Harvard Yard is bustling on a bright day in May. With graduation nearing, large white tents stand ready for celebration. Tourists and Cambridge residents enjoy the sunshine, as Harvard students study al fresco for finals. A few SUVs loaded with boxes are parked on the quad in preparation for the end of the semester.
Those students who were willing to speak to a reporter said they were proud to belong to an institution that is taking a stand for what it believes in. Christoffer Gernow, a first-year student from Denmark, says he’s “very supportive” of Harvard fighting back against the Trump administration, and thinks a lot of other students are, too.
“We’ve never been as united as we are right now” around supporting the university’s decisions, he says. The federal government’s list of demands is, in his view, “completely unreasonable and almost somewhat dystopian,” as well as “contradictory.”
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The Harvard community is processing the loss of $3 billion in funding from the Trump administration. But ahead of graduation, students, faculty, and local businesses share what is unifying them – and fueling their pride in the school.
As swiftly as the canceled grants have piled up (so far to a total of $3 billion), so have responses in support of the United States’ oldest and most affluent university. After the university filed a First Amendment lawsuit in April and spearheaded an open letter defending “essential freedom” signed by the presidents of more than 400 universities, donations began pouring in at a rate of 88 an hour, according to The Harvard Crimson.
The floods of goodwill and small-donor donations stand as a strong contrast to a year before, when the university was awash in protests, its first Black president had resigned amid plagiarism allegations and unsatisfactory testimony in Congress on campus antisemitism, and large-scale donors were pulling their support. From faculty and alumni to area businesses, the expressions of pride in Harvard’s stance for academic freedom are effusive. Actions by the White House have galvanized people, they say.
“Trump has a way of unifying people – Canadians, Australians, Harvard faculty, you name it,” says Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard.
Dr. Skocpol is one of at least 90 tenured faculty members who have pledged to give 10% of their salary for the 2025-2026 school year to support the school. To date, they have made commitments totaling an estimated $2.5 million. Harvard President Alan Garber has pledged to donate 25% of his salary to support the school.
“All of us at Harvard who are in a position to sacrifice need to do so,” Dr. Skocpol says. “We need to do what we can to sustain the sciences and graduate students and lab people, and we need to stand up for the principle of academic autonomy and freedom.”
The donation amounts number in the millions and can’t match dollar for dollar with the billions pulled by the federal government. But Harvard community members say their actions have additional benefits. “We think that Harvard can be an example for other schools. We took a strong stand for safeguarding the school’s independence and that certainly has spread to other universities,” says Eric Maskin, Nobel Prize-winning economist and tenured faculty member.
“I could not be more proud”
People affiliated with Harvard pledge to continue to fight as long as the school pushes back against what they say is an illegal encroachment into how they do things there.
“Personally, I could not be more proud,” says Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association. She notes she can’t speak on behalf of the entire business association’s board, but that she gets the sense that most people in the community support Harvard’s decision.
She’s grateful that Harvard is standing up for “righteousness, and they’re just doing the right thing regardless of the consequences.”
Harvard is one of several prominent universities to come under intense scrutiny by President Donald Trump and U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon. “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” reads a letter dated April 11, criticizing what it characterized as a lack of “intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor.”
White House officials first said that funding was being cut off because of campus activity in response to the Israel-Hamas war that started on Oct. 7, 2023. Protests on campus led many Jewish students to feel unsafe. It also led to companies refusing to hire students who protested and students’ information being doxxed.
“[Antisemitism] was something that the Harvard administration was already working to address. We don’t need the federal government to step in for this to be dealt with,” says Dr. Maskin.
Dr. Maskin, who is donating part of his salary, alluded to an antisemitism task force that Harvard created, which published a 200-plus page report that found both antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus. And Dr. Maskin, who is Jewish, also says that antisemitism at the school is not as pervasive as the government would suggest.
He says that he will continue to help Harvard as long as the school continues to fight back. “And the benefits of that research go to everyone. This is not charity to Harvard. This is an investment, because Harvard has a proven track record of producing great results.”
Dr. Maskin and other faculty say that Harvard doesn’t need the government having a say in who can get hired, what students can be admitted, or what disciplinary actions Harvard doles out.
The university argues the cuts violate both the Constitution and laws governing grants. A hearing is scheduled for July. In the meantime, the school has made several moves to plug funding gaps, such as pledging $250 million toward research. But the first big gesture came from the faculty.
“There’s a moral case for people who are well off trying to help out vulnerable people, vulnerable people who through no fault of their own are affected,” says Dr. Maskin.
The effort for faculty to make financial commitments was spearheaded by Dani Rodrik, a professor of economics at the Kennedy School of Government.
“We already had hundreds of faculty members who had expressed a very strong view about resisting the Trump administration’s unlawful demands on the university,” Dr. Rodrik says. That letter was signed March 24 by more than 600 faculty members who urged the governing body of the school to resist attacks on colleges.
Dr. Rodrik says he and others reached out to those faculty members. They were promised anonymity and that they could withdraw donations if the university didn’t stand firm. Professors who can’t give 10% are helping out students in other ways.
“We did think about this as possibly as an example to other faculty at other universities. Given Harvard’s name and standing and prestige, we thought this might spark similar initiatives elsewhere,” Dr. Rodrik says. He says that he has heard from faculty at other schools who are willing to step up to a financial pledge if it is organized on their respective campuses.
“We’re going to be morally supported”
Caitlyn Gonzalez, a first-year student having lunch with a friend, calls Harvard’s stand against the Trump administration “very powerful.” “I think [it] is a beautiful thing that a university is standing up for their students,” she adds.
The friend Ms. Gonzalez is lunching with is international and asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. She says she wishes the university had taken more “concrete” steps to support international students this semester. Still, she feels that Harvard has held on to its “moral soul” by standing up to the Trump administration.
“It shows we’re going to be morally supported by this institution, and to me, personally, that’s a very important thing and that’s something that I really value,” she says.
While faculty members sought to encourage colleagues in academia at other schools, they also ended up rallying people inside Cambridge city limits.
Jacob Posner/The Christian Science Monitor
Kari Kuelzer owns neighborhood institutions Grendel’s Den, which has been around for more than 50 years, and The Sea Hag. She feels not just pride but also “relief” that Harvard is not giving in.
“My concern is that the alternative bad feeling [in the community] that might result from some sort of capitulation would damage my business,” she says.
Her restaurants have always given “people a chance to come out with a big group of people from all walks of life and share ideas and learn and socialize,” she says.
She also worries “the best and the brightest” will be replaced by only the wealthiest.
“We’re not here to serve the wealthy,” she says, but rather future inventors of a killer app or a cure for cancer.
If Harvard loses its academic integrity, all the university has left is a “nice, shiny price tag,” she says.
Ms. Jillson, of the Harvard Square Business Association, believes the square will get through this period of turmoil, as it has done throughout its long history. Harvard has been around since 1636, she notes, and many of the businesses in her association were founded over 100 years ago.
“We will do as we have done, whether it was the [1918] pandemic, or the two world wars,” she says.
