S2 - Episode 1: The Harvard Plan

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Speaker 6 This is on the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Speaker 4 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 4 Foreign-born holders of student visas indefinitely detained for exercising their free speech rights.

Speaker 9 Rumesa Oz Turk and others identified as pro-Palestinian activists have had visas revoked or their legal status challenged by the Trump administration.

Speaker 4 Hundreds of millions of dollars already allocated for research grants for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's rescinded.

Speaker 4 But none of the seismic shifts that have occurred this year at universities should have come as a surprise.

Speaker 4 The fault lines were there for all to see back when Donald Trump was still on the campaign trail last year.

Speaker 12 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 4 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 4 And it wasn't just the president setting off alarm bells.

Speaker 14 We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Speaker 4 In fact, there's a strain on the political right that has been gunning for universities for decades.

Speaker 4 Last year we explored that history in season one of the Harvard Plan, which we made in partnership with the Boston Globe.

Speaker 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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, it was a no-brainer.

Speaker 4 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 4 We start off with the oldest and richest university and the only school that's fought back in court, here's Ilya.

Speaker 21 Ryan looked forward to election night 2024.

Speaker 23 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 27 I say return to form because the 2016 election hit Ryan like a sucker punch. Not because he doesn't like Trump, although he definitely does not like Trump, but because the models failed so badly.

Speaker 33 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 37 Then came 2020, the COVID election, and after that, the false claims of a stolen election.

Speaker 28 Still, going into the first Tuesday of November 2024, Ryan felt good about the models.

Speaker 40 That evening, he made his way over to Memorial Hall, which is the most Hogwartsy building on Harvard's campus.

Speaker 27 They throw a big election watch party there every four years.

Speaker 43 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 27 Ryan stayed just long enough for the early returns to show the models were off again.

Speaker 32 Trump was doing a bit better than expected.

Speaker 46 Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida.

Speaker 47 I can see their fingers probably bleeding because there's no more nail to bite.

Speaker 32 He then walked a few blocks to where his Poli Psci grad students had their own smaller gathering.

Speaker 10 By the time I got over here to the graduate students,

Speaker 10 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 37 The mood in the room was deflating rapidly.

Speaker 49 Harvard students and faculty are overwhelmingly liberal, progressive, Democrats.

Speaker 40 But Ryan was not inclined to despair.

Speaker 27 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 lived with policies I don't like all the time.

Speaker 39 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 21 Ryan told me, people can call me naive if they want to.

Speaker 37 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 50 You could almost convince yourself that since election night, nothing much had really changed in the life of this university.

Speaker 52 Camilla saw Donald Trump's second election to the presidency similarly to how Ryan did.

Speaker 3 Ah, it's all just drama. No, no.
Last time around, nothing happened. Nothing's going to happen.
It'll be fine.

Speaker 32 She's a professor and researcher at Harvard Medical School.

Speaker 33 She studies cancer cells, not politics.

Speaker 37 And her lived experience gave her a lot of faith in the United States. Camila Naksarova was born in communist Czechoslovakia and emigrated as a young girl with her mother to West Germany.

Speaker 10 They were joined later by her father, who crossed the Iron Curtain by air.

Speaker 32 Czech men, and I say this from from personal experience, my people come from there, Czech men can be very inventive.

Speaker 3 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 27 After university, Camilla came to the States for an internship at Boston Children's Hospital.

Speaker 3 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 3 I'm never going back to Europe. I'll stay here forever and I'll do science here forever.

Speaker 24 As a younger person, you could share an idea and be taken seriously.

Speaker 27 Collaboration was encouraged.

Speaker 3 It was a big revelation for me coming here and really experiencing that.

Speaker 19 And she went all the way, getting a PhD and then a faculty job at Harvard with her own lab.

Speaker 3 Here's our cell culture room.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow. Where we do genetic screens.

Speaker 22 You have the white lab coats on hangers.

Speaker 3 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 44 Next Arova 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 34 At the end of it, like a captain's quarters, is Camilla's office with floor-to-ceiling windows and a big couch.

Speaker 3 I lie down there all the time. I like my couch.

Speaker 55 They have big goals here.

Speaker 27 It's about nothing less than life and death, really.

Speaker 57 to understand the way cancer cells spread from one organ to another.

Speaker 21 A lot of the work is in colorectal cancers, which have risen sharply in younger people.

Speaker 48 With any luck, her work will lead to a breakthrough in treatment.

