Cutting financial aid to Harvard an act of self-sabotage

Last week, I was among hundreds of researchers at Harvard University who received termination notices for our federal research grants. Mine was for a project to study electrical signalling between neurons in the brain. My lab research has led to progress in treatments for pain, epilepsy and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). We have been working to map the physiological basis of memory, enabling new ways to study Alzheimer’s disease. All our work is available for the public to see. I am a long-time member of the Harvard community (18 years on the faculty, plus four years as an undergraduate), and I am visibly and proudly Jewish. The government’s decision to withhold federal funding in the name of combating anti-Semitism is wrong, bad for Jews everywhere, and terrible for the US. Yes, anti-Semitism on the campus is real and must be confronted. Harvard’s recent report on the matter documents harrowing incidents of bias and harassment. But in my 22 years here, I have never personally encountered anti-Semitism. From many conversations with Jewish students and colleagues, I am confident that Harvard is and has been a welcoming and supportive home for the vast majority. The problem of anti-Semitism is serious but not systemic. A proportionate and effective response requires local knowledge and nuanced leadership, exactly the sort that Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, provides. His Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, and the parallel Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, studied these problems extensively and provided strong recommendations that strike a thoughtful balance between the demands of free speech and protections against harassment. Some are already being implemented. By contrast, US President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to destroy Harvard, and its assertion that it is doing so to combat anti-Semitism effectively pins the blame for the wreckage on the Jews. Whatever the administration’s intent, the effect is indistinguishable from genuine anti-Semitism. The intent, apparently, is to turn hatred towards Jews into a political weapon, associating it solely with the Left and portraying the Right as protectors of Jewish students, and hence America’s Jews. The government’s charges of anti-Semitism at Harvard and other universities have been supplemented with a litany of other accusations: that students are indoctrinated with leftist ideology; that academic standards have slipped; that Harvard’s faculty and students are living fat off taxpayer dollars. Trump claimed, “Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning.” I invite any Trump administration official who thinks our academic standards have declined to sit for an exam in my class. If you can explain the quantum principles underlying the structure of the Periodic Table (like my 18-year-old freshmen can), then you can lecture me on academic standards. The notes for my graduate biophysics class are online. I challenge any reader to guess my political leanings from these notes (be careful, you might learn some physics while searching). My classes are the norm, not the exception. Trump supporters argue that, given its $53.2 billion endowment, Harvard doesn’t need federal money. But the opposite is true. The endowment has been subsidising research costs by supporting graduate students, financing core facilities and providing funds to help new researchers get started. This support provides additional leverage for taxpayer investments in science. Every dollar of my grants is scrutinised. There is no fat. Overhead charges to federal grants pay for compliance with federal regulations, safety standards, and lab infrastructure. The Republican Party that Trump leads has long championed local control, limited government and the free market, especially when it comes to education. For decades, US conservatives have fought for school choice, opposed federal overreach, and insisted that parents, teachers, and local communities — not federal bureaucrats — know best how to educate their children. These values should apply just as much to higher education as they do to primary and secondary schools. Yet today, some of the same voices calling for decentralisation are applauding a heavy-handed federal effort to punish a private university, to dictate who gets to study and teach there, and to interfere in research funding decisions that have traditionally been merit-based and apolitical. The federal government has no more business telling Harvard who it can admit or hire, or what its faculty can teach, than it does setting the curriculum at my kids’ public school. Students come to Harvard to learn; if we don’t deliver, they will go elsewhere. If Harvard faculty doesn’t produce valuable research, it will lose grants. The academic marketplace is self-correcting, and it is fiercely competitive. When government steps in to micromanage that system to score political points, it undermines the principles conservatives have defended. In the short term, the people most affected by the Trump administration’s funding cuts are not tenured professors, but rather early-career scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students, very few of whom have any connection to campus activism. In the long term, the US itself will be worse off, both because of the discoveries that don’t happen and because global leadership in science and technology will be ceded to China and other countries. The US needs more research funding, not less. Federal investment in science — at Harvard and other US universities — is an investment in a healthier, wealthier, and more secure future for Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs. Cutting it off is a wanton act of self-sabotage. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025 Adam Ezra Cohen is Professor, Chemistry and Physics, Harvard University.

Comments