university’s employment practices, particularly against white men. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts, the E.E.O.C. accused the university of noncompliance, escalating a legal battle that has been brewing for more than a year, court filings show.

Lawyers for Harvard have called the E.E.O.C.’s investigation part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to bring the university to heel. “The government has not concealed that its all-out campaign targets Harvard for the assertion of its constitutional rights,” the lawyers wrote in a June motion, which the agency included in the lawsuit filed on Tuesday. Harvard’s lawyers noted that Andrea Lucas, the Republican chair of the E.E.O.C., filed her civil rights charge against Harvard in April 2025, four days after the university sued the federal government for freezing $2.2 billion in funding.

...Ms. Lucas has been keen to use what are known as commissioner’s charges — allegations based not in a complaint from an employee, but on an E.E.O.C. commissioner’s belief that a violation of the law may have occurred...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/business/economy/harvard-eeoc-diversity-hiring.html. 

Straws in the Wind - Part 477

From the Harvard Crimson: Former Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana criticized the December 2023 congressional testimony of three university presidents on campus antisemitism — including then-Harvard President Claudine Gay — saying none of them could explain what a university is for. The remarks, delivered in a lecture at Cornell University last week, are Khurana’s most direct public comments on the backlash that ended Gay’s presidency and set off two years of federal scrutiny of Harvard.

Khurana delivered the Milton R. Konvitz Memorial Lectureship in American Ideals on Thursday, an annual Cornell lecture named for the civil liberties scholar who taught there for four decades. His talk — “From Institutional Mission to Administrative Means: The Bureaucratization of Universities” — argued that universities have grown too heavy with administrators and lost institutional legitimacy. Khurana earned his bachelor’s degree at Cornell...

He named one only as a school in Connecticut — an apparent nod to Yale University that drew laughs. Between 2003 and 2021, its human resources department jumped from 11 staff to 192, and its development staff spiked from 71 to 333, while the faculty went from 610 to 675...

Khurana said rising inequality had also reshaped how universities raise money, pushing them toward a small number of very large gifts... That arrangement held, Khurana said, only as long as donors asked for nothing in return — and it has not survived the collapse in public trust. Donors now style themselves as “impact philanthropists” who want a say in how their money is spent...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/21/khurana-criticizes-gay-testimony/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 200

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard’s School of Public Health has privately weighed asking UnitedHealthcare, Tenet, and CVS Aetna to fund its research as it works to replace money lost to federal funding cuts, according to a person familiar with the matter. The three companies emerged from a November meeting of the HSPH Health Policy and Management Executive Council, where attendees suggested them as the most attractive candidates for a partnership given their size and budget, the person in the room said. CVS Aetna was a particularly promising prospect, an HSPH affiliate told the council, because Troyen A. Brennan — an adjunct faculty member who joined HSPH in April 2022 after 14 years as chief medical officer and executive vice president at CVS Health — could help broker a relationship with the company. Two other people confirmed the council has brainstormed corporate partnerships in recent meetings but did not specify which companies it landed on...

The school’s funding picture shifted sharply last year after the Trump administration cut off nearly $2.7 billion in Harvard’s research grants. HSPH — which relied on private and federal sponsors for 59 percent of its operating budget in fiscal year 2025 — was hit particularly hard. Last spring, the school cut budgets across its departments, laid off staff and researchers whose projects lost funding, and slashed Ph.D. admissions in several programs. The Biostatistics department, which lost out on a large NIH grant midway through the review process, halved its number of admitted students for the cycle. At the time, then-HSPH spokesperson Stephanie Simon wrote in a statement that the school faced a “significant budget crisis” and that its research operations were “seriously jeopardized.” ...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/18/hsph-corporate-research-funding/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 199

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative announced last week the launch of a new Israel Program, expanding the center’s research, teaching, and engagement on Israel within its regional and global context. In a letter announcing the program, Middle East Initiative Faculty Chair Tarek E. Masoud wrote that interest in Israel has intensified “after Hamas’ terrorist attacks of October 7th, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent military campaigns, and particularly the devastating war in Gaza.” The program will be led by Barak Sella, a senior research fellow at the initiative and a Kennedy School graduate who previously served as executive director of the Reut Institute, an Israeli policy nonprofit. Masoud wrote that Sella has “long been a leading voice on U.S.-Israel relations and global Jewish affairs.” The program will also draw on existing initiative scholars, including senior fellow Edward P. Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria, and Kennedy School professor Lotem Bassan-Nygate.