Speaker 19 So last November, her focus was on that and on her young family.

Speaker 11 Not, it turns out, what was coming around the corner.

Speaker 3 I think some people knew, but most of us were just completely oblivious.

Speaker 32 Later, Camilla questioned her blasé attitude about the incoming administration.

Speaker 3 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 3 as early as November next year, if Harvard's still here, then haha.

Speaker 3 And I remember thinking, what? What? What?

Speaker 3 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 3 conservative press that has been talking about straight out destroying us and other institutions like us for a long time.

Speaker 10 So, let me just give you a quick orientation.

Speaker 19 Kit keeps military habits.

Speaker 36 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 36 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 10 Uh-huh, this is my office. Do you want to see the lab right quick? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 48 If a professor's lab is a mirror of their mind, Kit Parker's mind is restless, hungry for new things.

Speaker 10 I got frustrated with the lack of creativity in my science engineering instruments, so I ripped out part of my lab and built a studio space for artists.

Speaker 40 On the walls are these big maps of world cities made, so I'm told, from living cell samples.

Speaker 10 These are pig.

Speaker 10 And you know, they beat. And so you're looking in the microscope and the whole city is throbbing, you know, because they get synchronized.

Speaker 10 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 36 He showed me a 300-pound smoker he created with his students when he taught a class on barbecue.

Speaker 65 He has a patent on it.

Speaker 32 Actually, Kit has quite a few patents reflecting his eclectic interests.

Speaker 10 I've always been kind of interested in couture.

Speaker 59 A few years ago, he taught a class on fashion.

Speaker 10 Avoid a lot of camouflage.

Speaker 10 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 Chechnyan snipers from like a long way away because you could see us because of this uniform.

Speaker 10 It was like like I had a road flare duct taped on my forehead.

Speaker 25 One thing that makes Kit conspicuous is this: he's one of the few Harvard professors known to be conservative to vote Republican.

Speaker 10 I voted for President Trump the first time because I needed him to end the war in Afghanistan, and he promised to do that. I didn't think I was gonna have any peace in my own life until that war.

Speaker 10 Because even if I wasn't going back there, it was always there, and I needed it to end.

Speaker 27 Kit voted for Trump again in 2024.

Speaker 21 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 38 And properly so.

Speaker 10 We're unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards.

Speaker 10 for admissions and scholarship and the integrity of scholarship.

Speaker 33 Between Between the ever-expanding bureaucracy and the leftward drift of campus conventional thinking, Kit felt stifled.

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

Speaker 27 So the next morning, when he learned Trump had been re-elected in 2024, Kit felt upbeat.

Speaker 39 Trump shared his concerns.

Speaker 55 Kit told colleagues, Harvard should go to Trump and open up a dialogue.

Speaker 10 We need to go talk to him. Immediately.
If he talks to Putin and Kim, here, talk to us.

Speaker 26 With some prodding from the new administration, Kit hoped Harvard could heal itself.

Speaker 43 Coming up, Harvard does not go talk to the new president.

Speaker 19 Instead, Trump brings the fight to Harvard.

Speaker 11 It's the Harvard plan from the Boston Globe and on the media.

Speaker 13 I'm journalist Henry Bonsu. I'm working with Foreign Policy to bring you The Threshold, a new podcast about the fight to end infectious disease.

Speaker 68 How close are we?

Speaker 13 Where can the financing come from? And what's at stake if we fall short?

Speaker 13 The Threshold is a seven-part series made possible in part through funding from the Gates Foundation, available on all the major platforms.

Speaker 69 This is on the media.

Speaker 36 I'm Ilya Merritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe.

Speaker 61 Kit Parker, a Trump voting professor of bioengineering, was right that Trump was looking at higher ed.

Speaker 57 Shortly after being sworn in, the new president ordered the formation of a task force to investigate anti-Semitism at universities.

Speaker 63 It came under the umbrella of the General Services Administration.

Speaker 19 The chairman of the group was a lawyer named Leo Terrell, who did a lot of TV hits.

Speaker 70 We're all going to use every federal criminal statue to go after these anti-Semites, these people who hate Jews.

Speaker 70 We're gonna bankrupt these universities. We're gonna take away every single federal dollar.

Speaker 27 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 67 Then the Secretary of State began revoking hundreds of student visas, apparently over their activism around Gaza.

Speaker 71 Vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa.

