In short
The NPR/On the Media series “The Harvard Plan” (Episode 1) examines how the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities—framed as anti-Semitism enforcement—has threatened Harvard’s independence, free speech, and scientific research funding, and how Harvard leaders and faculty respond.
Guests (backgrounds)
- Ryan Enos: Harvard political scientist; quantitative “numbers guy” who modeled election outcomes; co-authored pro-democracy op-eds with Steve Levitsky.
- Camilla Nakserova: Harvard Medical School researcher; cancer biologist running a lab studying metastasis (notably colorectal cancer); immigrant from communist Czechoslovakia to West Germany.
- Kit Parker: Harvard bioengineering professor; Army Reservist colonel (Afghanistan deployments); conservative Republican; builds interdisciplinary projects (e.g., cell-based “city” maps; patents).
Key claims
- Federal investigations and funding freezes (via NIH and other agencies) function as leverage to force institutional changes (e.g., DEI rollback, leadership changes, conservative hiring).
- Harvard’s president Alan Garber rejects demands and sues; Harvard’s stance is portrayed as defending First Amendment rights and academic freedom.
Notable examples
Trump task force letters to universities; visa revocations; Columbia singled out and later settled; Harvard’s NIH grants terminated then partially restored by court order; Harvard sued the government; rally and “No Surrender” faculty action; NIH funding cessation threatening lab staffing and long research timelines.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOTrump's Educational Promises
0:45 to 1:18
Discussion on Trump's promises regarding educational institutions during his campaign.
“The new season of a podcast series called The Harvard Plan looks at the pressure the president has put on Harvard and what it means for scientific research and free speech.”
Harvard Under Pressure
1:18 to 2:29
Exploring the pressures Harvard faces from the Trump administration.
“This is going to be elections being fun again.”
Election Night Anticipation
2:29 to 3:15
Ryan Enos shares his thoughts leading up to the 2024 election night.
“Trump was doing a bit better than expected.”
Ryan's Experience on Election Night
3:15 to 4:23
Ryan recounts his experience at the election watch party on Harvard's campus.
“And that actually didn't really turn out to be true.”
Camilla's Perspective on Politics
4:23 to 5:00
Camilla reflects on her views about elections and politics, shaped by her background.
“and emigrated as a young girl with her mother to West Germany.”
Camilla's Journey to Harvard
5:00 to 6:06
Camilla narrates her journey from Czechoslovakia to becoming a researcher at Harvard.
“I'll stay here forever, and I'll do science here forever.”
Awakening to Political Reality
6:06 to 6:46
Camilla's realization of the political climate's impact on academia.
“So last November, her focus was on that and on her young family.”
Kit Parker's Background and Views
6:46 to 8:06
Introduction to Kit Parker, his military background, and conservative views.
“And only later it dawned on me, oh, wow, yeah, I mean, there is a pocket of conservative press that has been talking about straight out destroying us and other institutions like us for a long time.”
Kit's Concerns about Academia
8:06 to 9:35
Kit expresses his frustrations regarding the state of academia under liberal influence.
“I've always been kind of interested in couture.”
Trump's Actions Towards Universities
9:35 to 10:53
Discussion on Trump's task force and its implications for universities.
“We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, while we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus.”
Show all 31 chapters
Trump's Actions Towards Universities
11:14 to 11:43
Discussion on Trump's task force and its implications for universities.
“Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down.”
Trump's Actions Towards Universities
11:47 to 12:03
Discussion on Trump's task force and its implications for universities.
“Do it the right way with Indeed's sponsored jobs.”
Impact of Trump's Policies on Academia
12:03 to 14:00
Analysis of the consequences of Trump's policies on universities and funding.
“I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe.”
Initial Response to Funding Cuts
14:00 to 15:08
The impact of canceled research grants on faculty and the ensuing panic.
“The administration also canceled hundreds of millions of research dollars.”
Political Pressures on Universities
15:08 to 17:48
How the Trump administration's actions affected universities like Harvard.
“All righty, joining us now, my very dear friend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon.”
Call to Action: Faculty Organizes
17:48 to 18:14
Ryan's initiative to rally faculty against government pressures.
“Ryan asked himself what more he could do.”
Harvard's Response to Government Ultimatum
18:14 to 21:44
Harvard's rejection of government demands and its implications.
“I was watching these and 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.”
Sponsor Messages: Health and Business
21:44 to 22:20
Promotions for health supplements and AI business solutions.
“Coming up after the break, fight or fold, Harvard's leaders make up their minds.”
Harvard's Rejection and Its Consequences
22:20 to 28:00
The aftermath of Harvard's decision against government pressure.
“OLLI makes it easier to build simple habits into your routine.”
Funding Challenges at Harvard
28:00 to 28:54
Discussion on the funding crisis affecting Harvard's research and job security.