A central piece of the program is the Shared Society Lab, which will be led by senior research fellow Dana Schleifer, another HKS graduate who previously served as chief innovation officer for the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipal government. According to Masoud’s announcement, the lab will focus on strengthening municipal institutions and building partnerships between Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens. The Israel Program will also introduce a new course, DPI-635: “Arguing Israel-Palestine,” and will launch an Israeli Research Fellowship beginning in the 2026-2027 academic year that will bring Israeli scholars and practitioners to the initiative for short-term residencies with other scholars from the region, as well as Harvard students and faculty. Masoud wrote that these initiatives will foster the “rigorous, open inquiry and civil, constructive debate that are the hallmarks of the Middle East Initiative.”

...The new program also arrives just over a year after Harvard announced a pair of new academic partnerships with Israeli institutions — a study abroad program with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a postdoctoral fellowship for Israeli researchers at Harvard Medical School. Harvard had agreed to partner with an Israeli university as part of a January 2025 settlement with two groups alleging it had slow-walked its response to campus antisemitism. A separate antisemitism lawsuit brought against Harvard by the Department of Justice was dismissed in August, and the department appealed the ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals later that month...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/17/harvard-middle-east-initiative-israel/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 198

From the Harvard Crimson: Almost four years after the public release of ChatGPT, nearly two-thirds of professors who responded to The Crimson’s annual Faculty of Arts and Sciences survey said they believe the prevalence of artificial intelligence has had a negative effect on their courses. Sixty-four percent of faculty respondents said AI had a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” effect on their courses this year — a sharp uptick from last year’s survey, when 42 percent said the same. The figures point to growing concerns about tools that allow students to complete assignments without fully absorbing content, even as professors adjust their courses to keep up with the technology.

Course-level policies are now commonplace: Only 3.5 percent of respondents said they have no explicit policy on AI tools in their courses, down from 10 percent last year. The percentage of respondents who said they “entirely permit” the use of AI tools in their courses was also roughly halved, from 8 percent to 4 percent. The faculty concerns come as Harvard coordinates broader curricular responses to AI. Harvard College added a required AI module to the first-year Expository Writing course this spring and phased in an AI chatbot to advise incoming students on course planning. The FAS also announced plans this spring to offer access to Anthropic’s Claude, while ending its institution-wide ChatGPT Edu pilot...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/14/fas-2026-survey-AI/.

Retract

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: The journal Psychological Science... retracted a 2002 research paper co-authored by Dan Ariely, the influential but increasingly scrutinized Duke University professor, after the blog Data Colada reported earlier this week that the study contains fabricated data. The paper, on which Ariely shared authorship with Klaus Wertenbroch, found that subjects responded better to externally imposed deadlines than self-imposed ones, and has been cited over 2,000 times on Google Scholar. The retraction is the latest in a series of scandals that have dogged Ariely. Earlier reporting by Data Colada led to the 2021 retraction of another study he had co-authored, and data sleuths have cast doubt on more of his past research...

...The three professors who run Data Colada detailed several points of evidence showing that the 2002 deadlines study contains doctored data. Many participants’ results in the dataset were identical, suggesting data points had been duplicated or faked. Results that should be highly correlated — for instance, participants who said they liked the task would be expected to also report finding it interesting — showed no signs of correlation.

...In 2021, Data Colada documented evidence of fraud in a 2012 study Ariely had co-authored that also failed to replicate. Another author on the study was Francesca Gino, whose tenure was revoked by Harvard Business School after the data sleuths found a pattern of data fraud across several of her studies.* ...Duke announced [in January] it was closing Ariely’s lab, alongside several other centers, a decision the university said was made the previous December...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/data-sleuths-found-evidence-of-fraud-in-another-dan-ariely-study-now-its-being-retracted.

