Trump’s attacks on Harvard are part of the administration’s wider war on knowledge

This is an adapted excerpt from the May 27 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

The Trump administration is trying to put Harvard University, the nation’s oldest college, out of business. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the White House intends to order all government agencies to cut ties with the school, canceling federal contracts totaling an estimated $100 million.

That is in addition to the billions of dollars in research funding that the administration has already frozen at the university. Last week, the White House also halted Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, which The New York Times reports could affect more than a quarter of the student body. (A federal judge has since temporarily paused Trump’s order.)

People desperately want to come to the U.S. to study because we offer the gold standard in terms of higher education. It’s one area of genuine American exceptionalism. International students are a huge boon to American universities. According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, during the 2023–2024 academic year, 1.1 million international students at American colleges and universities contributed more than $43 billion to the U.S. economy.

For all the complaints about our trade deficit with other countries, one place where we have an enormous trade surplus with the rest of the world is in higher education. But no one in this administration actually cares about that. This is all just punishment for Harvard after it rejected the White House’s demands, including an order to install a third party to audit “programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.”

To be clear, antisemitism is a real and pernicious problem in America, but by now, it is painfully obvious that it is just a convenient rhetorical weapon for Donald Trump and his allies to use to gain full control of universities. They want to rewrite the school’s curriculum in a way that is favorable and deferential to Trump and his worldview, and the president wants the most powerful and legendary institution in higher education to bend the knee to his whims.

It can be difficult to root for an elite institution like Harvard with a $53 billion endowment, but this attack on the university isn’t happening in a vacuum. It is the latest escalation in the administration’s battle to destroy all independent sources of knowledge and fact-finding in our free and open society.

As the writer Adam Serwer put it in his latest piece for The Atlantic, “By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that.”

“It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed,” Serwer wrote. “Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.”

To that end, we are seeing the administration run this playbook toward any independent source of authority. For example, the White House threatened to pull $400 million in federal grants for Columbia University. The university caved to the pressure, but last week the administration announced new trumped-up charges of civil rights violations against the school stemming from campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a new piece for the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, quotes one expert who taught at both Columbia and Harvard as saying, “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for fifty years … What’s happening now is worse.”

Cobb adds, “The biggest mistake that some universities have made in responding to the White House has been to presume that it is operating in good faith. It is not.”

But it is not just attacks on higher education. Everywhere you look, this administration is targeting independent sources of authority that could challenge Trump.

In addition to eviscerating the U.S.’ best-in-the-world biomedical research, the administration is also undermining existing knowledge about public health. On Tuesday, without citing any new evidence or studies, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. overrode typical procedure and announced that the government would no longer recommend annual Covid boosters for pregnant women and healthy children.

In a podcast released on Tuesday, Kennedy also threatened to block government scientists from publishing their research in top medical journals, such as The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

In addition to the moves against public health and schools, we are also seeing an escalation of Trump’s attacks on news media, probably best exemplified by the president’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News over an interview “60 Minutes” held with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

First Amendment experts have called the lawsuit meritless, but Paramount, which owns CBS, is already appearing to prepare to settle. Earlier this month, the president and CEO of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, resigned, telling staff in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” The executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, also resigned, citing a loss of independence at the network.

During a recent commencement address at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, journalist Scott Pelley, who has been at “60 Minutes” for more than two decades, delivered a warning to graduating students:

Not every outlet is capitulating to Trump. On Tuesday, National Public Radio announced it is suing Trump over his attempts to gut funding for the independent outlet through an executive order.

We are seeing this type of resistance everywhere. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who was initially elevated to that job by Trump, is fighting the president’s pressure campaign to remove him from his position. In a commencement speech at Princeton University on Sunday, Powell called on the next generation to preserve our democratic institutions.

The most important thing for everyone to understand about the ongoing existential battle to preserve our American birthright of a free and open society is that all these institutions — and the vast sources of independent knowledge contained within them — are more powerful than one petty, addled man.

That’s the real silver lining here: Trump’s attacks are so reckless and transparent that they’ve left our independent institutions with no choice but to fight back.