Harvard vs Trump vs the Media: An Update.

Our oldest educational institution is standing up to the Trump onslaught. We can't know how this will end. But we can note the different narratives that different news organizations are presenting.

The current president of Harvard, Alan Garber, acknowledging a minute-long spontaneous standing ovation at the university’s commencement this past May. That was after he issued his “Hell, no!” response to MAGA threats to cut billions in funding, unless Harvard accepted government supervision of its student admissions, faculty promotions, course content, and other aspects of university life. (Photo Rick Friedman/AFP via Getty Images.)

I am writing today about America’s oldest, richest, and best-known educational institution—Harvard—and the way it is handling the responsibilities that come with its power and prominence.

I’m also writing about one of the oldest, best-known, and most influential news organizations in the country—the New York Times—and the way it is covering Harvard’s response to these unprecedented MAGA attacks.

What Harvard ultimately does—defy, comply, work out something quietly—obviously matters more than mere news stories about that choice. Harvard’s actions and example matter not just because of Harvard’s scale but also because they will have ramifications for thousands of other American institutions that are deciding, right now, how much they dare stand up to Trump demands.

But the coverage itself matters too. Through modern history we’ve seen how media “framing” can affect the momentum, message, and influence of social movements.

-It affects how protestors are seen by others: Through the 1960s, mainstream media stopped using the term “outside agitators” to describe Black demonstrators in the South, and started using “Civil Rights activists” or “voting rights protestors.”

-It affects how people in a movement feel about themselves, and whether they think they are entirely on their own or part of something larger. If 50 people protest in a small-town park, is it just those few people, at that one site? Or are other groups of 50 to 5,000 standing up in other places, for the same reason, at the same time?

“Strength in numbers” is something real, and in many cases it is affected by news coverage. The same with “courage is contagious.” Most people are braver when they see evidence that they are not alone. There’s a reason that Chinese governments since 1989 have tried to erase all evidence of mass protests across the country that year, in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere.

The importance of ‘framing.’

This is where journalistic “framing” comes in. You can tell when a news organization has really put its teeth into a subject. It will run repeated, featured stories, each building on the others. For many routine topics, an editor can wave away a proposed story by saying, “Yeah, we ran something on that two years ago.” But when a news organization digs in, past coverage changes into a feature rather than a bug. Each additional story becomes part of a deep-dive series, with follow-ups. Sometimes this is part of a quest for prizes. Sometimes it grows from one reporter’s instinct. Sometimes it comes from an editor’s asking reporters for updates, and “new” news. Sometimes it reflects a plain old sense of the public’s right to know.

The point is that you recognize this kind of commitment when you see it. And I have seen and been struck by the energy the New York Times has put into its forecasts that Harvard has been on the verge of capitulating to the Trump demands.

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‘If Harvard doesn’t stand up’ ….

This journalistic framing about Harvard, in specific, matters, for a reason that a former Harvard president, Lawrence Summers, laid out in a NYT op-ed soon after Trump’s initial demands. Its headline was, “If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?” Any smaller institution, any of them with tighter financial constraints—which means all of them except Harvard, since it is the richest—might see news about Harvard’s compromise and conclude that its own resistance is futile. If standing up is too costly for Harvard, it would be insane for any place else.

We don’t know how the Trump-Harvard story will end. It is possible that the long-predicted capitulation is still to come. Or that the correct way to state Harvard’s current stance is: It hasn’t caved, yet.

But I offer the timeline below as an illustration of how much energy our leading paper has put into saying that compromise will be the outcome. So far, these stories have been based on unnamed sources. So far, the predictions have not come true. So far, they have implicitly played to the MAGA concept that Trump can’t be stopped, by anyone.

Enough setup. Here is the timeline:

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Challenge and response, over the past six months.

This timeline begins not in 1636, the year of Harvard’s founding, but instead in February, 2025, one month into the Trump-II era. The media-centric part of the following narrative starts in mid-April.

—February 27, 2025 the Trump-Bondi DOJ sends a letter to Harvard claiming that the university is in trouble allegedly because of its failure "to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination.” This comes of course from an administration whose president has dined with a renowned antisemite and whose DHS/ICE recruiting information has reinforced motifs of white Christians as the “real” Americans.

—March 8, the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force says in public, “We’re going to bankrupt these universities.”

—March 31, as president of Harvard, Alan Garber responds to initial Trump demands with a semi-conciliatory statement, saying that Harvard takes antisemitism seriously and will look carefully into the stated MAGA concerns. For the record, Garber is Jewish, as were two of his 21st century predecessors, Lawrence Summers and Lawrence Bacow.

—April 11, the Trump team submits a demand letter to Harvard that boils down to a Federal government takeover of the university’s operations. The Trump team says, in so many words: We want control of your courses, your admissions policy, your faculty, and details on all of your overseas involvements and students. We want an on-scene monitor. This arrives by email on a Friday afternoon.

—April 14, on the following Monday, after the weekend, Harvard sends a reply that matches the famed response of US General Anthony McAuliffe to a Nazi surrender demand in World War II. McAuliffe replied, in total: NUTS!. When I read Garber’s message, I thought it was a polite way of saying not just “Nuts!” but Go to hell. I wrote about it that day, here.