“And they pay the bills on a very regular basis.”
Government Actions Against Harvard
28:54 to 29:54
Exploration of the government's punitive measures against Harvard amidst funding controversies.
“Not only had Camilla lost funding, she also lost the ability to plan.”
Courtroom Drama: Harvard vs. Government
29:54 to 30:57
Narrative of Harvard's legal battles and the courtroom dynamics during the trial.
“All of these departments became respondents in Harvard's lawsuit.”
Reactions and Rallies
30:57 to 32:48
Description of the reactions from students and faculty during rallies supporting Harvard's cause.
“The professor's union was also a plaintiff in what became a combined lawsuit.”
Columbia's Settlement and Its Implications
32:48 to 34:51
Details about Columbia University's negotiated settlement and its impact on research funding.
“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.”
The Nature of Extortion in Academia
34:51 to 35:56
Discussion on the metaphor of extortion in the context of academic funding crises.
“Shipman was asked, why not do what Harvard did and join the fight?”
Personal Stories and Academic Freedom
35:56 to 37:45
Sharing personal experiences related to academic freedom and pressures within Harvard.
“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.”
Controversial Teaching at Harvard
37:45 to 39:38
Insights into the challenges faced by a professor teaching controversial topics at Harvard.
“is rooted in direct personal experience.”
The Future of Research at Harvard
39:38 to 42:05
Reflections on the future of research funding and its implications for Harvard scientists.
“But he says the whole experience has made him less ambitious, less creative in the classroom.”
The State of Harvard's Research and Funding
42:05 to 44:50
Discussion on the current challenges and funding issues faced by Harvard's medical school.
“I feel like in the newspaper, I always read about what do the students in Cambridge say.”
The Legal Battle and Its Implications
44:50 to 47:25
Overview of Harvard's legal situation with the government and the implications of the recent court rulings.
“A judge ordered the canceled NIH grant money to flow again.”
Personalities and Power at Harvard
47:25 to 49:20
Exploration of the personal dynamics between Harvard leaders and the broader implications for the institution.
“American higher education remains in limbo.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Ryan Enos:This message comes from NPR sponsor Raymond James, a firm where wealth management, banking, and capital markets solutions start with the connections between people. That's the power of personal. Disclosures at RaymondJames.com. Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR. When President Trump campaigned for the 2024 election, he didn't just promise to overhaul the federal government. He said he would go after another sector, too. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that. Now, in his first year of office, President Trump has, of course, made good on that promise and targeted universities.
0:42Ryan Enos:Probably his biggest target has been Harvard, the country's oldest and richest university. The new season of a podcast series called The Harvard Plan looks at the pressure the president has put on Harvard and what it means for scientific research and free speech. The series was produced by our friends at WNYC's On the Media and the Boston Globe, and we are going to share it today. Ilya Meritz is the host. Here's Ilya.
1:11Kamila Naxerova:Ryan looked forward to election night 2024. He expected a pleasant return to form. the way election nights used to be. This is going to be elections being fun again.
1:22Ryan Enos:We're going to sit, we're going to drink beer, we're going to watch election terms come in and play, like, games.
1:27Kamila Naxerova: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. Ryan Enos is a political scientist at Harvard, and specifically, he's a numbers guy.
1:45Ryan Enos:It seemed like this kind of tragedy for quantitative political science because it defied a lot of people's predictions.
1:50Kamila Naxerova:Then came 2020, the COVID election, and after that, the false claims of a stolen election. Still, going into the first Tuesday of November 2024, Ryan felt good about the models. That evening, he made his way over to Memorial Hall, which is the most Hogwarts-y building on Harvard's campus. They throw a big election watch party there every four years. A lot of undergrads turn out.
2:15Ryan Enos: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. That's what, like, these models showed, but I think they were happy to hear that.
2:24Kamila Naxerova:Ryan stayed just long enough for the early returns to show the models were off again. Trump was doing a bit better than expected.
2:32Ryan Enos:Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida. I can see their fingers probably bleeding because there's no more nail to bite.
2:38Kamila Naxerova:He then walked a few blocks to where his poli-sci grad students had their own smaller gathering.
2:43Ryan Enos: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.
2:53Kamila Naxerova:The mood in the room was deflating rapidly. Harvard students and faculty are overwhelmingly liberal, progressive Democrats. But Ryan was not inclined to despair. To him, 2024 felt different from 2016.
3:08Ryan Enos:Because in 2016, that actually really panicked me. I was like, 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. I didn't love the policies for four years, but I live with policies I don't like all the time. He told the grad students, we're going to be OK. 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.
3:32Kamila Naxerova:But, you know, the country got through it. Ryan told me, people can call me naive if they want to. 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. You could almost convince yourself that since election night, nothing much had really changed in the life of this university.
