The Harvard Plan is Back. Episode 1: And So It Begins...

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Speaker 1 This is on the media.

Speaker 5 I'm Michael Loenger.

Speaker 6 And I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's been a heck of a year for the universities.
To date, we've seen college presidents resign under pressure campaigns.

Speaker 7 James Ryan announced his departure today amid a Justice Department investigation into UVA's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Speaker 6 Foreign-born holders of student visas indefinitely detained for exercising their free speech rights.

Speaker 5 Rumesa Oz Turk and others identified as pro-Palestinian activists have had visas revoked or their legal status challenged by the Trump administration.

Speaker 6 Hundreds of millions of dollars already allocated for research grants for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's rescinded.

Speaker 6 But none of the seismic shifts that have occurred this year at universities should have come as a surprise.

Speaker 6 The fault lines were there for all to see back when Donald Trump was still on the campaign trail last year.

Speaker 11 When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated. by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics.

Speaker 6 So far, the accreditors have kept their jobs, but as the evidence piles up, it's clear that Trump was not making idle threats against the universities.

Speaker 6 And it wasn't just the president setting off alarm bells.

Speaker 13 We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Speaker 6 In fact, there's a strain on the political right that has been gunning for universities for decades.

Speaker 6 Last year we explored that history in season one of the Harvard Plan, which we made in partnership with the Boston Globe.

Speaker 6 The series focused on the short, tumultuous tenure of the first black president of the university, Claudine Gay, and the forces that arrayed to hound her out of that position.

Speaker 6 As a reminder, it was all unfolding in the wake of the anti-war encampments, the accusations of anti-Semitism on campus, and the disastrous congressional hearings that put university leaders like Gay in the firing line.

Speaker 15 It's when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment.

Speaker 16 Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?

Speaker 6 What we learned in season one was that this campaign to force change on universities had allies in high places who were waiting for the pendulum to swing in their favor.

Speaker 6 Now with Trump in the White House, it has. Given all of that, when our friends at the Boston Globe asked if we wanted to make a new season of the Harvard Plan, Plan, it was a no-brainer.

Speaker 6 So over the next three weeks, the reporter and host of the series, Ilya Meretz, will take us inside the pressure campaign on universities big and small, public and private.

Speaker 6 We start off with the oldest and richest university, and the only school that's fought back in court, here's Ilya.

Speaker 19 Ryan looked forward to Election Night 2024.

Speaker 22 He expected a pleasant return to form, the way election nights used to be.

Speaker 10 This is going to be elections being fun again. We're going to sit, we're going to drink beer, we're going to watch election terms come in and play like games.

Speaker 25 I say return to form because the 2016 election hit Ryan like a sucker punch.

Speaker 26 Not because he doesn't like Trump, although he definitely does not like Trump, but because the models failed so badly.

Speaker 20 Ryan Enos is a political scientist at Harvard, and specifically, he's a numbers guy.

Speaker 10 It seemed like this kind of tragedy for quantitative political science because it defied a lot of people's predictions.

Speaker 30 Then came 2020, the COVID election, and after that, the false claims of a stolen election.

Speaker 18 Still, going into the first Tuesday of November 2024, Ryan felt good about the models.

Speaker 32 That evening, he made his way over to Memorial Hall, which is the most Hogwartsy building on Harvard's campus.

Speaker 35 They throw a big election watch party there every four years.

Speaker 39 A lot of undergrads turn out.

Speaker 10 My role was to kind of tell them what they wanted to hear, which was that Harris was going to win, you know, which was, I wasn't just making that up.

Speaker 10 That's what like these models showed, but I think they were happy to hear that.

Speaker 40 Ryan stayed just long enough for the early returns to show the models were off again.

Speaker 25 Trump was doing a bit better than expected.

Speaker 41 Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida.

Speaker 42 I can see their fingers probably bleeding because there's no more nail to bite.

Speaker 29 He then walked a few blocks to where his poli-sci grad students had their own smaller gathering.

Speaker 10 By the time I got over here to the graduate students, there was some data that was just starting to come in that really meant like something extraordinary would have to happen for Harris to pull it out.

Speaker 30 The mood in the room was deflating rapidly.

Speaker 10 Harvard students and faculty are overwhelmingly liberal, progressive, Democrats.

Speaker 14 But Ryan was not inclined to despair.

Speaker 18 To him, 2024 felt different from 2016.

Speaker 10 Because in 2016, that actually really panicked me. I was like,

Speaker 10 this is something that could have significant effects for democracy in the United States and for our lives. And that actually didn't really turn out to be true.

Speaker 10 I didn't love the policies for four years, but I live with policies I don't like all the time.

Speaker 21 He told the grad students, we're going to be okay.

Speaker 10 I said, you know, we went through four years of Trump and it wasn't a big deal. Like, you know, it wasn't great, but, you know, the country got through it.

Speaker 30 Ryan told me, people can call me naive if they want to.

Speaker 30 We did this interview on a beautiful day outdoors just before the start of a new semester with young people joining orientation activities all around us.

Speaker 49 You could almost convince yourself that since election night, nothing much had really changed in the life of this university.

Speaker 40 Camilla saw Donald Trump's second election to the presidency similarly to how Ryan did.

Speaker 50 Ah, it's all just drama. No, no.
Last time around, nothing happened. Nothing's going to happen.
It'll be fine.

Speaker 22 She's a professor and researcher at Harvard Medical School.

Speaker 18 She studies cancer cells, not politics.

Speaker 27 And her her lived experience gave her a lot of faith in the United States.

Speaker 25 Camila Neksarova was born in communist Czechoslovakia and emigrated as a young girl with her mother to West Germany.

Speaker 35 They were joined later by her father, who crossed the Iron Curtain by air.

