First they folded. Now they’re pretending they were always a swan.
By Jenny Braddock, Politics Editor (Reluctantly)
April 15, 2025
Three days ago, we roasted Harvard like it applied early decision to Liberty University. Make America Dumb Again → While Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber stood up to Trump’s research purge with a spine and a statement, Harvard’s new president, Alan Garber issued something that read more like a scented memo: vaguely disappointed in tone, noncommittal in content, and clearly drafted in the same bunker as every CEO apology since 2020. Yale’s Maurie McInnis, not to be outdone, mastered the lost art of saying nothing while taking up space.
But now? Now Harvard wants you to know it was resisting all along — just very quietly, with lawyers. According to Politico, Garber and company are refusing to comply with the White House’s demands to muzzle student protest, open research records for federal inspection, and realign their academic mission around “proven American values.” Which is Trumpian for “shut up and color inside the culture war lines.”
It’s being spun as an act of high-minded defiance. But let’s not confuse timing with courage. Harvard didn’t suddenly remember what it stood for — it remembered that people were watching. The Guardian called it “cowardice cloaked in caution.” Princeton embarrassed it by doing what elite institutions almost never do in real time: taking a clear moral position without waiting for a donor consensus. Eisgruber’s office issued a formal statement within 48 hours of the order, rejecting the administration’s demands outright and warning that federal interference in academic research “threatens the foundation of higher education.” It wasn’t performative. It was principled — and it made Harvard’s silence look even more like a strategic nap. And Harvard’s own faculty fired off an open letter condemning the administration’s initial passivity: “Our commitment to academic freedom cannot be subject to political convenience.” That’s not protest from the fringe — that’s internal revolt, printed in the Crimson. And while Harvard may be impervious to shame, it is exquisitely sensitive to reputational damage — especially the kind that shows up in donation graphs and foreign admissions dashboards.
This isn’t resistance. It’s rebranding.
Yale, for its part, remains rolled up like a cashmere throw on a billionaire’s fainting couch. President McInnis issued a letter so laden with “ongoing conversations” and “respect for institutional processes” that it may actually be the first university statement to achieve sentience and ghost itself. MIT is “monitoring developments.” Stanford is “reviewing internal protocols.” Columbia is “taking this seriously.” Which is East Coast for “We’re hoping it goes away.”
Still, it matters. Harvard blinking now — even belatedly — gives cover for other schools to follow. Whether it’s out of principle, or just because they don’t want to look like cowards in tweed, the pressure’s working. And that’s the real lesson here: in the modern American empire, the last functioning check on elite behavior isn’t law or ethics — it’s global embarrassment.
Harvard may be folding itself into the shape of a paper crane and calling it resistance. But at least it stopped pretending to be a napkin.
Your move, Yale. The printer’s still warm if you need to borrow Princeton’s press release.
Filed from: a Harvard faculty lounge where the cocktails are stirred, the convictions are shaken, and someone just Googled “moral clarity.”