3:58Kamila Naxerova:Camilla saw Donald Trump's second election to the presidency similarly to how Ryan did.
4:04Kit Parker:Ah, it's all just drama. No, no. no, last time around, nothing happened. Nothing's going to happen. It'll be fine.
4:12Kamila Naxerova:She's a professor and researcher at Harvard Medical School. She studies cancer cells, not politics. And her lived experience gave her a lot of faith in the United States. Kamila Nakserova was born in communist Czechoslovakia and emigrated as a young girl with her mother to West Germany. They were joined later by her father, who crossed the Iron Curtain by air.
4:33Kit Parker:He built his own plane. and he carved a propeller out of wood. He took the motor out of an old car and built it onto a type of glider.
4:43Kamila Naxerova:After university, Camilla came to the States for an internship at Boston Children's Hospital.
4:48Kit Parker: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. I'm never going back to Europe. I'll stay here forever, and I'll do science here forever.
5:02Kamila Naxerova:As a younger person, you could share an idea and be taken seriously. Collaboration was encouraged.
5:09Kit Parker:It was a big revelation for me coming here and really experiencing that.
5:14Kamila Naxerova:And she went all the way, getting a PhD and then a faculty job at Harvard with her own lab.
5:19Kit Parker:Here's our cell culture room. Oh, wow. Where we do genetic screens.
5:24Kamila Naxerova:You have the white lab coats on hangers.
5:26Kit Parker:Yes, exactly.
5:28Kamila Naxerova:Naxerova 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. At the end of it, like a captain's quarters, is Camilla's office, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a big couch.
5:45Kit Parker:I lie down there all the time. I like my couch.
5:48Kamila Naxerova:They have big goals here. It's about nothing less than life and death, really. To understand the way cancer cells spread from one organ to another, 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. So last November, her focus was on that and on her young family. Not, it turns out, what was coming around the corner.
6:14Kit Parker:I think some people knew, but most of us were just completely oblivious.
6:18Kamila Naxerova:Later, Camilla questioned her blasé attitude about the incoming administration.
6:23Kit Parker:Some of my more conservative colleagues were actually reading the conservative press and just know what the discussion points are, had already told me as early as November next year, if Harvard's still here, then ha ha. And I remember thinking, what, what, what? I don't know. I really I couldn't even make sense of like what he meant by that. And only later it dawned on me, oh, wow, yeah, I mean, there is a pocket of conservative press that has been talking about straight out destroying us and other institutions like us for a long time.
7:02Ryan Enos:So let me just give you a quick orientation.
7:04Kamila Naxerova:Kit keeps military habits. When I met him one Saturday morning at 8 at his lab at the Harvard Engineering Building, he told me he'd risen at 345, had already worked out and taken one meeting. 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.
7:25Ryan Enos:This is my office. Do you want to see the lab right quick? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
7:29Kamila Naxerova:If a professor's lab is a mirror of their mind, Kit Parker's mind is restless, hungry for new things.
7:35Ryan Enos:I got frustrated with the lack of creativity in my science and engineering students, so I ripped out part of my lab and built a studio space for artists.
7:43Kamila Naxerova:On the walls are these big maps of world cities, made, so I'm told, from living cell samples.
7:50Ryan Enos:These are pig, and you know, they beat. And so you're looking at the microscope, and the whole city is throbbing, you know, because they get synchronized. Oh my God.
Read the full transcript
7:58Kamila Naxerova:He showed me a 300-pound smoker he created with his students when he taught a class on barbecue. cue. He has a patent on it. Actually, Kit has quite a few patents, reflecting his eclectic interests.
8:10Ryan Enos:I've always been kind of interested in couture.
8:12Kamila Naxerova:A few years ago, he taught a class on fashion.
8:14Ryan Enos:I wore a lot of camouflage. 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 Cheshire snipers from like a long way away because you could see us because of this uniform. It was like I had a road flare duct taped on my forehead.
8:32Kamila Naxerova:One thing that makes Kit conspicuous is this. He's one of the few Harvard professors known to be conservative, to vote Republican.
8:40Ryan Enos: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 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.
8:56Kamila Naxerova: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. And properly so. We're unable to complete our mission by hosting debate
9:14Ryan Enos:and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship and integrity of scholarship.
9:28Kamila Naxerova:Between the ever-expanding bureaucracy and the leftward drift of campus conventional thinking, Kitt felt stifled.
9:35Ryan Enos: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.
9:49Kamila Naxerova:So the next morning, when he learned Trump had been re-elected in 2024, Kitt felt upbeat. Trump shared his concerns. Kit told colleagues Harvard should go to Trump and open up a dialogue. We need to go talk to him. If he talks to Putin and Kim here, talk to us. With some prodding from the new administration Kit hoped, Harvard could heal itself.
