Should Elders Care about Harvard?

If they care about the well-being, health, and safety of themselves and their families, then yes.

The Trump regime’s attack on higher education is not confined to Harvard University. The Department of Education and other agencies are withholding funds from several institutions. Further, Republicans are planning to tax endowment funds from approximately 60 colleges and universities.

As elders, we should use our considerable political power and influence to resist such an unprecedented and damaging assault because it affects us and our families directly.

If you received a college education or if your children and grandchildren did, the benefits that resulted from that experience are about to be denied by Trump to others and to society as a whole.

Trump’s attack is not about the money. And it’s not really about protecting Jewish students from antisemitic assault. Those alleged justifications are a smokescreen to cover over the real aim, which is to control what is taught, by whom, and to whom.

Using Money to Control Education

While the amount of withheld funding is not important to Trump or the national budget (because it’s too small), it is very important to the institutions affected. Here’s a partial list of the more prominent institutions and amounts.[1]

• Harvard University - $9 billion and counting

• Brown University - $510 million

• Columbia University - $400 million, perhaps more

• Cornell University - $1 billion

• Northwestern University - $790 million

• University of Pennsylvania - $175 million

• Princeton University - $210 million

Lost funding affects university operations – upkeep of facilities, salaries, student services – and grants for conducting scientific, medical, environmental, and social science research. These universities routinely have contracts with public agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and many others. A large number of these contracts have been canceled.

Trump and his minions claim that higher education needs to be stripped of its “wokeness,” that DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and CRT (critical race theory) must be abolished, and that their “positive” view of American history and society should be taught. By withholding funding, they intend to impose their own MAGA ideology on educational institutions (including, by the way, K-12 schools).

Republicans in Congress want to go even further. The Big Brutal Bill now under consideration proposes to tax the endowment funds of approximately 60 colleges and universities – most well-known, but some not.[2]

When my own alma mater, Wabash College (900 students, $400 million in endowment), appeared on the list, I began to take this personally.

“So what?” you might say. “These institutions are wealthy. They’re not doing enough for their students or society. They can take the hit. After all, Harvard reports an endowment of $53 billion, and many of the others have billions or hundreds of millions at their disposal.”

But remember that Harvard’s endowment is puny compared to the wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and other individuals. Also, universities rarely spend down the principal of their endowments. Rather, they use the investment income from those funds to defray operating expenses. And the use of many endowment funds is highly restricted by donors.

Again, in the grand scheme of the federal budget, it’s not about the money. It’s about ideological control.

Dire Consequences of the Attack on Education

In an important, but lengthy, article in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer spells out the devastating consequences of Trump’s attack on higher education and on knowledge in general.[3] I’ll summarize part of what Serwer says, but you should read his piece for yourself if you have access and the time.

Going right to the heart of what should concern elder folks, Serwer points out that the attack on higher education will halt much vital research conducted by the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since universities manage much of that research under contract with these public agencies, withholding funds from the universities will cause such research to wither and die.

For example, we know that about 75% of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. involved persons who were 65 and older. Imagine what is likely to happen if the research and monitoring of bird-flu disappears. Universities have been at the heart of original research on vaccines and other preventive measures for a host of illnesses. Cutting funding for ideological reasons or political gain is stupid.

Older folks are now living much longer than in previous decades. My father died from prostate cancer that metastasized into bone cancer. Within 9 months of the definitive diagnosis, he was gone. President Biden now has the same condition, and recent reports indicate that new treatment protocols might allow him to live for several more years.

The sort of research that led to these new treatments directly improves the chances for a healthy lifespan for elders. In our own self-interest, it doesn’t make sense for us to throw these research capabilities into the trash.

In previous posts, I have discussed the problems that many elder folks face in terms of loneliness, lack of suitable housing, and inadequate support services. But addressing these problems will take additional research in a variety of fields, much of which is conducted by university centers for gerontology.

Obviously, these are not just medical problems, although they can have a medical component. Our society will not successfully address these issues without adequate social scientific research into what works and what doesn’t. And some of these challenges, such as lack of affordable housing, concern all age groups.

The Attack on Academic Freedom

One of the benefits that many of us received from a college education was the opportunity to learn new things and to think critically about what we were learning. Trump and the Republican majority in Congress are working to restrict those opportunities.

Their attacks on higher education as described above will mean fewer colleges and smaller universities that will accommodate reduced enrollments. That means that fewer people will become critical observers and perhaps opponents of what Trump and his MAGA followers want to impose. The Republicans stand to benefit politically from these attacks unless we resist – strongly.

Personally, I found college to be difficult. I was not good at getting along with others, and I was frightened about having to acquire new academic skills. But by assigning me to live with a Black roommate, my college disrupted my racist worldview and opened me to what it means to live in a just society.

Without that experience, I would never have enjoyed a career working and becoming friends with an extremely wide variety of people. Simply learning that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct, made it all worth it.

At the heart of that, as I came to learn later, was the principle of academic freedom. It’s really quite simple: academic freedom means the liberty to study, research, and teach (or publish) whatever is relevant to one’s academic field. It even includes the freedom to dissent from so-called accepted wisdom or tradition.

For instance, academic freedom allows everyone to learn the history that was intentionally excluded from secondary school textbooks. It allows us to understand how we got here as a society and what needs to be done to fulfill the egalitarian dream of the Declaration of Independence and its authors, however flawed they were.

That possibility is precisely the reason that the Trump regime regards college professors as “the enemy” and wants to eliminate DEI, CRT, or any other approach that undermines white privilege and classist domination.

If you, your children, or your grandchildren have that experience, the whole society benefits. More people will be exposed to different points of view, to the moral shortcomings of our collective history, and to new ways of resolving differences. We cannot let the current regime choke that off.

Last summer, in my newsletter, Higher Ed Success, I wrote a series of posts on Project 2025 and education. Unfortunately, those essays turned out to accurately predict what would happen if Trump were re-elected. Although I no longer post regularly to that newsletter, you are welcome to visit the archives and read any or all of the posts.

My ultimate point here is that elder folks have a personal and collective stake in preserving our system of higher education against this vicious attack. Should some aspects of higher education be corrected and reformed? Of course. But turning colleges and universities into MAGA or Christian Nationalist indoctrination centers is not the solution we need.

I conduct research for these posts so you don’t have to.
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NOTES

[1] Alan Blinder, “Trump Has Targeted These Universities. Why?” The New York Times, 27 May 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html.

[2] Stephanie Saul and Steven Rich, “Republican Plan to Tax Elite Colleges Could Hit in Unexpected Places,” The New York Times, 20 May 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/universities-endowment-tax-republicans.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

[3] Adam Serwer, “The New Dark Age,” The Atlantic, 27 May 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/trump-defund-schools-research-republicans/682742/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The+Atlantic+AM