Speaker 53 Czech men, and I say this from personal experience, my people come from there, Czech men can be very inventive.

Speaker 50 He built his own plane, he carved a propeller out of wood, he took the motor out of an old car and built it onto like a type of glider.

Speaker 18 After university, Camilla came to the States for an internship at Boston Children's Hospital.

Speaker 50 And I was supposed to stay for three months and as soon as I experienced the American scientific culture, really, and I'm not exaggerating here, I decided I'm never going back.

Speaker 50 I'm never going back to Europe. I'll stay here forever and I'll do science here forever.

Speaker 48 As a younger person, you could share an idea and be taken seriously.

Speaker 21 Collaboration was encouraged.

Speaker 50 It was a big revelation for me coming here and really experiencing that.

Speaker 18 And she went all the way, getting a PhD and then a faculty job at Harvard with her own lab.

Speaker 50 Here's our cell culture room

Speaker 50 where we do genetic screens.

Speaker 26 You have the white lab coats on hangers.

Speaker 50 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 18 Nexarova Lab is a series of bays punctuated by an industrial sink here, some advanced scientific gadget there, and a small crew of postdocs and lab assistants at computers.

Speaker 54 At the end of it, like a captain's quarters, is Camilla's office with floor-to-ceiling windows and a big couch.

Speaker 50 I lie down there all the time. I like my couch.

Speaker 38 They have big goals here.

Speaker 18 It's about nothing less than life and death, really.

Speaker 51 To understand the way cancer cells spread from one organ to another.

Speaker 19 A lot of the work is in colorectal cancers, which have risen sharply in younger people. With any luck, her work will lead to a breakthrough in treatment.

Speaker 27 So last November, her focus was on that and on her young family.

Speaker 45 Not, it turns out, what was coming around the corner.

Speaker 50 I think some people knew, but most of us were just completely oblivious.

Speaker 18 Later, Camilla questioned her blase attitude about the incoming administration.

Speaker 50 Some of my more conservative colleagues who are actually reading the conservative press and just know what the discussion points are, had already told me

Speaker 50 as early as November.

Speaker 50 Next year, if Harvard's still here, then ha ha.

Speaker 50 And I remember thinking, what? What? What?

Speaker 50 I don't understand. I really, I couldn't even make sense of what he meant by that.
And only later it dawned on me, oh, wow, yeah. I mean, there is a pocket of

Speaker 50 conservative press that has been talking about straight out destroying us and other institutions like us for a long time.

Speaker 55 So let me just give you a quick orientation.

Speaker 28 Kit keeps military habits.

Speaker 2 When I met him on Saturday morning at 8 at his lab at the Harvard Engineering Building, he told me he'd risen at 3.45, had already worked out and taken one meeting.

Speaker 57 He's a colonel in the Army Reserves who did two tours and two shorter deployments in Afghanistan, and he's also a professor of bioengineering.

Speaker 55 Uh-huh, this is my office. Do you want to see the lab right quick?

Speaker 10 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 38 If a professor's lab is a mirror of their mind, Kit Parker's mind is restless, hungry for new things.

Speaker 55 I got frustrated with the lack of creativity in my science engineer institutions, so I ripped out part of my lab and built a a studio space for artists on the walls are these big maps of world cities made so i'm told from living cell samples these are pig um and you know they beat and so you're looking the microscope and the whole city is throbbing you know because they get synchronized in the body oh yeah he showed me a 300 pound smoker he created with his students when he taught a class on barbecue he has a patent on it actually kit has quite a few patents reflecting his eclectic interests it's i've always been kind of interested in couture A few years ago, he taught a class on fashion.

Speaker 55 I've worn a lot of camouflage.

Speaker 55 In 2009, when I was in Afghanistan, we were wearing this pixelated kind of blue uniforms, and we were getting like shot at by these Cheshin snipers from like a long way away because you could see us because of this uniform.

Speaker 55 It was like I had a Rode Flare duct taped on my forehead.

Speaker 38 One thing that makes Kit conspicuous is this.

Speaker 36 He's one of the few Harvard professors known to be conservative to vote Republican.

Speaker 55 I voted for President Trump the first time because I needed him to end the war in Afghanistan and he promised to do that.

Speaker 55 I didn't think I was going to have any peace in my own life until that war because even if I wasn't going back there, it was always there and I needed it to end.

Speaker 18 Kit voted for Trump again in 2024. That election night, he went to bed early, feeling that Trump would win and also feeling that very likely he'd take a look at universities.

Speaker 48 And properly so.

Speaker 55 We're unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides.

Speaker 55 We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship and the integrity of scholarship.

Speaker 18 Between the ever-expanding bureaucracy and the leftward drift of campus conventional thinking, Kit felt stifled.

Speaker 55 We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, but we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.

Speaker 18 So the next morning, when he learned Trump had been re-elected in 2024, Kit felt upbeat. Trump shared his concerns.

Speaker 25 Kit told colleagues, Harvard should go to Trump and open up a dialogue.

Speaker 55 We need to go talk to him immediately. If he talks to Putin and Kim, here talk to us.

Speaker 18 With some prodding from the new administration, Kit hoped Harvard could heal itself.

Speaker 62 Coming up, Harvard does not go talk to the new president.

Speaker 64 Instead, Trump brings the fight to Harvard.

Speaker 2 It's the Harvard plan from the Boston Globe and on the media.

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Speaker 50 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
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Speaker 66 Question. Is it just me or can the news right now feel exhausting? I'm Brad Milke and I think I can help.
I host Start Here, the daily podcast from ABC News.

Speaker 66 And every morning, we take a straightforward look at the top stories in politics, culture, and more, all in about 20 minutes.