10:15Kamila Naxerova:Coming up, Harvard does not go talk to the new president. Instead, Trump brings the fight to Harvard. It's the Harvard Plan from the Boston Globe and on the media.
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11:31Ryan Enos:Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere, on your schedule. Don't just survive the summer. Thrive. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR. This message comes from Indeed. Hiring? Do it the right way with Indeed's sponsored jobs. Claim a$75 sponsored job credit to get matched with quality candidates at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.
12:03Kamila Naxerova:This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe. Kit Parker, a Trump voting professor of bioengineering, was right that Trump was looking at higher ed. 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. The chairman of the group was a lawyer named Leo Terrell, who did a lot of TV hits.
12:33Ryan Enos:We are going to use every federal criminal statute to go after these anti-Semites. These people who hate Jews. We're going to bankrupt these universities. We're going to take away every single federal dollar.
12:49Kamila Naxerova: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. Then the Secretary of State began revoking hundreds of student visas.
13:06Ryan Enos:Vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, is creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa.
13:14Kamila Naxerova: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. Camilla didn't see the connection.
13:26Kit Parker:That's surprising. That can't possibly be a big issue.
13:30Kamila Naxerova: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. It's called indirect costs.
13:43Kit Parker:I remember being like, why are we talking about antisemitism? We should be talking about indirect costs. Isn't that the problem that we're facing?
13:51Kamila Naxerova:In March, Colombia became the first university to be directly singled out by the government for alleged lapses in dealing with antisemitism on campus. The administration also canceled hundreds of millions of research dollars.
14:04Kit Parker:Then we would all frantically reach out to colleagues at Colombia and try to find out, has your grant been canceled? How about this other person's grant? This person who works on cancer in a similar field as me, has their grant been canceled? Because we didn't really understand what was happening.
14:20Kamila Naxerova:Colombia soon relented. The school tightened its protest policies and adopted the broad, some say too broad, definition of anti-Semitism favored by the Trump administration. The government froze all of Colombia's research funding anyway. No deal. That's, I think, when we all started being very afraid, because it was clear that, you know, we might well be next. For Camilla, there was one more complication. She was pregnant. She had a baby in March, her second kid.
14:50Kit Parker: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 just take time off. I'm not going to worry about work. I'm just going to be with a baby.
15:05Kamila Naxerova:But the pressure campaign was just heating up.
15:08Ryan Enos:All righty, joining us now, my very dear friend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon. 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?
15:23Kamila Naxerova:We've now launched investigations into five different universities, Harvard being one, Columbia was one.
15:28Ryan Enos:What's Harvard got to worry about money? They've got an endowment of$51 billion.
15:33Kit Parker:They don't really need to worry, but they are reading the tea leaves here a bit. They saw what happened to Columbia yanking the$400 million.
15:39Ryan Enos:Not only have I targeted 13 schools, I'm sending letters to the mayors and the DAs of L.A., Boston, New York, Chicago. Do your job or we'll do it for you. And we are going to file hate crimes.
15:53Kamila Naxerova:The second Trump administration was turning out so differently from what Ryan had expected. Not only were universities under pressure, so were news organizations, media companies, law firms, corporations. Many of them were capitulating. Doge's rampage through government had everyone on edge. Ryan was concerned by what was happening inside Harvard as well. DEI initiatives were renamed or scaled back. The university ended a partnership with a school in the West Bank. It removed the heads of a Middle East studies center. Essentially, complying in advance with the Trump administration, It seemed wrong, and Ryan felt called to do something.
16:33Kamila Naxerova:But there was a problem. He's a political scientist.
16:37Ryan Enos: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.
16:44Kamila Naxerova:He thought, F it. I need to act. Together with a colleague who studies Latin American politics, Steve Levitsky, he published a series of opinion pieces in the school newspaper, The Crimson. The titles read like the beginnings of a manifesto. Harvard must take a stand for democracy. First they came for Columbia. 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. We sat down and made our case. 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.
17:22Kamila Naxerova:It's frustrating.
17:23Ryan Enos: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? And then you have to start thinking on your feet about why exactly you said that.
17:34Kamila Naxerova:So, they debated pros and cons. Ryan says Garber left him feeling heard, but not hopeful.
17:41Ryan Enos:He had some pretty firm reasons about why Harvard probably would be futile for it to push back.
17:47Kamila Naxerova:The pressure on universities seemed to be constantly ratcheting up. Ryan asked himself what more he could do. It seemed like it was so imminent that Harvard was going to fold. It kind of seemed like it was going to happen at 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. He and Levitsky drafted it over spring break.
18:09Ryan Enos:We hit send to all the faculty we know and held our breath to see what would happen.