Speaker 32 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 22 Camilla didn't see the connection.

Speaker 3 That's surprising. That can't possibly be a big issue.

Speaker 65 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 like heat and electricity.

Speaker 52 It's called indirect costs.

Speaker 3 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 65 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 26 To focus the minds of people at Columbia, the administration also canceled hundreds of millions of research dollars.

Speaker 3 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 3 This person who works on cancer in a similar field as me.

Speaker 10 Has their grant been canceled?

Speaker 3 Because we didn't really understand what was happening.

Speaker 27 Columbia soon relented.

Speaker 40 The school tightened its protest policies and adopted the broad, some say too broad, definition of anti-Semitism favored by the Trump administration.

Speaker 39 The government froze all of Columbia's research funding anyway.

Speaker 30 No deal.

Speaker 3 That's, I think, when we all started being very afraid because it was clear that, you know, we might well be next.

Speaker 62 For Camilla, there was one more complication.

Speaker 31 She was pregnant.

Speaker 61 She had a baby in March, her second kid.

Speaker 3 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 3 just take time off. I'm not going to worry about work.

Speaker 3 I'm just going to be with a baby.

Speaker 21 But the pressure campaign was just heating up.

Speaker 72 Alrighty, joining us now, my very dear friend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Speaker 72 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 73 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 54 They've got an endowment of $51 billion.

Speaker 74 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 70 Not only have I targeted 13 schools, I'm sending letters to the mayors and the DAs of LA, Boston, New York, Chicago. Do your job, or we'll do it for you.
And we are going to file hate crimes.

Speaker 33 The second Trump administration was turning out so differently from what Ryan had expected.

Speaker 67 Not only were universities under pressure, so were news organizations, media companies, law firms, corporations.

Speaker 27 Many of them were capitulating. Doge's rampage through government had everyone on edge.

Speaker 32 Ryan was concerned by what was happening inside Harvard as well.

Speaker 50 DEI initiatives were renamed or scaled back. The university ended a partnership with a school in the West Bank.

Speaker 19 It removed the heads of a Middle East studies center.

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

Speaker 27 It seemed wrong, and Ryan felt called to do something.

Speaker 10 But there was a problem.

Speaker 55 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 11 He thought, F it, I need to act.

Speaker 67 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 67 The titles read like the beginnings of a manifesto.

Speaker 26 Harvard must take a stand for democracy.

Speaker 27 First, they came for Columbia. Appeasing Trump damages Harvard and America.
One 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 27 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 32 It's frustrating.

Speaker 77 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 77 And then you have to start thinking on your feet about why exactly you said that.

Speaker 27 So, they debated pros and cons.

Speaker 26 Ryan says Garber left him feeling hurt, but not hopeful.

Speaker 10 He had some pretty firm reasons about why Harvard probably would be futile for it to push back.

Speaker 25 The pressure on universities seemed to be constantly ratcheting up.

Speaker 54 Ryan asked himself what more he could do.

Speaker 10 Seemed like it was so imminent that Harvard was going to fold. It kind of seemed like it was going to happen any moment.

Speaker 32 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 20 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 36 One by one, people added their names.

Speaker 33 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 40 It was that same week that the government turned its attention to Harvard.

Speaker 27 A March 31st letter from the Anti-Semitism Task Force informed Harvard that $8.7 billion in federal funding was under review.

Speaker 26 A letter on April 3rd offered some preconditions for continuing to receive public money, including abolishing DEI programs.

Speaker 28 Another document that same day offered a choice between installing new leadership in problematic departments and entering receivership.

Speaker 10 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 65 Kit watched the Trump administration's pressure campaign approvingly, but also aware that his own values were being tested.

Speaker 10 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 10 Kit, Camilla, and Ryan.

Speaker 31 They each have different ideas about what's most at stake.

Speaker 37 For Kit, it's academic freedom and the intellectual cage match.

Speaker 60 For Camilla, it's serving the public through research and innovation.

Speaker 20 Only Ryan had a critical mass of people on campus feeling the same way he did and organizing.

Speaker 37 Their thing is the independence of the university.

Speaker 21 Saturday, the 12th of April, the no-surrender people held a rally on Cambridge Common under gray skies with spitting wind and rain.

Speaker 33 In an insulated canvas work coat, Ryan climbed to the lectern.

Speaker 52 He told a story about growing up in a California town that had fallen on hard times.

