Conservatives are jumping on the “defund Harvard” bandwagon.
President Donald Trump has threatened Harvard University with withholding billions in federal grants over what the administration says are violations of civil rights law.
On April 11, the Department of Education sent Harvard a letter and charged the school with failing “to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The letter demanded that the school agree to a host of reforms — including reforming programs with egregious records of antisemitism and discontinuing DEI programs — in order to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.”
Harvard replied in a letter of its own, saying it is “is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in its community” because “antisemitism and discrimination of any kind not only are abhorrent and antithetical to Harvard’s values but also threaten its academic mission.” Harvard maintains that the government’s terms contravene the First Amendment and “circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law.” Accordingly, “Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”
“Harvard doesn’t have a right to your money,” says Jarrett Stepman, a columnist for The Daily Signal, a conservative website. He explains:
I’ve got news for Harvard. Like most higher education institutions in America, it takes federal money. And federal money will always come with strings attached.
But now Americans are very seriously questioning the blank check they’ve handed higher education for generations. Why is it that the average American taxpayer who has never attended Harvard, whose children will never attend Harvard, and who may even be outright discriminated against by Harvard (despite the Supreme Court ruling), has to pay for a school that has an endowment larger than the gross domestic product of many small countries?
Harvard’s endowment is worth a staggering $53 billion. It’s practically a hedge fund with a school attached to it.
No school has a right to federal money.
He concludes that “the Trump administration is doing the right thing in holding Harvard accountable to the law and accountable to the American people.”
If Harvard University was not a thoroughgoing leftist institution, would conservatives demand that the federal government cut off its funding?
Stepman goes on to explain his real problem with Harvard receiving federal funds:
Harvard made the full transition over the generations from a Christian to secular institution. And now it, like higher education in general, holds dearly to an extremely narrow left-wing worldview that has become the dominant ethos of the West’s ruling elite. That ethos is very much at odds with the general American public that underwrites the institution.
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Stepman is right that Harvard is a leftist institution. He is also right that Harvard should not receive federal funds. But the reason why Harvard should not receive federal funds has nothing to do with whether Harvard has rejected Christianity for secularism or neutrality for leftism. And it has nothing to do with the size of Harvard’s endowment or its mission to oppose antisemitism, bigotry, and discrimination.
No school has a right to federal money for the simple reason that no institution or individual has a right to federal money: that is, your money, my money, our money. The federal government has no money of its own unless it sells something (land, an asset, postage) or provides a service — or just prints the money. Governments are, by their very nature, parasitical entities that produce nothing but instead live off the production of others. The U.S. government is no exception. Every dollar that the federal government gives to a school, a scientist, an artist, a college student, a researcher, a physician, a farmer, or a welfare recipient must first be taken from American taxpayers.
The federal government should not be giving any money to any institution or individual for any reason. This doesn’t mean that the federal government shouldn’t purchase toilet paper and paper towels for the restrooms at national parks. This doesn’t mean that the federal government shouldn’t employ a janitor to clean those restrooms. It just means that the federal government shouldn’t be giving away money. According to the late, great economist Walter Williams:
Tragically, two-thirds to three-quarters of the federal budget can be described as Congress taking the rightful earnings of one American to give to another American — using one American to serve another. Such acts include farm subsidies, business bailouts, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, and many other programs.
Harvard is an easy target for conservatives. Just like NPR and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities — government agencies that President Trump wants to defund — are easy targets for conservatives because of their left-wing bias. When was the last time a conservative called for the elimination of refundable tax credits, food stamps, school breakfast and lunch programs, SSI, TANF, and section 8 housing vouchers?
What conservatives fail to realize is that the ideology of a recipient of federal funds is not the best reason, or even a good reason, to defund or eliminate a federal program or agency. To be consistent, conservatives would have to support any federal program or agency that leaned right instead of left.
A much better reason — and the best reason — to defund or eliminate a federal program or agency is to simply ask: Is it constitutional?
So, the case of Harvard is a simple one. Since the Constitution nowhere authorizes the federal government to fund universities, Harvard should not receive federal funds. Harvard’s ideology has nothing to do with it.
The original version of this article first appeared at The Future of Freedom Foundation, on 05/13/2025. CC-BY-4.0