Speaker 66 And because this is ABC and we've got correspondence fanned out around the world, we're taking you to the news with context and clarity.

Speaker 66 If you like on the media, you clearly like knowing the story behind the story. So, I really think you'd like Start Here.
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Speaker 64 This is On the Media.

Speaker 2 I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe.

Speaker 57 Kit Parker, a Trump voting professor of bioengineering, was right that Trump was looking at higher ed.

Speaker 2 Shortly after being sworn in, the new president ordered the formation of a task force to investigate anti-Semitism at universities. It came under the umbrella of the General Services Administration.

Speaker 2 The chairman of the group was a lawyer named Leo Terrell, who did a lot of TV hits.

Speaker 12 We're all going to use every federal criminal statue to go after these anti-Semites, these people who hate Jews.

Speaker 68 We're going to bankrupt these universities.

Speaker 12 We're going to take away every single federal dollar.

Speaker 61 Then letters went out to 60 colleges and universities, informing them they were under investigation by the Department of Education for allowing a climate of anti-Semitism to take hold.

Speaker 61 Then the Secretary of State began revoking hundreds of student visas, apparently over their activism around Gaza.

Speaker 69 Vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.

Speaker 7 We're not going to give you a visa.

Speaker 31 For Camilla, the first sign of trouble was delivered by the medical school's dean, who warned faculty that investigations into anti-Semitism could affect their work.

Speaker 21 Camilla didn't see the connection.

Speaker 50 That's surprising. That can't possibly be a big issue.

Speaker 40 A much bigger problem, in her mind, was a new effort by the Trump administration to cut the money universities collect on top of government grants to cover overhead like heat and electricity.

Speaker 39 It's called indirect costs.

Speaker 50 I remember being like, why are we talking about anti-Semitism? We should be talking about indirect costs. Isn't that the problem that we're facing?

Speaker 31 In March, Columbia became the first university to be directly singled out by the government for alleged lapses in dealing with anti-Semitism on campus.

Speaker 24 To focus the minds of people at Columbia, the administration also canceled hundreds of millions of research dollars.

Speaker 50 Then we would all frantically reach out to colleagues at Columbia and try to find out, has your grant been canceled? How about this other person's grant?

Speaker 50 This person who works on cancer in a similar field as me.

Speaker 10 Has their grant been canceled?

Speaker 50 Because we didn't really understand what was happening.

Speaker 52 Columbia soon relented.

Speaker 62 The school tightened its protest policies and adopted the broad, some say too broad, definition of anti-Semitism favored by the Trump administration.

Speaker 35 The government froze all of Columbia's research funding anyway.

Speaker 2 No deal.

Speaker 50 That's, I think, when we all started being very afraid because it was clear that, you know, we might well be next.

Speaker 28 For Camilla, there was one more complication.

Speaker 64 She was pregnant.

Speaker 2 She had a baby in March, her second kid.

Speaker 50 So I had a few weeks of bliss, you know, where I had actually decided this year for the first time, I'm going to really

Speaker 50 just take time off. I'm not going to worry about work.
I'm just going to be with a baby.

Speaker 37 But the pressure campaign was just heating up.

Speaker 70 All righty. Joining us now, my very dear friend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Speaker 70 You are essentially taking out $400 million from Columbia University. Are you looking at some of the other elite schools who are having the same problems?

Speaker 71 We've now launched investigations into five different universities, Harvard being one, Columbia was one.

Speaker 10 What's Harvard got to worry about money?

Speaker 24 They've got an endowment of $51 billion.

Speaker 42 They don't really need to worry, but they are reading the tea leaves here a bit. They saw what happened at Columbia, yanking the $400 million.

Speaker 12 Not only have I targeted 13 schools, I'm sending letters to the mayors and the DAs of LA,

Speaker 12 Boston, New York, Chicago.

Speaker 9 Do your job, or we'll do it for you. And we are going to file hate crimes.

Speaker 21 The second Trump administration was turning out so differently.

Speaker 25 from what Ryan had expected.

Speaker 18 Not only were universities under pressure, so were news organizations, media companies, law firms, corporations.

Speaker 2 Many of them were capitulating.

Speaker 18 Doge's rampage through government had everyone on edge.

Speaker 25 Ryan was concerned by what was happening inside Harvard as well.

Speaker 40 DEI initiatives were renamed or scaled back.

Speaker 24 The university ended a partnership with a school in the West Bank.

Speaker 49 It removed the heads of a Middle East studies center.

Speaker 10 Essentially, complying in advance with the Trump administration.

Speaker 31 It seemed wrong, and Ryan felt called to do something.

Speaker 10 But there was a problem.

Speaker 40 He's a political scientist.

Speaker 10 Right, you don't do politics, and I always kind of thought I was somebody that especially didn't do campus politics, like that was a waste of my time.

Speaker 8 He thought, F it, I need to act.

Speaker 56 Together with a colleague who studies Latin American politics, Steve Levitsky, he published a series of opinion pieces in the school newspaper, The Crimson.

Speaker 30 The titles read like the beginnings of a manifesto. Harvard must take a stand for democracy.

Speaker 18 First, they came for Columbia.

Speaker 24 Appeasing Trump damages Harvard and America. One of those pieces resulted in an invitation to meet with Harvard's president, Alan Garber, in his office.

Speaker 10 We sat down and made our case.

Speaker 40 Ryan found Garber to be very different from a lot of administrators who nod and write things down and don't really engage, he says.

Speaker 45 It's frustrating.

Speaker 72 And Garber, on the other hand, will argue with you about things. Like he'll tell you why he disagrees with you, or you'll say something, and then he'll ask you to justify it, right?