Speaker 6 But you know what we heard? 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 6 And people dreamed that that new university would be in my town. So people organized and they lobbied and they worked.
and that university did open

Speaker 6 and that transformed my community. It brought jobs.

Speaker 55 It brought knowledge and jobs and pride he said

Speaker 32 and that is what Donald Trump wants to take away.

Speaker 6 We are waiting on you Harvard. When will you speak up?

Speaker 70 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 40 But there was something important Ryan and the others did not know that day.

Speaker 19 The The night before, Harvard had received yet another letter from the government.

Speaker 67 This one was more like an ultimatum.

Speaker 11 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 30 There would be no more delaying, no punting.

Speaker 67 It was yes or no time.

Speaker 18 Harvard, stand up, follow the rule of law.

Speaker 79 If Harvard falls, then others are definitely going to follow suit. Don't give in without a fight.

Speaker 62 Coming up after the break, fight or fold, Harvard's leaders make up their minds.

Speaker 44 This is the Harvard Plan from the Boston Globe and on the media.

Speaker 80 When a child is in the hospital, family does whatever it takes to stay. At Ronald McDonald's house, we give them a community of support, warm meals, and a place to rest.

Speaker 80 Because when a child is in the fight of their lives, family stays. And Ronald McDonald's house stays with them.

Speaker 13 I'm journalist Henry Bonsu. I'm working with Foreign Policy to bring you The Threshold, a new podcast about the fight to end infectious disease.

Speaker 68 How close are we?

Speaker 13 Where can the financing come from? And what's at stake if we fall short?

Speaker 13 The Threshold is a seven-part series made possible in part through funding from the Gates Foundation, available on all the major platforms.

Speaker 63 This is on the media.

Speaker 69 I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe.

Speaker 58 Before the break, professors and students held a rally pleading with Harvard not to give in to government pressure.

Speaker 53 That was on a Saturday.

Speaker 40 The following Monday, at exactly 1.30 p.m.

Speaker 69 Eastern 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 69 It was an answer to the government's ultimatum.

Speaker 57 The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights, he wrote.

Speaker 71 Harvard became the first university to outright outright reject the Trump administration's demands.

Speaker 5 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 81 In a show of solidarity, hundreds of university and college presidents have now signed on to a message that reads in part:

Speaker 81 We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.

Speaker 18 One of the signatories is Harvard's president, Alan Garber.

Speaker 19 For months, everyone wondered what Harvard would do.

Speaker 65 Now Harvard president Alan Garber was speaking out.

Speaker 42 It's less that I chose to take on the fight than that the fight came to me.

Speaker 57 Ryan says he felt an immense swelling of pride.

Speaker 29 Those are his words.

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

Speaker 34 For Camilla, the email was unsettling.

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

Speaker 3 It felt a little bit like a natural disaster. It felt very similar to

Speaker 3 reading, we've been flooded or there's an earthquake coming.

Speaker 28 And for Kit?

Speaker 10 I thought this is going to suck. I mean, I'm torn, right? Because

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 So

Speaker 10 I thought this is going to suck, and it has sucked. It's tough.
It's like watching your parents fight, you know?

Speaker 27 The New York Times later reported that the fateful Friday ultimatum to Harvard may have been sent by accident.

Speaker 10 It looked like a drunk text.

Speaker 34 But even if it was that, Kit sees it as a tactical success.

Speaker 10 Look, Trump is a master negotiator.

Speaker 10 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 master class. He took an extreme position.

Speaker 10 He knows the courts are going to backstop him from anything illegal. And he put Harvard in a terrible negotiating position.

Speaker 27 A week after saying no to the government's demands, Harvard went further, suing the government to restore billions of dollars in funding.

Speaker 55 The Globe's Hillary Burns and Mike Damiano went to talk with Alan Garber in his office.

Speaker 17 So, what is the Trump administration's campaign that it says is about combating anti-Semitism? What is it really about?

Speaker 82 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.

Speaker 82 It has impacts on so many different aspects of university life that it is hard to say it is only about anti-Semitism.

Speaker 82 And he didn't ask this, but I would also say that attacking a research enterprise in the name of attacking anti-Semitism really gives rise to skepticism about what the goal is here.

Speaker 65 Meanwhile, Camilla's worst fears were coming to pass.

Speaker 34 Trump turned scientific research funding into an improvised weapon, specifically billions of dollars of grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker 3 And so what happened is that they just stopped.