Garber’s public statement is a bold declaration that academic freedom itself was at stake. For instance:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government…. It threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge.

No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

—April 19, the Times publishes an article saying that the outrageously sweeping original MAGA demand letter, of April 11, had been sent “by mistake.”

Note the both-sides framing of this “confrontation,” which would become a constant in the paper’s reporting of what could be more clearly called Trump’s assault on Harvard. The story began this way:

Harvard University received an emailed letter from the Trump administration last Friday [April 11] that included a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum so onerous that school officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.

The university announced its intentions on Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.

The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

Oooops, so sorry!!! Don’t you hate it when clerical errors pop up like this! No reason for Harvard to be thin-skinned and over-react. Of course the Trump people never intended things to go this far—or so we hear from “people familiar with the matter.” (Hmm, I wonder where they work.) From the Trump team this is a ham-handed example of what has become known as “sane-washing.”

—April 21, the following Monday, Harvard’s reply expands to: See you in court. Under the heading “Upholding Our Values, Defending Our University,” Alan Garber sends out a public statement on the lawsuit Harvard has filed to block the $2 billion MAGA cutbacks. Details of the formal complaint are in a PDF here.

Many parts of Garber’s statement are worth noting. For instance:

The consequences of the government’s overreach will be severe and long-lasting. Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield….

As a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism…. [But] before taking punitive action, the law requires that the federal government engage with us about the ways we are fighting and will continue to fight antisemitism.

Instead, the government’s April 11 demands seek to control whom we hire and what we teach. Today, we stand for the values that have made American higher education a beacon for the world.

—May 27 - June 6, Alan Garber gets prolonged, spontaneous standing ovations, from record-size crowds, when introduced at Harvard’s end-of-year events, from Commencement on May 27 to Alumni Day on June 6. A sample video is here. To the best of my knowledge, previous Harvard presidents have not been greeted in this way.

—July 28, the New York Times begins its series of “about to cave” articles. This one was on the NYT’s front page; its byline cited three reporters; and its takeaway, like that of several follow-up pieces, was that not even Harvard—again oldest, richest, most famous of the US universities—could defy Trump.

Was this true at the time? I don’t know. Will it prove true? Again we cannot say. But objectively this framing bolstered the MAGA narrative that no one could resist the Trump onslaught.

—August 3, in The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper that like others has often taken a lead in reporting campus realities, undergrad staffers William Mao and Veronica H. Paulus report that in talks with faculty members Garber is denying the $500 million deal.

—August 11, the NYT publishes the most assertive of its “about to cave” series:

The story quotes unnamed sources, does not mention the Crimson article, and links to the team’s own previous reportage as confirmation.

—Two days later, on August 13, the print NYT publishes a positive profile of a Trump team member deeply involved in the Harvard negotiations. (The story appeared online on August 11, the same day as the “Landmark Settlement” article.) The author is one of the reporters on the “about to cave” series. The story says, about its subject, May Mailman:

When President Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Mr. Miller turns to May Mailman.

Ms. Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.

Was Ms. Mailman one of the unnamed “sources close to the discussion” for the Harvard-Trump stories? We can’t know. We do know, again, that blind quotes about the “potential deal” would be in MAGA’s interest.

—August 12-September 2, through more than three weeks, Harvard gives no public indication that it is in fact “moving toward” a settlement with Trump.

—September 3, two days ago as I write, federal district court judge Allison Burroughs rules resoundingly in Harvard’s favor, ordering the Trump administration to release $2 billion in funding, and dismissing the pretext of MAGA concern about “fighting antisemitism.” Among the trenchant lines from her ruling:

[A]lthough combatting antisemitism is indisputably an important and worthy objective, nothing else in the administrative record supports Defendants’ contention that they were primarily or even substantially motivated by that goal…

The fact that Defendants’ swift and sudden decision to terminate funding, ostensibly motivated by antisemitism, was made before they learned anything about antisemitism on campus or what was being done in response, leads the Court to conclude that the sudden focus on antisemitism was, at best… arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual.

—September 3, a few hours after the ruling, Alan Garber of Harvard sends a message to tens of thousands of alumni. He says that the ruling reinforces Harvard in its determination to “stand up for core values of American higher education.”

—September 4, yesterday, news media reports abound on the court ruling. But they differ strikingly in play and prominence.

-Two newspapers with national ambitions, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, both put the story prominently on the front page. Most of today’s readers never see a print front page. But within the business the display is a signal of how much the story matters, from a newspaper’s point of view.

-The New York Times, which had featured the Trump-Harvard showdown so frequently over the summer, puts the ruling at the bottom of page A19. The story, by one of the reporters on this beat, says the following, for context:

The New York Times reported in July that the university was open to spending $500 million to resolve the matter, but that Harvard was seeking an array of provisions to protect its independence.

That paragraph could have said, but didn’t: “My colleagues and I reported.” Or that the reports were based on still-unnamed sources. Or that objectively the Trump team had a clear interest in promoting the “about to cave” theme.

One more time: Perhaps these accounts will eventually prove scoop-like, prescient, and true. I will acknowledge that if it happens. But given how hard the paper has pushed this framing, it would be useful for them, too, to convey what has been and still is unknown.

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What happens next?