Speaker 21 And then you have to start thinking on your feet about why exactly you said that so they debated pros and cons ryan says garber left him feeling hurt but not hopeful he had some pretty firm reasons about why harvard probably it would be futile for it to push back the pressure on universities seemed to be constantly ratcheting up ryan asked himself what more he could do seemed like it was so imminent that harvard was going to fold it kind of seemed like it was going to happen any moment ryan and some others coalesced around the idea of an open letter from faculty to at least make it clear that surrender was not okay with them.

Speaker 53 He and Levitsky drafted it over spring break.

Speaker 10 We hit send to all the faculty we know and held our breath to see what would happen.

Speaker 21 One by one, people added their names.

Speaker 2 Eventually, the number passed 800.

Speaker 10 You could see them coming in.

Speaker 10 You know, I was watching these and like typing them into an Excel spreadsheet in my in-law's living room and thinking that like, oh, we really are going to make a statement here.

Speaker 37 It was that same week that the government turned its attention attention to Harvard.

Speaker 18 A March 31st letter from the Anti-Semitism Task Force informed Harvard that $8.7 billion in federal funding was under review.

Speaker 18 A letter on April 3rd offered some preconditions for continuing to receive public money, including abolishing DEI programs.

Speaker 35 Another document that same day offered a choice between installing new leadership in problematic departments and entering receivership.

Speaker 55 Does anyone in America think that Harvard is capable of fixing itself other than the folks at Harvard? Nope. No one thinks Harvard can fix itself.

Speaker 18 Kit watched the Trump administration's pressure campaign approvingly, but also aware that his own values were being tested.

Speaker 55 Does a Republican who's against big government want federal intervention and monitoring of this campus? No, it's not what conservative ideas about the role of government should be.

Speaker 8 Kit, Camilla, and Ryan.

Speaker 64 They each have different ideas about what's most at stake.

Speaker 18 For Kit, it's academic freedom and the intellectual cage match.

Speaker 21 For Camilla, it's serving the public through research and innovation.

Speaker 45 Only Ryan had a critical mass of people on campus feeling the same way he did and organizing.

Speaker 18 Their thing is the independence of the university.

Speaker 37 Saturday, the 12th of April, the no-surrender Surrender people held a rally on Cambridge Common under gray skies with spitting wind and rain.

Speaker 30 In an insulated canvas work coat, Ryan climbed to the lectern.

Speaker 22 He told a story about growing up in a California town that had fallen on hard times.

Speaker 9 But you know what we heard?

Speaker 59 We heard that the University of California was going to open a new campus somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley to bring education to the region.

Speaker 68 And people dreamed that that new university would be in my town.

Speaker 65 So people organized and they lobbied and they worked.

Speaker 9 And that university did open.

Speaker 9 And it transformed my community.

Speaker 10 It brought jobs.

Speaker 14 It brought knowledge and jobs and pride, he said.

Speaker 40 And that is what Donald Trump wants to take away.

Speaker 9 We are waiting on you, Harvard.

Speaker 5 When will you speak up?

Speaker 59 If you don't speak up, who will?

Speaker 10 That was the first time I'd ever spoken at a rally. I didn't even know I was capable of that.

Speaker 34 But there was something important Ryan and the others did not know that day.

Speaker 49 The night before, Harvard had received yet another letter from the government.

Speaker 21 This one was more like an ultimatum.

Speaker 14 If the university wanted to keep its financial relationship with the government, it would have to submit now to government audits for three years and bring in an unspecified number of conservative students and faculty.

Speaker 32 There would be no more delaying, no punting.

Speaker 26 It was yes or no time.

Speaker 74 Harvard, stand up, follow the rule of law.

Speaker 44 If Harvard folds, then others are definitely gonna follow suit.

Speaker 9 Don't give in without a fight.

Speaker 10 Coming up after the break, fight or fold, Harvard's leaders make up their minds.

Speaker 45 This is the Harvard Plan from the Boston Globe and on the media.

Speaker 66 Question. Is it just me, or can the news right now feel exhausting? I'm Brad Milke, and I think I can help.
I host Start Here, the daily podcast from ABC News.

Speaker 66 And every morning, we take a straightforward look at the top stories in politics, culture, and more, all in about 20 minutes.

Speaker 66 And because this is ABC and we've got correspondents fanned out around the world, we're taking you to the news with context and clarity.

Speaker 66 If you'd like on the media, you clearly like knowing the story behind the story. So I really think you'd like start here.
So check out Start Here on your favorite podcast app.

Speaker 2 This is On the Media.

Speaker 63 I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe.

Speaker 63 Before the break, professors and students held a rally, pleading with Harvard not to give in to government pressure.

Speaker 30 That was on a Saturday.

Speaker 2 The following Monday, at exactly 1.30 p.m.

Speaker 67 Eastern Time, Time, thousands of people, faculty, students, really anyone who's ever had any kind of Harvard affiliation, received an email from Harvard's president, Alan Garber.

Speaker 63 It was an answer to the government's ultimatum. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights, he wrote.

Speaker 66 Harvard became the first university to outright reject the Trump administration's demands.

Speaker 75 Harvard said tonight that it was rejecting a list of demands from the administration on sweeping changes and would fight back against them.

Speaker 16 We'll not be repressed. Today, we can stand up and say no.

Speaker 76 In a show of solidarity, hundreds of university and college presidents have now signed on to a message that reads in part: quote: We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.

Speaker 76 One of the signatories is Harvard's president, Alan Garber.

Speaker 35 For months, everyone wondered what Harvard would do.

Speaker 39 Now Harvard President Alan Garber was speaking out.

Speaker 78 It's less that I chose to take on the fight than that the fight came to me.

Speaker 18 Ryan says he felt an immense swelling of pride.

Speaker 25 Those are his words.