Speaker 32 She explained how it had worked for years, decades actually.

Speaker 3 The NIH pays bills every week.

Speaker 3 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 56 Now, the money had ceased to flow.

Speaker 3 And it was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight? Would we have to stop doing

Speaker 3 everything?

Speaker 3 Or would there be some sort of help?

Speaker 45 For weeks, they were in a kind of low information limbo.

Speaker 43 Eventually, Camilla felt forced to ask two people who had recently joined her team to leave.

Speaker 56 She got a year of bridge funding from the university, but it's not really enough.

Speaker 3 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 3 And so that can take five years or longer.

Speaker 54 Time horizons are long in the sciences.

Speaker 19 Not only had Camilla lost funding, she also lost the ability to plan.

Speaker 28 How much pain can Harvard absorb here?

Speaker 82 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 65 The government found more ways to make Harvard pay for its recalcitrants.

Speaker 83 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 23 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 83 This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together.

Speaker 48 The departments of energy, defense, agriculture, and NASA all got in on the action, canceling grants and programs, launching investigations.

Speaker 32 All of these departments became respondents in Harvard's lawsuit.

Speaker 43 And for a few weeks at least, Alan Garber became a kind of resistance hero.

Speaker 54 At commencement, he was loudly cheered, especially when he talked about foreign students being a part of the community.

Speaker 47 Members of the class of 2025 from down the street, across the country, and

Speaker 10 around the world.

Speaker 6 Around the world, just as it should be.

Speaker 44 So it's a beautiful Monday morning in Boston in July. I'm about about to go inside the Moakley U.S.

Speaker 45 Courthouse and

Speaker 31 Over the summer, Harvard's lawsuit to restore Camilla's funding and all of its research dollars moved ahead.

Speaker 37 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 57 The Professors Union was also a plaintiff in what became a combined lawsuit.

Speaker 32 Their lawyers sat together in a group.

Speaker 11 The table was full.

Speaker 32 On the other side of the courtroom, a single man sat at the government bench.

Speaker 48 Lonely over there, huh?

Speaker 27 The judge said to him by way of an opener.

Speaker 10 The whole room chuckled.

Speaker 46 Yeah, and he said something to the effect of the executive branch speaks or has one voice or something like that.

Speaker 56 Aiden Ryan is with the globe.

Speaker 27 Like me, he was in court that day.

Speaker 45 When he rose to make the government's case, Michael Velchik, the Trump administration's lawyer, came in hot.

Speaker 46 Emphatically, vehemently, like just those adverbs came up quite a bit.

Speaker 54 Velchik is tall and slender and young, and a Harvard College and Harvard Law graduate.

Speaker 26 His first words after being invited by the judge to speak were, Harvard is a rich college.

Speaker 30 Velchik talked a lot about money.

Speaker 33 Harvard wants billions of dollars, he said.

Speaker 19 Ultimately, this is a problem of economics.

Speaker 20 He said it was a contract dispute and it shouldn't be heard here in district court at all.

Speaker 26 It should be in federal claims court.

Speaker 56 Judge Allison Burroughs was skeptical.

Speaker 46 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 74 When I say hands off, you say Harvard. Hands off!

Speaker 74 Hands off!

Speaker 74 Hands off!

Speaker 39 Harvard! Thank you.

Speaker 33 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 53 I was impressed with the speaker's passion, but not by their numbers.

Speaker 54 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 57 I counted only about 100 participants at this rally.

Speaker 27 Camilla was not one of them.

Speaker 45 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 52 She herself is not inclined to this kind of activism.

Speaker 3 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 38 Camilla's pretty sure she lay down on her office couch at some point.

Speaker 3 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 39 Over the summer, a lot of things happened.

Speaker 48 President Trump signed a law allowing big college endowments like Harvard's to be taxed at a much higher rate.

Speaker 37 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 33 And then there was this.

Speaker 84 Breaking overnight, Columbia University is now the first school to reach a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration over claims of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 67 In July, after initially being rebuffed, Columbia did get a deal with the government at a a cost of over $200 million.

Speaker 22 The school's new president, former journalist Claire Shipman, defended the agreement on CNN.

Speaker 18 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 18 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 18 This is really access to billions.

Speaker 84 This was a lot more than that.

Speaker 18 Billions of dollars in future funding. And it's not just money for Columbia.
I mean, this is about science.