18:14Kamila Naxerova:One by one, people added their names. Eventually, the number passed 800.
18:19Ryan Enos:You could see them coming in. I was watching these and 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.
18:29Kamila Naxerova:It was that same week that the government turned its attention to Harvard. A March 31st letter from the Anti-Semitism Task Force informed Harvard that$8.7 billion in federal funding was under review. A letter on April 3rd offered some preconditions for continuing to receive public money, including abolishing DEI programs. Another document that same day offered a choice between installing new leadership in problematic departments and entering receivership.
19:00Ryan Enos: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.
19:10Kamila Naxerova:Kitt watched the Trump administration's pressure campaign approvingly, but also aware that his own values were being tested.
19:17Ryan Enos: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.
19:31Kamila Naxerova:Kit, Camilla, and Ryan. They each have different ideas about what's most at stake. For Kit, it's academic freedom and the intellectual cage match. For Camilla, it's serving the public through research and innovation. Only Ryan had a critical mass of people on campus feeling the same way he did and organizing. Their thing is the independence of the university.
20:00Kamila Naxerova:Saturday, the 12th of April, the No Surrender people held a rally on Cambridge Common under gray skies with spitting wind and rain. In an insulated canvas work coat, Ryan climbed to the lectern. He told a story about growing up in a California town that had fallen on hard times.
20:42Ryan Enos:my community. It brought
20:45Kamila Naxerova:knowledge and jobs and pride, he said. And that is what Donald Trump wants to take away.
20:51Ryan Enos:We are waiting on you, Harvard. When will you speak up? If you don't speak up, who will? That was the first time I'd ever spoken at a rally. I didn't even know I was capable of that.
21:02Kamila Naxerova:But there was something important Ryan and the others did not know that day. The night before, Harvard had received yet another letter from the government. This one was more like an ultimatum. 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. There would be no more delaying, no punting. It was yes or no time.
21:31Kit Parker:Harvard, stand up, follow the rule of law.
21:35Kamila Naxerova:If Harvard falls, then others are definitely going to follow suit.
21:39Kit Parker:Don't give in without a fight.
21:44Kamila Naxerova:Coming up after the break, fight or fold, Harvard's leaders make up their minds. This is The Harvard Plan from The Boston Globe and On The Media.
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23:25Kamila Naxerova:This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, an OTM series made in collaboration with the Boston Globe. Before the break, professors and students held a rally, pleading with Harvard not to give in to government pressure. That was on a Saturday. The following Monday, at exactly 1.30 p.m. 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. It was an answer to the government's ultimatum. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights, he wrote.
24:05Ryan Enos:Harvard became the first university to outright reject the Trump administration's demands. Harvard said tonight that it was rejecting a list of demands from the administration
24:14Kit Parker:on sweeping changes and would fight back against them. We'll not be repressed. Today, we can stand up and say no.
24:22Kamila Naxerova: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. One of the signatories is Harvard's president, Alan Garber. For months, everyone wondered what Harvard would do. Now Harvard president Alan Garber was speaking out.
24:48Ryan Enos:It's less that I chose to take on the fight than that the fight came to me.
24:53Kamila Naxerova:Ryan says he felt an immense swelling of pride. Those are his words. Like this was the moment we'd been waiting for. For Camilla, the email was unsettling. No way there would not be consequences for her work.
25:06Kit Parker:It felt a little bit like a natural disaster. It felt very similar to reading, we've been flooded or there's an earthquake coming.
25:16Ryan Enos:And for Kit? I thought this is going to suck. I mean, I'm torn, right? Because 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. 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've got two warring factions, which you care deeply about. So I thought this is going to suck, and it has sucked. It's tough. It's like watching your parents fight, you know?
25:52Kamila Naxerova:The New York Times later reported that the fateful Friday ultimatum to Harvard may have been sent by accident. It looked like a drunk text. But even if it was that, Kit sees it as a tactical success. Look, Trump is a master negotiator.
26:09Ryan Enos: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. He knows the courts are going to backstop him from anything illegal. And he put Harvard in a terrible negotiating position.
26:32Kamila Naxerova:A week after saying no to the government's demands, Harvard went further, suing the government to restore billions of dollars in funding. The Globe's Hillary Burns and Mike Damiano went to talk with Alan Garber in his office.
26:45Kit Parker:So what is the Trump administration's campaign that it says is about combating anti-Semitism? What is it really about?
26:52Kamila Naxerova:It involves things like asking us to change who we hire, who we recruit as students to the university.
27:01Ryan Enos:And it includes the potential to actually monitor what we teach.
27:07Kamila Naxerova:It has impacts on so many different aspects of university life that it is hard to say it is only about anti-Semitism. And he didn't ask this.
27:20Ryan Enos: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.