Speaker 10 Like this was the moment we'd been waiting for.

Speaker 30 For Camilla, the email was unsettling.

Speaker 40 No way there would not be consequences for her work.

Speaker 50 It felt a little bit like a natural disaster. It felt very similar to

Speaker 50 reading, we've been flooded or there's an earthquake coming.

Speaker 55 And for Kit. I thought this is going to suck.

Speaker 10 I mean, I'm torn, right?

Speaker 55 Because

Speaker 55 I'm in the Army. The president is my commander-in-chief.
I also believe a lot of the last 10 years of changes at Harvard have been, for the most part, maladaptive to our scholarly mission.

Speaker 55 But I'm a committer. I committed to Harvard.
I committed to the United States of America. It's my country.
So, like, you know, you got two warring factions, which you care deeply about.

Speaker 55 So I thought this is going to suck, and it has sucked. It's tough.
It's like watching your parents fight, you know.

Speaker 14 The New York Times later reported that the fateful Friday ultimatum to Harvard may have been sent by accident.

Speaker 55 It looked like a drunk text.

Speaker 54 But even if it was that, Kit sees it as a tactical success.

Speaker 55 Look, Trump is a master negotiator.

Speaker 55 He didn't think Harvard was going to cave. He's smarter than that, right? But did he shape the terrain for the negotiation? Oh, yeah.
He gave a masterclass. He took an extreme position.

Speaker 55 He knows the courts are going to backstop him from anything illegal. And he put Harvard in a terrible negotiating position.

Speaker 18 A week after saying no to the government's demands, Harvard went further, suing the government to restore billions of dollars in funding.

Speaker 30 The Globe's Hillary Burns and Mike Damiano went to talk with Alan Garber in his office.

Speaker 15 So what is the Trump administration's campaign that it says is about combating anti-Semitism? What is it really about?

Speaker 78 It involves things like asking us to change who we hire, who we recruit as students to the university, and it includes the potential to actually monitor what we teach. It has impacts.

Speaker 78 on so many different aspects of university life that it is hard to say it is only about anti-Semitism.

Speaker 78 And he didn't ask this, but I would also say that attacking our research enterprise in the name of attacking anti-Semitism really gives rise to skepticism about what the goal is here.

Speaker 39 Meanwhile, Camilla's worst fears were coming to pass.

Speaker 24 Trump turned scientific research funding into an improvised weapon, specifically billions of dollars of grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker 50 And so what happened is that they just stopped.

Speaker 31 She explained how it had worked for years, decades, actually.

Speaker 50 The NIH pays bills every week.

Speaker 50 So every week we basically submit to them, our administration submits to them what we're spending on the grants that we have at the NIH, and they pay the bills on a very regular basis.

Speaker 52 Now, the money had ceased to flow.

Speaker 50 And it was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight? Would we have to stop doing everything? everything?

Speaker 50 Or would there be some sort of help?

Speaker 31 For weeks, they were in a kind of low information limbo.

Speaker 18 Eventually, Camilla felt forced to ask two people who had recently joined her team to leave.

Speaker 21 She got a year of bridge funding from the university, but it's not really enough.

Speaker 50 Just because I can't provide the security, job security that I usually aim to provide for everybody who comes to the lab, which is basically a promise on my end that I will train them, I will work with them until they're ready to apply for a job, which for a postdoc would be a professorship somewhere.

Speaker 50 And so that can take five years or longer.

Speaker 40 Time horizons are long in the sciences.

Speaker 2 Not only had Camilla lost funding, she also lost the ability to plan.

Speaker 78 How much pain can Harvard absorb here?

Speaker 78 We don't know how much we can actually absorb, but what we do know is that we cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights.

Speaker 35 The government found more ways to make Harvard pay for its recalcitrance.

Speaker 79 They will no longer be allowed to participate in this student exchange visitor program, and that's up to 27% of their enrolled students.

Speaker 14 In May, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam moved to block Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students because of the university's, quote, pro-terrorist conduct.

Speaker 79 This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together.

Speaker 19 The departments of energy, defense, agriculture, and NASA all got in on the action, canceling grants and programs, launching investigations.

Speaker 22 All of these departments became respondents in Harvard's lawsuit.

Speaker 58 And for a few weeks at least, Alan Garber became a kind of resistance hero.

Speaker 24 At commencement, he was loudly cheered, especially when he talked about foreign students being a part of the community.

Speaker 43 Members of the class of 2025 from down the street, across the country, and

Speaker 10 around the world.

Speaker 68 Around the world, just as it should be.

Speaker 40 So it's a beautiful Monday morning in Boston in July. I'm about to go inside the Moakley U.S.

Speaker 22 Courthouse.

Speaker 18 Over the summer, Harvard's lawsuit to restore Camilla's funding and all of its research dollars moved ahead.

Speaker 40 In court, I watched Harvard's lawyers argue that the Trump administration had violated its First Amendment rights, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Speaker 30 The Professors Union was also a plaintiff in what became a combined lawsuit.

Speaker 22 Their lawyers sat together in a group.

Speaker 45 The table was full.

Speaker 39 On the other side of the courtroom, a single man sat at the government bench.

Speaker 14 Lonely over there, huh?

Speaker 26 The judge said to him by way of an opener.

Speaker 10 The whole room chuckled.

Speaker 65 Yeah, and he said something to the effect of the executive branch speaks or has one voice or something like that.

Speaker 26 Aiden Ryan is with the Globe.

Speaker 18 Like me, he was in court that day.

Speaker 33 When he rose to make the government's case, Michael Velchik, the Trump administration's lawyer, came in hot.

Speaker 65 Emphatically, vehemently, like just those, those adverbs came up quite a bit.