Speaker 18 It's about curing cancer, cutting-edge, boundary-breaking science that actually benefits the country and humanity.

Speaker 39 Shipman was asked, why not do what Harvard did and join the fight?

Speaker 18 Look, we, and I've said this to our community openly, we kept all options at all times open.

Speaker 43 Shipman said, we might have had some victories in court.

Speaker 18 But we worried we would have long-term damage.

Speaker 18 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 48 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 and take their wallet as well. And they just keep doing it until somebody fights back.

Speaker 10 The nature 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 48 Then Kristen, my Globe colleague, tossed Ryan a curveball.

Speaker 2 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 48 Ryan is tall and white and a man and a Harvard man at that. He says friends and family are concerned for him, becoming that guy who's always criticizing the president.

Speaker 56 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 54 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 10 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 56 I feel like your answer is like, yes, it's ugly, but like, this is how you get to change.

Speaker 10 You're forcing me towards a yes answer, and you're doing so successfully.

Speaker 25 I don't think I could force you to do anything.

Speaker 10 I just wish I hadn't come to this point. You know, I don't think it had to.
And I like President Garber a lot. I think he's a good dude.

Speaker 10 I don't know how much freedom to operate he has right now, given the corporate governance of Harvard.

Speaker 36 Kit's view that Harvard has a lefty groupthink problem is rooted in direct personal experience.

Speaker 36 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 36 Police there were using techniques borrowed from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Speaker 85 Counterinsurgency cops cops in one of the most crime-ridden cities in New England.

Speaker 29 The program got results, and that got the attention of 60 minutes.

Speaker 85 Last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab.

Speaker 86 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 86 That's the kind of data I need.

Speaker 57 But a decade later, the national conversation on policing had changed.

Speaker 40 It was the time of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.

Speaker 54 Kit's course listing in the catalog caught the attention of some activists who started a petition to cancel the class.

Speaker 42 Here's how one Boston station, WGBH, covered the story in 2020.

Speaker 87 As one critic said on Twitter, police reform is not good for communities of color unless it is a means to abolition.

Speaker 67 There was a case to be made that this kind of policing was good for the community.

Speaker 87 But right now, it's not a story Harvard plans to help tell.

Speaker 37 Adam Riley, GBA.

Speaker 31 To Kit, it was clear that social media noise, not the quality of the syllabus or the teaching, was what counted with Harvard leadership.

Speaker 10 I passed to another administrator. I said, make a statement about academic freedom.
Make a statement in support of my students that are working on this stuff.

Speaker 10 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 63 The class had to be withdrawn after one of the instructors dropped dropped out.

Speaker 7 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 10 After that, and then, you know, me being investigated by the university, and I was very open. You were investigated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 10 I mean, like, just like, who has, 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 50 His alleged offense,

Speaker 19 in his own words.

Speaker 10 I speak bluntly. I give blunt feedback, and that's not always received well by folks at Harvard.

Speaker 40 As a matter of fact, to be clear, we haven't seen the complaint, but we have independently confirmed the outlines of what Kit told us.

Speaker 36 The upshot was that Kit had to meet with a sensitivity coach. He had a pay reduction and a hiring freeze at his lab, which hurt.

Speaker 61 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 31 Kit realized he was far from the only one.

Speaker 10 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 32 Are there conservative faculty at Harvard?

Speaker 10 I have identified six.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 10 No, I mean, I, so, I mean, President Garber and I had a discussion about putting conservative voices on some of these committees.

Speaker 10 And so Alan asked me, can you put together a list of conservative faculty?

Speaker 32 He's working on it. We asked Harvard what Alan Garber plans to do with the names of conservative faculty.

Speaker 55 They did not respond to this or to other requests for comment.

Speaker 40 At some point in the summer, it became clear that Harvard was not simply fighting the administration in court.

Speaker 26 The two sides were also talking out of court.

Speaker 38 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 3 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 3 I feel like in the newspaper, I always read about what do the students in Cambridge say.

Speaker 52 The medical school, where Camilla's lab is, is located in Boston proper, south of the Charles River.

Speaker 65 The main Harvard campus is a few miles north in Cambridge.

Speaker 3 You know, there's a letter that's being organized and you know, faculty don't want a deal, et cetera.

Speaker 3 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, but I suspect that feelings may be a little different.

Speaker 3 So I definitely want a deal.

Speaker 3 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 21 They're looking for evidence of how metastasis happens.

