Last week, Harvard challenged the Trump administration’s threat to deny billions in federal funds unless the university bent to a list of far-reaching demands. Harvard’s legal counsel struck a measured but unmistakably defiant tone: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” In a separate letter, Harvard’s president Alan Garber warned that the administration’s move would jeopardize crucial scientific and medical research and pledged that “the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
It was an important moment. The administration’s demands — which include eliminating DEI programs, mandating “viewpoint diversity,” overhauling admissions and hiring processes, and reporting students deemed “hostile to American values” — are, they claim, aimed at combating campus antisemitism. But they carry sweeping implications for intellectual and institutional freedom on American campuses. It is both significant and right that Harvard, the nation’s oldest and most storied university, has chosen to confront this challenge to its autonomy.
Yet for all its courage, Harvard’s response stopped short of making the argument that would best protect the values for which it was fighting. It defended the university’s independence without explaining why that independence deserves protection. It invoked values like “pluralism” and “inquiry,” but it did not fully explain why those values are essential to a liberal democratic society. The letter therefore missed an opportunity to articulate what a university is for — not just to students or donors, but to the country. And this matters, because Trump’s attack against this and other universities is not only about the balance of power between universities and the government. It is, at bottom, about the legitimacy of higher education as a public good.
To see what such a defense might look like, consider a largely forgotten episode from the 1940s, another moment when the federal government sought to assert control over an institution of higher learning.
During World War II, the U.S. Navy attempted to seize the campus of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, invoking eminent domain, the government’s inherent power to seize private property for public use. Though far less prominent than Harvard, St. John’s is the third-oldest college in America. In 1937, in an attempt to address the educational needs of a nation rent by cultural confusion and economic depression, it launched an experimental “New Program”: a four-year liberal arts curriculum built around the study of philosophy, literature, mathematics, and science.
The program drew controversy, but that controversy is not what invited the Navy’s attentions. For the Navy, St. John’s intellectual aims were irrelevant. The war effort required space, and the underfunded liberal arts college across the street seemed an obvious target. Surely, no good citizen could object to its buyout in the name of national security.
Except the people who ran the college did object. Loudly.
President Stringfellow Barr delivered a stirring defense before Congress. He reminded the committee that St. John’s once counted three signers of the Declaration of Independence on its board. More importantly, he argued that liberal education was not a luxury to be indulged only in times of peace but an essential feature of American democracy. “A free government does not merely tolerate liberal education,” Barr insisted. “It recognizes liberal education as a necessity for a free electorate.”
Even more striking was the response from his colleague, Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and the intellectual architect of the New Program. Where Barr appealed to the Founders and the Constitution, Buchanan went deeper. Drawing on Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) — a landmark Supreme Court case limiting state interference with private charters — he argued that colleges and universities were not, strictly speaking, “private,” nor were they mere endowments attached to pieces of property. They were quasi-public trusts: artificial corporate bodies created for a civic purpose and charged with cultivating a collective “responsibility to truth.”
That, for Buchanan, was the university’s function: not to grant credentials or generate knowledge, but to pursue truth and, in the process, to promote intellectual self-governance. Universities existed to teach students how to think: how to entertain conflicting worldviews and ideas, argue in good faith, and work through complexity without allowing one’s own views to harden into dogma.
That process wasn’t ancillary to the freedoms Americans were fighting to defend. It was the essence of that freedom. And in a country increasingly defined by its military-industrial power but also widespread cultural fragmentation, Buchanan believed schools like St. John’s could model a new kind of democratic community for all Americans — one grounded in humility, reason, and deliberation.
In the end, their arguments proved unnecessary; the Navy abandoned its plans when the war ended. But Barr and Buchanan understood what many leaders in higher education today seem to have forgotten: legal protections are no substitute for clarity of purpose, and a university that cannot explain why it deserves the authority it claims may win in court but lose in public.
Which brings us to 2025.
Trump’s campaign against higher education is more extreme and ideological than the Navy’s bid for St. John’s almost a century ago. Although Trump’s administration has not (yet) threatened to bulldoze campuses into extinction, its attack is broader, targeting not just one school, but many. And it is not grounded in temporary assertions of national emergency, but in a sweeping ideological broadside: today’s universities are corrupt, self-dealing, and dominated by elites hostile to American values.
Nor is the modern research university exactly like the small liberal arts college Barr and Buchanan rose to defend. Since World War II — thanks in large part to the federal investments now under threat — American higher education has become a vast, incredibly complex enterprise. Universities today are deeply enmeshed with the economy and the state. They serve multiple constituencies, pursue conflicting goals, and engage diverse publics. This complexity is part of their strength. But it also makes it harder to speak with one voice about their guiding purpose.
It’s no surprise, then, that when leaders like Garber defend higher education, they often default to technocratic justifications: jobs created, research performed, GDP grown. These are real benefits. But they’re unlikely to persuade a skeptical public that colleges and universities are more than expensive sorting machines for the already privileged.
Trump’s attacks have exposed this as a major vulnerability. In the absence of a compelling counter-narrative, universities become easy targets. If they do not explain themselves, others will, often their fiercest critics.
In the face of such attacks, emphasizing the university’s legal rights and economic contributions is necessary, but not sufficient. It may even play into the narrative upon which Trump and his allies insist: universities seek the benefits of public support, but hypocritically avoid the obligations of public responsibility.
When the Navy came for St. John’s, the college didn’t just invoke its legal rights. It made an argument to Congress — and the country — about what it stood for, and why that mattered. Barr and Buchanan understood they were defending more than a campus. They were defending an idea of higher education as a public good rooted in intellectual openness and collective responsibility, a vision that made a claim on the American imagination.
Universities today must do the same. Their arguments need not echo Buchanan’s. But they must be substantive. They must explain what higher education is for and why it deserves the public support and protections it claims.
Harvard’s letter was an admirable start. But every college and university must go further. They must do more than assert their independence. They must articulate their public purpose.