Speaker 40 Velchik is tall and slender and young, and a Harvard College and Harvard law graduate.

Speaker 61 His first words after being invited by the judge to speak were, Harvard is a rich college.

Speaker 14 Velchik talked a lot about money.

Speaker 40 Harvard wants billions of dollars, he said.

Speaker 28 Ultimately, this is a problem of economics.

Speaker 24 He said it was a contract dispute and it shouldn't be heard here in district court at all.

Speaker 30 It should be in federal claims court.

Speaker 17 Judge Allison Burroughs was skeptical.

Speaker 65 She didn't understand his argument, but that he was arguing it well and said that he, you know, his Harvard education was serving him well, and that got a laugh.

Speaker 75 When I say hands off, you say Harvard. Hands off!

Speaker 75 Hands off!

Speaker 75 Hands off! Harvard!

Speaker 25 Thank you.

Speaker 39 When court let out, there was a rally just outside by faculty, grad students, and undergrads angry that potentially life-saving research had been turned into a tool.

Speaker 10 They're cutting over $3 billion in vital scientific research. This case is about academic freedom.

Speaker 54 I was impressed with the speaker's passion, but not by their numbers.

Speaker 18 I thought of the tens of thousands of people just in Boston who work in biotech, medicine, and other industries where government funding is critical.

Speaker 51 I counted only about 100 participants at this rally.

Speaker 40 Camilla was not one of them.

Speaker 21 She said after final word came from the NIH that their grants had been terminated, the scientists in her building did not spontaneously gather in the lobby to get organized.

Speaker 18 She herself is not inclined to this kind of activism.

Speaker 50 I think scientists, they're a particular kind of animal. I think that we all probably locked our office doors and just started emailing.
We didn't physically emerge.

Speaker 20 Camilla's pretty sure she lay down on her office couch at some point.

Speaker 50 I certainly felt like I just want to hide under my blanket and this doesn't feel good and I don't want to see anyone because I knew my colleagues couldn't help me.

Speaker 14 Over the summer, a lot of things happened.

Speaker 40 President Trump signed a law allowing big college endowments like Harvard's to be taxed at a much higher rate.

Speaker 18 A number of college presidents resigned or were pressured to do so, including the leaders of Northwestern, the University of Virginia, George Mason University, and Columbia's interim president, the one who had tried and failed to appease the government back in March.

Speaker 40 And then there was this.

Speaker 77 Breaking overnight, Columbia University is now the first school to reach a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration over claims of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 56 In July, after initially being rebuffed, Columbia did get a deal with the government at a cost of over $200 million.

Speaker 21 The school's new president, former journalist Claire Shipman, defended the agreement on CNN.

Speaker 74 I think there are a couple of really important things about this agreement from our point of view. One, it doesn't cross the red lines that we laid out.
It protects our academic integrity.

Speaker 74 That was, of course, essential to us. And two, it does reset our relationship with the federal government in terms of research funding.
And that's, you know, there's many headlines about $400 million.

Speaker 74 This is really access to billions. This was a lot more than that.
Billions of dollars in future funding. And it's not just money for Colombia.
I mean, this is about science.

Speaker 74 It's about curing cancer, cutting-edge, boundary-breaking science that actually benefits the country and humanity.

Speaker 34 Shipman was asked, why not do what Harvard did and join the fight?

Speaker 74 Look, we, and I've said this to our community openly, we kept all options at all times open.

Speaker 60 Shipman said, we might have had some victories in court.

Speaker 74 But we worried we would have long-term damage.

Speaker 74 For example, we could have faced the loss of any future relationship in the coming years with the federal government, and that would have effectively meant an end to the research mission we conduct as we know it.

Speaker 10 It's understandable people would want to say we just want to move on. That, of course, is absolutely the nature of extortion, right?

Speaker 52 Ryan sees what he calls the collective action problem.

Speaker 10 When a mugger comes to you and says, give me your wallet,

Speaker 10 If you give them your wallet, rather than fighting back, they move on to the next person to take their wallet as well. And they just keep doing it until somebody fights back.

Speaker 10 The nature of of extortion is that the extortionist extracts pain from you.

Speaker 10 And in many ways, these analogies about the mugger don't just quite capture it because the mugger is not trying to undo democracy.

Speaker 10 And as somebody who studies politics and studies democracy, I believe 100% firmly there is no doubt that that is what Donald Trump is trying to do.

Speaker 14 Then Kristen, my Globe colleague, tossed Ryan a curveball.

Speaker 50 Have you ever stood up to a bully before?

Speaker 10 Have I ever stood up to a bully before? Well, I mean, when I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time bullying people. So maybe I

Speaker 10 reflect on that a little bit. You know, I was always the tall guy in the classroom.

Speaker 35 Ryan is tall and white and a man and a Harvard man at that.

Speaker 32 He says friends and family are concerned for him, becoming that guy who's always criticizing the president.

Speaker 31 But Ryan sees it differently.

Speaker 10 I have been very fortunate to have this

Speaker 10 position where I have the ability to be a little bigger than myself for a period and try to do what's right for society more generally.

Speaker 24 Kit Parker has not had direct funding cuts, but he's watched them hit scientists all around him.

Speaker 56 Are you okay with that, like

Speaker 56 as a means to an end?

Speaker 55 I haven't thought through an alternative strategy to apply pressure to universities to potentiate the change required to secure them on the geopolitical terrain.

Speaker 25 I feel like your answer is like, yes, it's ugly, but like this is how you get to change.

Speaker 55 You're forcing me towards a yes answer, and you're doing so successfully.

Speaker 52 I don't think I could force you to do anything.

Speaker 55 I just wish I hadn't come to this point.

Speaker 18 You know, I don't think it had to.