27:33Kamila Naxerova:Meanwhile, Camilla's worst fears were coming to pass. Trump turned scientific research funding into an improvised weapon, specifically billions of dollars of grants from the National Institutes of Health.
27:45Kit Parker:And so what happened is that they just stopped.
27:48Kamila Naxerova:She explained how it had worked for years, decades actually.
27:52Kit Parker:The NIH pays bills every week. 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.
28:05Kamila Naxerova:Now, the money had ceased to flow.
28:08Kit Parker:And it was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight? Would we have to stop doing everything? Or would there be some sort of help?
28:20Kamila Naxerova:For weeks, they were in a kind of low-information limbo. Eventually, Camilla felt forced to ask two people who had recently joined her team to leave. She got a year of bridge funding from the university, but it's not really enough.
28:32Kit Parker: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. And so that can take five years or longer.
28:54Kamila Naxerova:Time horizons are long in the sciences. Not only had Camilla lost funding, she also lost the ability to plan.
29:01Ryan Enos:How much pain can Harvard absorb here? 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.
29:17Kamila Naxerova:The government found more ways to make Harvard pay for its recalcitrance.
29:21Ryan Enos:They will no longer be allowed to participate in this student exchange visitor program, and that's up to 27 percent of their enrolled students.
29:29Kamila Naxerova:In May, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved to block Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students because of the university's, quote, pro-terrorist conduct.
29:40Ryan Enos:There should be a warning to every other university to get your act together.
29:44Kamila Naxerova:The departments of Energy, Defense, Agriculture, and NASA all got in on the action, canceling grants and programs, launching investigations. All of these departments became respondents in Harvard's lawsuit. And for a few weeks at least, Alan Garber became a kind of resistance hero. At commencement, he was loudly cheered, especially when he talked about foreign students being a part of the community.
30:08Ryan Enos:Members of the class of 2025, from down the street, across the country, and around the world.
30:20Ryan Enos:Around the world, just as it should be.
30:32Kamila Naxerova:So it's a beautiful Monday morning in Boston in July. I'm about to go inside the Moakley U.S. courthouse. Over the summer, Harvard's lawsuit to restore Camilla's funding and all of its research dollars moved ahead. 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. The professor's union was also a plaintiff in what became a combined lawsuit. Their lawyers sat together in a group. The table was full. On the other side of the courtroom, a single man sat at the government bench.
31:09Kamila Naxerova:Lonely over there, huh? The judge said to him by way of an opener. The whole room chuckled. Yeah, and he said something to the effect of the executive branch speaks, has one voice or something like that. Aidan Ryan is with The Globe. Like me, he was in court that day. When he rose to make the government's case, Michael Velchik, the Trump administration's lawyer, came in hot. Emphatically, vehemently, like just those adverbs came up quite a bit. Velchik is tall and slender and young, and a Harvard College and Harvard Law graduate. His first words after being invited by the judge to speak were, Harvard is a rich college.
31:48Kamila Naxerova:Velchik talked a lot about money. Harvard wants billions of dollars, he said. Ultimately, this is a problem of economics. He said it was a contract dispute, and it shouldn't be heard here in district court at all. It should be in federal claims court. Judge Allison Burroughs was skeptical. She didn't understand his argument,
32:05Ryan Enos:but he was arguing it well and said that his Harvard education was serving him well, and that got a laugh. When I say hands off, you say Harvard. Hands off! Harvard! Hands off! Harvard! Hands off! Harvard!
32:18Kamila Naxerova: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.
32:27Ryan Enos:They're cutting over$3 billion
32:29Kamila Naxerova:in vital scientific research.
32:33Ryan Enos:This case is about academic freedom.
32:36Kamila Naxerova:I was impressed with the speaker's passion, but not by their numbers. 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. I counted only about 100 participants at this rally. Camilla was not one of them. 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. She herself is not inclined to this kind of activism.
33:07Kit Parker: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.
33:17Kamila Naxerova:Camilla's pretty sure she lay down on her office couch at some point.
33:21Kit Parker: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.
33:29Kamila Naxerova:Over the summer, a lot of things happened. President Trump signed a law allowing big college endowments like Harvard's to be taxed at a much higher rate. 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. And then there was this.
33:53Kit Parker:Breaking overnight, Columbia University is now the first school to reach a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration over claims of anti-Semitism.
34:02Kamila Naxerova:In July, after initially being rebuffed, Columbia did get a deal with the government at a cost of over$200 million. The school's new president, former journalist Claire Shipman, defended the agreement on CNN.
34:14Ryan Enos: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. 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. This is really access to billions. It was a lot more than that. Billions of dollars in future funding. And it's not just money for Columbia. I mean, this is about science. It's about curing cancer, cutting-edge, boundary-breaking science that actually benefits the country and humanity.