====

*The Harvard Crimson reports pre-trial maneuvering in the Gino case is ongoing as a December 7 trial date approaches:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/9/harvard-gino-trial-near/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 198

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard faculty in the humanities and social sciences expressed broad concern over an email Harvard College Dean David J. Deming sent students... suggesting that artificial intelligence be integrated into “writing-intensive” courses. Deming identified “AI use policies” as a priority for the academic year in the... message, saying he hoped to roll out College-wide advisory guidelines on AI by the end of the year and proposing “AI acceptance or even encouragement” in writing- and project- heavy classes. He added that the approach would help affiliates avoid “the AI-detection business because it damages trust between faculty and students.” ...

In interviews and written statements, most faculty in writing-intensive fields agreed that they wanted to avoid policing student AI use but remained divided on Deming’s broader proposal for “AI acceptance, or even encouragement.” Faculty in the humanities and social sciences have generally shied from incorporating AI into their courses...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/3/humanities-ai-pushback-deming/. 

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 197

From the Harvard Crimson: Faculty soured on Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra amid broad-scale austerity measures this year, according to The Crimson’s annual FAS survey. Thirty-one percent of respondents said they were either “somewhat satisfied” or “very satisfied” with Hoekstra’s tenure as FAS dean, a sharp reversal from last year, when 57 percent said they were satisfied with her leadership. That figure marks the lowest approval rating she has had on the survey since stepping into the role.

Satisfaction with Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 also saw a notable dip, falling from 74 percent at the acme of Harvard’s battle with the White House to roughly 56 percent this spring. Hoekstra drew the highest dissatisfaction of the three senior administrators measured in the survey: 43 percent said they were “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied with her tenure, compared with 35 percent who said the same of Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 and 26 percent of Garber...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/4/fas-2026-survey-hoekstra/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 196

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard College student organizations must coordinate with University officials before accepting external donations under a new requirement in the 2026-27 student handbook. A draft version of policy updates to the handbook circulated at a May Faculty of Arts Sciences meeting only stated that student organizations would be “strongly encouraged to adopt policies consistent with Harvard’s university-wide guidance.” But the final handbook language goes further, dropping the encouragement language and instead requiring groups to “coordinate” with the College’s development office before accepting external donations...

The policy notes that those restrictions may apply particularly when an international program involves compensation. Federal sanctions broadly restrict certain financial transactions, services, and other activities involving sanctioned individuals, entities, or countries... The policy changes come amid heightened federal scrutiny of Harvard’s financial and academic ties abroad...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/4/external-donation-new-policy/. 

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 195

From the Harvard Crimson: Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh told Peer Advising Fellows... that Harvard plans to enforce its new cap on A grades by automatically converting all of a course’s A’s to A-’s if professors refuse to bring their grades under the limit — but backtracked in [a later] interview..., saying the mechanism remains only a proposal. Claybaugh told PAFs that professors who entered too many A grades would first receive an alert instructing them to bring their course into compliance. If they nevertheless submitted grades above the limit, she said, all of the course’s A grades would automatically become A-’s, according to four students in attendance and a recording of the event obtained by The Crimson.

...The comments, made during a fireside chat that attendees had been told was off the record, offer the clearest indication yet of how Harvard could enforce the controversial cap once it becomes mandatory, answering a question that has loomed over the policy since faculty approved it in May. Claybaugh [later] backed away from the certainty of her...  remarks, saying the automatic conversion mechanism was only one option under consideration. She said a committee is still considering how to enforce the cap. While she said the mechanism “seems like the easiest enforcement option,” she added that she was unsure whether it was “physically possible in our system.”

“It sounds mean to hold a gun to the student’s head, but the thing about our faculty is they really care about our students,” Claybaugh said... The enforcement question has taken on added urgency as some professors have publicly said they may refuse to follow the cap...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/8/28/harvard-grade-cap-enforcement/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 194

From the Harvard Crimson: The Department of Justice appealed the dismissal of its antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard... seeking to revive a sweeping case accusing the University of violating federal civil rights law in its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students. The government filed a notice Thursday afternoon asking the First Circuit to review U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns’ August 13 decision granting Harvard’s motion to dismiss the case. The appeal comes two weeks after Stearns dealt a major blow to one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive legal efforts against Harvard, finding that the incidents cited by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to prove an ongoing violation of Title VI...