Speaker 55 And I like President Garber a lot. I think he's a good dude.
I don't know how much freedom to operate he has right now, given the corporate governance of Harvard.

Speaker 64 Kit's view that Harvard has a lefty groupthink problem is rooted in direct personal experience.

Speaker 57 More than a decade ago, he began teaching a class that presented his engineering students with a different kind of problem, gang violence in the Massachusetts city of Springfield.

Speaker 57 Police there were using techniques borrowed from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Speaker 80 Counterinsurgency cops in one of the most crime-ridden cities in New England.

Speaker 25 The program got results, and that got the attention of 60 minutes.

Speaker 80 Last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab.

Speaker 81 Help me understand what kind of intelligence I need to collect when I'm in the field, whether it's in the North End, I'm on Main Street, standing by the taco truck, or if I'm in Kandahar City.

Speaker 81 That's the kind of data I need.

Speaker 18 But a decade later, the national conversation on policing had changed.

Speaker 2 It was the time of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.

Speaker 31 Kitt's course listing in the catalog caught the attention of some activists who started a petition to cancel the class.

Speaker 24 Here's how one Boston station, WGBH, covered the story in 2020.

Speaker 82 As one critic said on Twitter, police reform is not good for communities of color unless it is a means to abolition.

Speaker 21 There was a case to be made that this kind of policing was good for the community.

Speaker 82 But right now, it's not a story Harvard plans to help tell. Adam Riley, GBA.

Speaker 40 To Kit, it was clear that social media noise, not the quality of the syllabus or the teaching, was what counted counted with Harvard leadership.

Speaker 55 I passed to another minister. I said, make a statement about academic freedom.
Make a statement in support of my students that are working on this stuff.

Speaker 55 Make a statement in support of this black and brown community in Springfield that's trying to fix itself. Maybe make a statement in support about me.
And they wouldn't do it.

Speaker 67 The class had to be withdrawn after one of the instructors dropped out.

Speaker 56 The following year, Kit managed to resume teaching about policing in Springfield, but he says, the whole experience has made him less ambitious, less creative in the classroom.

Speaker 55 After that, and then me being investigated by the university, and I was very open.

Speaker 55 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, just like, who hasn't? If you're a faculty member and you haven't been investigated in the last 10 years at Harvard, what have you really done?

Speaker 52 His alleged offense,

Speaker 28 in his own words, I speak bluntly.

Speaker 55 I give blunt feedback, and that's not always received well by folks at Harvard. As a matter of fact,

Speaker 2 to be clear, we haven't seen the complaint, but we have independently confirmed the outlines of what Kit told us.

Speaker 57 The upshot was that Kit had to meet with a sensitivity coach.

Speaker 40 He had a pay reduction and a hiring freeze at his lab, which hurt.

Speaker 64 The penalty, he says, was overseen by Claudine Gay, who was then a dean and went on to become Harvard's president, albeit briefly.

Speaker 29 Kit realized he was far from the only one.

Speaker 55 And then I had all these other faculty members come to me and say, hey, I'm being investigated too. I'm like, what is this?

Speaker 62 This too contributed to Kit's sense that something had gone badly awry with administrators driving a process that felt bureaucratic and far removed from the vibrant community of scholars that in his mind, Harvard should be.

Speaker 22 Are there conservative faculty at Harvard?

Speaker 55 I have identified six.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 55 No, I mean, so, I mean, President Garbert and I had a discussion about putting conservative voices on some of these committees.

Speaker 55 And so Alan asked me, can you put together a list of conservative faculty?

Speaker 14 He's working on it.

Speaker 18 We asked Harvard what Alan Garber plans to do with the names of conservative faculty.

Speaker 45 They did not respond to this or to other requests for comment.

Speaker 31 At some point in the summer, it became clear that Harvard was not simply fighting the administration in court.

Speaker 48 The two sides were also talking out of court.

Speaker 24 Shortly before students returned to campus, there was a flurry of news stories about how a settlement, perhaps similar to Columbia's, could be imminent.

Speaker 50 I really hope there is a settlement. And I hope that you can put this in your podcast, because I think that the world doesn't hear enough about our side of the river.

Speaker 50 I feel like in the newspaper, I always read about what do the students in Cambridge say.

Speaker 40 The medical school, where Camilla's lab is, is located in Boston proper, south of the Charles River.

Speaker 58 The main Harvard campus is a few miles north in Cambridge.

Speaker 50 You know, there's a letter that's being organized, and you know, faculty don't want a deal, etc.

Speaker 50 But I think over here at the medical school, I certainly don't want to speak for my colleagues, but I suspect, I don't have any hard data on it, I suspect that feelings may be a little different.

Speaker 50 So I definitely want a deal.

Speaker 50 I think that what we do here is extremely valuable, and the reality is that without a deal, it's dead.

Speaker 40 In Camilla's lab, they analyze tissue donated by people with cancer, most of whom will not be alive for much longer.

Speaker 24 They're looking for evidence of how metastasis happens, and they've learned a lot.

Speaker 50 We have come this far, and actually, a lot of the funding that was terminated recently was enabling us to now look in more depth for the molecular basis of the liver metastatic trait.

Speaker 50 So the next step would be to throw the molecular biology kitchen sink at these cells that we now know are special and dangerous and really try to map out what about the cells' properties is different.

Speaker 50 Is it something about the DNA? Is it something about the RNA?

Speaker 46 Camilla paid attention to Columbia's settlement.

Speaker 24 She says it was reasonable.

Speaker 50 Nobody's dictating their faculty hiring. They, it seems like, retained most of their freedoms.
They had to pay a very steep fine, which I think we will have to pay also.

Speaker 50 But if we can have a similar kind of deal, I think it's worth it. And I would would like for there to be a deal.