Speaker 48 And they've learned a lot.

Speaker 3 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 3 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 3 Is it something about the DNA? Is it something about the RNA?

Speaker 57 Camilla paid attention to Columbia's settlement.

Speaker 24 She says it was reasonable.

Speaker 3 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 3 But if we can have a similar kind of deal, I think it's worth it. And I would like for there to be a deal.

Speaker 56 Even if that happens, she has been changed by this experience.

Speaker 3 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 3 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 3 It's like, oh, maybe it was a little bit naive to think that just because it's the government,

Speaker 3 for sure I can like absolutely, when I

Speaker 3 count on it.

Speaker 65 She is starting to think about the alternatives.

Speaker 3 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 3 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 3 Maybe I would become a stay-at-home mom.

Speaker 3 Who knows?

Speaker 48 In September, Harvard won a round in its fight with the government.

Speaker 21 A judge ordered the canceled NIH grant money to flow again.

Speaker 40 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 36 Days earlier, a story came to light from the past of the man who represented the Trump administration in court.

Speaker 19 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 31 The assignment was to write a piece in the voice of a controversial figure.

Speaker 19 Two sources the Globe spoke with found Welchik's paper disturbing.

Speaker 60 We learned that the instructor asked him to redo it.

Speaker 19 Separately, in an email to a friend about a year and a half later, Welczek wrote that Mein Kampf was his, quote, favorite book I've read this year.

Speaker 63 The email didn't mention the Holocaust or Hitler's role in the murder of six million Jews.

Speaker 52 Welchik didn't respond to our request for comment.

Speaker 34 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 36 It is almost certain that the government will appeal the decision.

Speaker 37 If there's no settlement, Harvard's litigation with the government could last for years.

Speaker 10 Question is, are they trying to wait out Trump and the administration? That's the issue right now. That's the big question.

Speaker 62 Kit would have preferred for Alan Garber and Donald Trump to sit down and dialogue without lawyers.

Speaker 19 The same behavior that that Ryan might call obeying in advance, Kit thinks is honestly not very impressive. Doesn't go nearly far enough.

Speaker 10 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 10 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 10 Hadn't happened. Hadn't happened yet.
No one has had to write down, I will support academic freedom and ideological viewpoint diversity.

Speaker 10 You just have to write down your statement every year in a practice report about what you did with DEI this past year, but no one's making that kind of commitment.

Speaker 19 The engineering school no longer asks for DEI progress reporting.

Speaker 10 So, yeah, I'm still skeptical.

Speaker 37 American higher education remains in limbo.

Speaker 32 While Columbia and a few other schools have taken settlements, most have not.

Speaker 62 But no one besides Harvard has gone as far as to sue the government.

Speaker 48 And so all eyes remain on the nation's oldest 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 10 I'm sure he has emotions just like everybody else, but he's just very rational.

Speaker 25 It just so happens that Harvard's fight is more than that for Alan Garber.

Speaker 58 It's personal, putting him in direct conflict with a close colleague, someone he once mentored.

Speaker 49 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 57 In the coming weeks, we'll go deep on that personal relationship and its central role in the battle for Harvard's soul.

Speaker 47 Here with me, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr.
B,

Speaker 47 I think you were probably on the show, I don't even know how many times.

Speaker 75 That makes Alan and Jay extremely special. They are not ideological about answers, They're extremely data-driven and empirical about answers.

Speaker 19 But this struggle is not academic or even particularly rational.

Speaker 35 It is a bare-knuckle fight for money, prestige, and power.

Speaker 78 And I have seen a number of the compacts that have been circulated, and we made a conscious decision not to sign them.

Speaker 80 How did you get the invitation to Mar-a-Lago?

Speaker 49 I see a bit of cowardice in a lot of other universities who are like, thank God it's Harvard, not us.

Speaker 10 If we stay quiet, this will go away.

Speaker 36 The Harvard Plan, Season 2, is reported and written by me, Ilya Maritz.

Speaker 69 The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen.

Speaker 19 It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for the Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer.

Speaker 69 Mixing and original music by Jared Paul.

Speaker 54 Tom Colligan is the fact-checker.

Speaker 36 Thanks to the Boston Globe's editor Nancy Barnes and to Ryan Huddle for episode Art.

Speaker 26 And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers.

Speaker 19 I'll see you next week for part two of the Harvard Plan.

Speaker 40 This is On the Media.

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