34:51Kamila Naxerova:Shipman was asked, why not do what Harvard did and join the fight?
34:55Ryan Enos:Look, we, and I've said this to our community openly, we kept all options at all times open.
35:01Kamila Naxerova:Shipman said we might have had some victories in court.
35:04Ryan Enos:But we worried we would have long-term damage. 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. It's understandable people would want to say we just want to move on. That, of course, is absolutely the nature of extortion, right?
35:28Kamila Naxerova:Ryan sees what he calls the collective action problem.
35:32Ryan Enos:When a mugger comes to you and says, give me your wallet, 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. The nature of extortion is that the extortionist extracts pain from you. And in many ways, these analogies about the mugger don't just quite capture it because the mugger is not trying to undo democracy. 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.
36:05Kamila Naxerova:Then Kristen, my Globe colleague, tossed Ryan a curveball.
36:09Kit Parker:Have you ever stood up to a bully before?
36:12Ryan Enos: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 reflect on that a little bit. I was always the tall guy in the classroom.
36:22Kamila Naxerova: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. But Ryan sees it differently.
36:34Ryan Enos:I have been very fortunate to have this 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.
36:52Kamila Naxerova:Kit Parker has not had direct funding cuts, but he's watched them hit scientists all around him. Are you OK with that, like, as a means to an end?
37:05Ryan Enos: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.
37:16Kamila Naxerova:I feel like your answer is, like, yes, it's ugly, but, like, this is how you get to change.
37:21Ryan Enos:You're forcing me towards a yes answer, and you're doing so successfully. I don't think I could force you to do anything. 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. I don't know how much freedom to operate he has right now, given the corporate governance of Harvard.
37:44Kamila Naxerova:Kitt's view that Harvard has a lefty groupthink problem is rooted in direct personal experience. 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. Police there were using techniques borrowed from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
38:06Ryan Enos:Counterinsurgency cops in one of the most crime-ridden cities in New England.
38:11Kamila Naxerova:The program got results, and that got the attention of 60 Minutes.
38:15Ryan Enos:Last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab. 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, that's the kind of data I need.
38:34Kamila Naxerova:But a decade later, the national conversation on policing had changed. It was the time of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Kitt's course listing in the catalog caught the attention of some activists who started a petition to cancel the class. Here's how one Boston station, WGBH, covered the story in 2020.
38:53Ryan Enos:As one critic said on Twitter, police reform is not good for communities of color unless it is a means to abolition.
39:00Kamila Naxerova:There was a case to be made that this kind of policing was good for the community.
39:04Ryan Enos:But right now, it's not a story Harvard plans to help tell. Adam Riley, GBH.
39:09Kamila Naxerova:To Kit, it was clear that social media noise, not the quality of the syllabus or the teaching, was what counted with Harvard leadership.
39:17Ryan Enos:I passed through another administrator. I said, make a statement about academic freedom. Make a statement in support of my students that are working on this stuff. 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.
39:34Kamila Naxerova:The class had to be withdrawn after one of the instructors dropped out. 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.
39:53Ryan Enos:After that, and then, you know, me being investigated by the university, and I was very open about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, just like, who has, if you're a faculty member and you haven't been investigated in the last 10 years of Harvard, what have you really done?
40:05Kamila Naxerova:His alleged offense? In his own words?
40:08Ryan Enos:I speak bluntly. I give blunt feedback. And that's not always received well by folks at Harvard.
40:14Kamila Naxerova:To be clear, we haven't seen the complaint. But we have independently confirmed the outlines of what Kit told us. 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. The penalty, he says, was overseen by Claudine Gay, who was then a dean and went on to become Harvard's president, albeit briefly. Kitt realized he was far from the only one.
40:39Ryan Enos: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?
40:44Kamila Naxerova:This too contributed to Kitt'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. Are there conservative faculty at Harvard?
41:04Ryan Enos:I have identified six. Okay. No, I mean, so, I mean, President Garber and I had a discussion about putting conservative voices on some of these committees. And so, Alan asked me, can you put together a list of conservative faculty members?
41:22Kamila Naxerova:He's working on it. We asked Harvard what Alan Garber plans to do with the names of conservative faculty. they did not respond to this or to other requests for comment. At some point in the summer, it became clear that Harvard was not simply fighting the administration in court. The two sides were also talking out of court. 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.
41:52Kit Parker: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. I feel like in the newspaper, I always read about what do the students in Cambridge say.
42:09Kamila Naxerova:The medical school where Camilla's lab is, is located in Boston proper, south of the Charles River. The main Harvard campus is a few miles north in Cambridge.
42:18Kit Parker:You know, there's a letter that's being organized and, you know, faculty don't want to deal, etc. 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. So I definitely want a deal. I think that what we do here is extremely valuable, and the reality is that without a deal, it's dead.