Speaker 46 Even if that happens, she has been changed by this experience.

Speaker 50 You know, like when you're a kid, everything that your parents say, that's the truth. And you believe, and there are these amazing figures in your life, and you don't question them.

Speaker 50 And so a part of growing up is to realize, oh, well, maybe they're not as perfect. And maybe I can't trust them on absolutely everything.
And so it feels a little bit like that too.

Speaker 50 It's like, oh, maybe it was a little bit naive to think that just because it's the government,

Speaker 50 for sure I can like absolutely 100% count on it.

Speaker 31 She is starting to think about the alternatives.

Speaker 50 I don't know what I would do. Maybe I would have to go back to Europe after all.
But Europe is right now flooded with all the people who are trying to go back.

Speaker 50 And then it would be kind of depressing to go back. I do love America.
So I would probably look for a job in industry.

Speaker 50 Maybe I would become a stay-at-home mom.

Speaker 50 Who knows?

Speaker 28 In September, Harvard won a round in its fight with the government.

Speaker 27 A judge ordered the canceled NIH grant money to flow again.

Speaker 31 The judge wrote, To upend the long-standing collaborative relationship between the government and Harvard and its partner institutions without considering alternatives or articulating a connection to the problem of anti-Semitism, sounds in arbitrariness and reeks of pretext.

Speaker 19 Days earlier, a story story came to light from the past of the man who represented the Trump administration in court.

Speaker 62 As my Globe colleague Hillary Burns learned, when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, Michael Welchik turned in a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 67 The assignment was to write a piece in the voice of a controversial figure.

Speaker 40 Two sources the Globe spoke with found Welchik's paper disturbing.

Speaker 23 We learned that the instructor asked him to redo it.

Speaker 2 Separately, in an email to a friend about a year and a half later, Welchik wrote that Mein Kampf was his, quote, favorite book I've read this year.

Speaker 2 The email didn't mention the Holocaust or Hitler's role in the murder of six million Jews.

Speaker 63 Welchik didn't respond to our request for comment.

Speaker 30 The Department of Justice told us in a statement, Michael has handled some of the civil division's most important cases, defending the president's agenda in court with the utmost respect and professionalism.

Speaker 40 It is almost certain that the government will appeal the decision.

Speaker 18 If there's no settlement, Harvard's litigation with the government could last for years.

Speaker 55 The question is, are they trying to wait out Trump and the administration? That's the issue right now. That's the big question.

Speaker 35 Kit would have preferred for Alan Garber and Donald Trump to sit down and dialogue without lawyers.

Speaker 57 The same behavior that Ryan might call obeying in advance, Kit thinks is honestly not very impressive.

Speaker 28 Doesn't go nearly far enough.

Speaker 55 We've changed the Middle East Studies Institute. We've changed the name of the DEI offices.
No one's been fired. No one's been retrained.

Speaker 55 There's been no by name accountability for what's happened over the last 10 years. No one has proposed that staffers, administrators, and faculty write statements of commitment to academic freedom.

Speaker 55 Hadn't happened. Hadn't happened yet.
No one has had to write down, I will support academic freedom and ideological viewpoint diversity.

Speaker 55 You just have to write down your statement every year in a purchase report about what you did with DEI this past year, but no one's making that kind of commitment.

Speaker 36 The engineering school no longer asks for DEI progress reporting.

Speaker 55 So, yeah, I'm still skeptical.

Speaker 27 American higher education remains in limbo.

Speaker 56 While Columbia and a few other schools have taken settlements, most have not.

Speaker 40 But no one besides Harvard has gone as far as to sue the government.

Speaker 35 And so all eyes remain on the nation's oldest and and richest school and its leader, Alan Garber, a 70-year-old man who has seldom made waves and who gives away very little when he speaks.

Speaker 40 Some even call him stoic.

Speaker 25 I'm sure he has emotions just like everybody else, but he's just very rational.

Speaker 31 It just so happens that Harvard's fight is more than that for Alan Garber.

Speaker 62 It's personal, putting him in direct conflict with a close colleague, someone he once mentored.

Speaker 41 Alan's also a human being, and it's gotta be like, there's gotta be part of him that's gotta be struggling with this.

Speaker 63 In the coming weeks, we'll go deep on that personal relationship and its central role in the battle for Harvard's soul.

Speaker 43 Here with me, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
Dr. B,

Speaker 43 I think you were probably on the show, I don't even know how many times.

Speaker 5 That makes Alan and Jay extremely special.

Speaker 65 They are not ideological about answers.

Speaker 5 They're extremely data-driven and empirical about answers.

Speaker 62 But this struggle is not academic or even particularly rational.

Speaker 28 It is a bare-knuckle fight for money, prestige, and power.

Speaker 59 And I have seen a number of the compacts that have been circulated, and we made a conscious decision not to sign them.

Speaker 50 How did you get the invitation to Mar-a-Lago?

Speaker 41 I see a bit of cowardice in a lot of other universities. We're like, thank God it's Harvard, not us.

Speaker 55 If we stay quiet, this will go away.

Speaker 49 The Harvard Plan, Season 2, is reported and written by me, Ilya Meritz.

Speaker 67 The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen.

Speaker 40 It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for the Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer.

Speaker 48 Mixing and original music by Jared Paul.

Speaker 24 Tom Colligan is the fact-checker.

Speaker 20 Thanks to the Boston Globe's editor Nancy Barnes and to Ryan Huddle for episode Art.

Speaker 24 And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers.

Speaker 36 I'll see you next week for part two of the Harvard Plan.

Speaker 2 This is On the Media.

Speaker 3 I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high-quality news about science, technology, and medicine.
News you won't get anywhere else.

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