As you’ve probably heard by now, Harvard has declined to comply with the Trump’s latest threat (articles in the New York Times¹ and the Chronicle of Higher Ed). Reading their response, I am certain of two things—first, that this is a positive development which reflects well on Harvard’s leadership. And second, that it never could’ve happened without an unforced error on the part of Trump administration.

Some context for those of you outside academia: In the US, most major American universities get between 10 and 50 percent² of their operating income from research grants, almost all of which come from the federal government. These grants pay for the direct costs borne by individual labs (research staff, equipment, travel), as well as a host of indirect costs (clerical staff, maintenance workers, machine shops, libraries, etc.).³ Like all federal grants, these come with compliance requirements, which include nondiscrimination with regard to sex (Title IX) and race (Title VI). The Trump administration has sought to deploy these requirements in bad faith (and without due process) in order to steal from institutions they perceive as opposing them.

And it might very well have worked! Remember, colleges do not support scientific research out of the goodness of their hearts—they do it because it makes them money, and they terrified of losing that revenue stream. From their perspective, what’s the harm? Expel some students? Sure, those kids were annoying anyway, and there’s no shortage of people willing to take their place (it’s Harvard). Get rid of Ethnic Studies? Why not! Most of the classes can be taught by History or English or Sociology profs, and it’s not like they brought in that many grants. No more diversity policies in faculty hiring? Eh, that was already on its way out. The only price is your dignity!

This, I imagine, was Columbia’s logic when they agreed to cooperate with the Trump administration last month.

Harvard was facing the same calculus, and it’s not as if they’ve previously shown any reticence toward playing ball with Republicans. Remember the Claudine Gay testimony that eventually led to her resignation? It was not compelled. She testified voluntarily! Harvard was so worried about jeopardizing its funding that it sent its own president into the jaws of the US House of Representatives, and then, when it became clear the news cycle wouldn’t die, forced her to resign.

So what changed?

Well, after Columbia expelled protestors, cooperated with ICE, placed its Middle Eastern Studies Department in academic receivership, fired its president, and made every effort to negotiate with the Trump administration in good faith, the NIH went ahead and froze all their grants anyway.

Columbia, you see, made a deal with the devil. These agreements have many disadvantages: damnation, hellfire, forfeiture of your immortal soul, the knowledge that you’re not actually the best fiddle player there’s every been, and so on. But there’s a much bigger problem that rarely gets brought up. Namely, the devil is not a reliable counterparty. He can’t be trusted to hold up his end of the bargain, and you have no way of compelling him to.

So when Trump shows you that the cost of cooperating with him is the same as the cost of telling him to fuck off, you might as well pick the one that doesn’t involve eating shit.

A brief digression: I have some experience winning major policy changes from Ivy League schools. My union negotiated a CBA with our university a couple years ago, and while I wasn’t sitting at the bargaining table myself, I was one of the most involved organizers. Being a good counterparty is everything. Management needs to know that, when they give you the contract language you want, the thousands of workers screaming at them will immediately de-escalate, go back to their jobs, and vote to ratify. If you can convincingly signal this, you can win so. goddamn. much. It brings me a lot of pleasure to know that the members of our bargaining committee are better negotiators than the guy who called his book The Art of the Deal.

Back to Columbia. Do you want to know what the saddest part is? This should’ve been obvious to them, too. To describe Trump’s campaign rhetoric as “empty promises” would be too kind—most of his promises actively contradicted each other. His businesses regularly stiffed contractors and got away with it. This is just who he is.

Under ordinary circumstances, it would’ve rendered him radioactive. Every social or political norm is a lesson learned through bitter experience. You keep your commitments, because if you don’t, no one will make positive-sum deals with you. You abide by the results of elections, because if you don’t, you deligitimize the government, and your life is rendered solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

But norms require enforcement, and after 70-plus years of relative political stability, we had forgotten how to hold people to account.⁴ All the Democrats could manage was a sort of cargo cult moralism, an attempt to model a society with standards of behavior in the hopes we might return to it. At best, this was “leading by example.” At worst, it was the Biden administration slow-walking the Trump prosecutions, because they seemed like the sort of thing a less stable country might do.

When you try this in an iterated prisoners dilemma, you lose the moment your opponent realizes he can defect without retaliation.

I think it’s clear that, if Trump were a Machiavellian genius and not just an old crank with a zero-sum way of thinking, he could consolidate power far more effectively. The knowledge of how vulnerable our country would be to a competent authoritarian keeps me up at night. But this prospect is incompatible with what he is and why he was able to get elected in the first place: Trump is the product of a society that has forgotten why it cared about honesty.

And that means there’s a way out. What we have forgotten, we can learn again. Remember that, when someone in your organization wants to cut a deal with his administration, when a Democratic strategist suggests making a small concession on gender-affirming care because “it’s not like it impacts that many people,” you are walking into a trap. And try, with all your might, to have at least as much backbone as the upper management of Harvard University.

It’s not hard. The bar is pretty low.

This entry was posted under: politics