Stearns left open the possibility that should the government be able to present compelling instances of ongoing noncompliance, their case might be seen in a different light. And he did not quarrel with the government’s assumption that it could recuperate previously awarded funds under the Title VI or breach of contract arguments outlined in the original complaint...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/8/28/doj-harvard-antisemitism-appeal/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 193

From the NY Times: One of Harvard University’s biggest federal funding streams is down sharply, according to a New York Times analysis of government data. The declines have persisted even after a federal judge forced the Trump administration to reverse drastic cuts to the university last year. The funding, from the National Institutes of Health, currently lags about 18 percent behind the average pace of grants during the Biden administration, the analysis shows. Last year, Harvard successfully sued the Trump administration, after the government announced it had frozen more than $2.2 billion in 2025, from multiple federal agencies. But unlike then, when Trump officials made a public spectacle out of announcing the cuts, the N.I.H. is mainly delaying, reducing or rejecting grant requests, often leaving researchers and university leaders in the dark about what is happening...

The reduction appears to be the latest front in the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again war with Harvard and other elite universities. It is a new, more subtle tactic that is harder to fight in court, but that could be just as damaging if cuts and uncertainty build... As the Trump administration has pulled multiple levers to try to bring Harvard and other schools to heel, Harvard has often pushed back. It was the first institution to sue the Trump administration, has won in court on a number of occasions and has not reached a settlement with the federal government, as other prominent schools have done. Now, however, the university faces cuts that may be harder to counter. Last September, a judge ruled that the administration had improperly cut off funding to Harvard when it ended all of its grants in 2025, finding that the government had violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights.

But in the ruling, the judge suggested that there were lawful means the government could pursue if it wanted to restrict Harvard’s money, should it choose to. That is what is happening. Through June 30 of this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the N.I.H. provided Harvard 309 awards worth a total of $200 million. The amount is down from an average of roughly 440 awards worth $246 million for the same nine-month period in 2021-2024, according to the latest data available...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/harvard-trump-costs.html.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 192

From the Harvard Crimson: The Faculty of Arts and Sciences selected 40 more employees for layoffs across two major academic divisions and several smaller offices last week, bringing a months-long staff restructuring to a close with 165 positions eliminated. In the final round, 40 employees across the Division of Science, Division of Arts and Humanities, FAS Dean’s Office, and FAS Office of Research Administration were selected for layoffs outright, while another 73 were offered the option between a layoff and a new role.

In total, FAS eliminated 165 positions, or roughly 10 percent of the roles in the units included in the restructuring, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra and FAS Dean of Administration and Finance Warren Petrofsky announced last week... FAS issued layoff and job-change notifications in five large waves this summer, after a smaller series of decisions affecting three sets of high-level administrators. The first wave, affecting department administrators and center executive directors, took place in June. A larger wave of College layoffs followed the next week, and several changes — including the dismissal of the Writing Center’s director and the end of the Dudley Community — drew fierce opposition from students and alumni. After more limited layoffs in the FAS’ central offices, two rounds of divisional layoffs this month accounted for the majority of the job changes...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/8/21/fas-layoffs-conclude-165-positions/.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 191

From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard International Office is now recommending that J-1 scholars and F-1 and J-1 international students enrolled in on-campus programs this fall try to be in the U.S. when a new Department of Homeland Security rule imposing four-year limits and other restrictions on student visa status takes effect on Sept. 15. 

The recommendation comes because the rule will apply differently to students and scholars already in the country when it takes effect. Those in the U.S. on the day the rule goes into effect will be authorized to remain without filing for an extension until the later of their program end date or the expiration of their post-completion work authorization, up to a maximum of four years. But current students and scholars who leave the country and return after Sept. 15 will become subject to the new rule upon reentry...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/8/21/hio-students-visa-rule/.