42:41Kamila Naxerova:In Camilla's lab, they analyze tissue donated by people with cancer, most of whom will not be alive for much longer. They're looking for evidence of how metastasis happens. And they've learned a lot.
42:53Kit Parker: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. 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 tried to map out what about the cell's properties is different. Is it something about the DNA? Is it something about the RNA?
43:26Kamila Naxerova:Camilla paid attention to Columbia's settlement. She says it was reasonable.
43:30Kit Parker:Nobody's dictating their faculty hiring. 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. 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.
43:48Kamila Naxerova:Even if that happens, she has been changed by this experience. You know, like when you're a kid, everything that your parents say,
43:55Kit Parker:that's the truth and you believe and there are these amazing figures in your life and you don't question them. 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. It's like, oh, maybe it was a little bit naive to think that just because it's the government, for sure I can absolutely 100 % count on it.
44:21Kamila Naxerova:She is starting to think about the alternatives.
44:24Kit Parker: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. 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. Maybe I would become a stay-at-home mom. Who knows?
44:47Kamila Naxerova:In September, Harvard won a round in its fight with the government. A judge ordered the canceled NIH grant money to flow again. The judge wrote, To upend the longstanding 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. Days earlier, a story came to light from the past of the man who represented the Trump administration in court. As my Globe colleague Hillary Burns learned, when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, Michael Velchik turned in a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.
45:32Kamila Naxerova:The assignment was to write a piece in the voice of a controversial figure. Two sources the Globe spoke with found Velchik's paper disturbing. We learn that the instructor asked him to redo it. Separately, in an email to a friend about a year and a half later, Velchik wrote that Mein Kampf was his, quote, favorite book I've read this year. The email didn't mention the Holocaust or Hitler's role in the murder of six million Jews. Velchik didn't respond to our request for comment. 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.
46:14Kamila Naxerova:It is almost certain that the government will appeal the decision. If there's no settlement, Harvard's litigation with the government could last for years.
46:23Ryan Enos:The question is, are they trying to wait out Trump and the administration? That's the issue right now. That's the big question.
46:30Kamila Naxerova:Kitt would have preferred for Alan Garber and Donald Trump to sit down and dialogue without lawyers. The same behavior that Ryan might call obeying in advance, Kitt thinks is honestly not very impressive. Doesn't go nearly far enough. We changed the Middle East Studies Institute.
46:48Ryan Enos:We've changed the name of the DEI offices. No one's been fired. No one's been retrained. 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. Hadn't happened. Hadn't happened yet. No one has had to write down, I will support academic freedom and ideological viewpoint diversity. You just have to write down your statement every year in a progress report about what you did with DEI this past year. But no one's making that kind of commitment.
47:20Kamila Naxerova:The engineering school no longer asks for DEI progress reporting. So, yeah, I'm still skeptical.
47:31Kamila Naxerova:American higher education remains in limbo. While Columbia and a few other schools have taken settlements, most have not. But no one besides Harvard has gone as far as to sue the government. 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. Some even call him stoic. I'm sure he has emotions just like everybody else, but he's just very rational. It just so happens that Harvard's fight is more than that for Alan Garber. It's personal, putting him in direct conflict with a close colleague, someone he once mentored.
48:11Kamila Naxerova:Alan's also a human being. And it's got to be like, there's got to be part of him that's got to be struggling with this. In the coming weeks, we'll go deep on that personal relationship and its central role in the battle for Harvard's soul.
48:24Kit Parker:Here with me, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Dr. B, I think you were probably on the show I don't even know how many times.
48:31Ryan Enos:That makes Alan and Jay extremely special. They are not ideological about answers. They are extremely data-driven and empirical about answers.
48:41Kamila Naxerova:But this struggle is not academic or even particularly rational. It is a bare-knuckle fight for money, prestige, and power.
48:51Ryan Enos:And I've seen a number of the compacts that have been circulated, and we made a conscious decision not to sign them.
49:01Kamila Naxerova:I see a bit of cowardice in a lot of other universities. We're like, thank God it's Harvard, not us. If we stay quiet, this will go away.
49:11Kamila Naxerova:The Harvard Plan, Season 2, is reported and written by me, Ilya Meritz. The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for The Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On The Media's executive producer. Mixing and original music by Jared Paul. Tom Colligan is the fact checker. Thanks to The Boston Globe's editor, Nancy Barnes, and to Ryan Huddle for episode art. And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers. I'll see you next week for part two of The Harvard Plan. This is On The Media.
49:45Ryan Enos:This message comes from Babbel. Babbel's conversation-based language technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash npr. Spelled b-a-b-b-e-l dot com slash npr. Rules and restrictions may apply.
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