With Columbia University thrown into yet more turmoil following the resignation of Interim President Katrina Armstrong, the Trump administration is expanding its campus antisemitism investigations, with sites now set on Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Michigan, among many others.

On Monday, the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism “will review the more than $255.6 million in contracts between Harvard University, its affiliates and the government. The review also includes the more than $8.7 billion in multi-year grant commitments to Harvard and its affiliates.”

Recall that, back in December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn drew outrage for their response to Congressional questions about antisemitism on their campuses. Harvard President Claudine Gay subsequently resigned and, in January 2024, her replacement tasked a special university group with “combatting anti-semitism and anti-Israel bias.” (A second task force was simultaneously convened on the topic of “combatting Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias.”)

But the Trump administration is nevertheless aggressively moving to threaten Harvard’s federal funding. On Tuesday, The New York Times noted that former Harvard medical school dean Jeffrey Flier (who serves on Heterodox Academy’s board) has called Trump’s challenges “‘an existential threat.’ But Dr. Flier said the assault was occurring in part because of higher education’s failure to take seriously the free expression concerns of conservatives and even political moderates.”

Flier also told the Times “that Harvard and other universities had tolerated behavior toward Jewish students that they would not have if it had been directed at other minorities and had generally created an unhealthy environment for the expression of heterodox views.”

Meanwhile, Fortune magazine reports former Harvard president Larry Summers has “blasted moves by the Trump administration to scrutinize or freeze federal funding to top universities as ‘authoritarian,’ and urged academic leaders to resist.”

For his part, Princeton University President Chrstopher Eisgruber has struck a tone of resistance after being notified of suspension of grants to his institution from NASA and the Departments of Energy and Defense.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Eisgruber said of the situation, “I think it requires a very firm commitment to principle and a willingness to do hard things. University presidents and leaders have to understand that the commitment to allow academics — including our faculty, including our students — to pursue the truth as best they see it is fundamental to what our universities do.”

He added, “We have to be willing to stand up for that. In principle, we have to be willing to speak up, and we have to be willing to say no to funding if it's going to constrain our ability to pursue the truth.” Heterodox Academy (HxA) agrees.

It can be a little dizzying to follow this scene — not just because of the speed and scope of the actions, but because everyone involved seems to talk about the problem being an assault on truth-seeking.

For conservatives, alongside concerns about failures of academic ideals and antisemitism come sharp criticisms of DEI, untaxed endowments, foreign financial involvement in universities, public subsidies of research and education, and more. Some have insisted – since well before the second Trump inauguration – that the only right path is a big “reset” or even “destruction” in Columbia’s case.

Writing in December 2024 for the Washington Examiner, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Max Eden argued that “The most interesting actions…wouldn’t require Congress. To scare universities straight, [then-proposed Education Secretary Linda] McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.”

On March 23, reacting to Columbia’s decision “to bend to the Trump Administration’s governance demands,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board expressed hope “it will also shock our academic elites into recognizing that they have courted this political backlash by too often abandoning their central mission of free inquiry.” The editorial board also hailed institutional neutrality policies and said “these reforms will be controversial only among those who think a university is an ivory foxhole from which to launch political movements or indoctrinate students.”

Even the left-leaning Boston Globe’s editorial board has declared Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department “notorious for being a hotbed of anti-Israel advocacy, with professors who have made statements that should be beyond the pale of acceptable academic – and civil – discourse.” But, in the Globe editorial board’s view, “the federal government should not be deciding the department’s future.”

“Setting aside very real questions about whether the Trump administration has legal authority to make these demands, for the American government to demand a university place a department under receivership because of its scholars’ views is unprecedented — and seriously threatens academic freedom,” the Globe’s editorial board writes. “It might not be a bad thing for Columbia to recruit an outside scholar or administrator to revamp its Middle East studies department. But for government to coerce such change — or to play any role in receivership itself — sets a dangerous precedent that could threaten academic freedom far beyond Columbia’s gates.”

The Globe’s board warned, “Conservatives cheering the move should imagine their reaction if a Democratic administration were to urge receivership of a biology department because its scholars believe there are only two genders, or of a university’s ‘free enterprise center’ because its free market approach harms minority entrepreneurs.”

It’s worth noting that federal law actually forbids any part of the federal government from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system.”

As HxA President John Tomasi told our members earlier this week, the situation on campuses has become politically very complex, as the left now openly battles the right for the future of our universities. “With political fireworks exploding around us,” Tomasi wrote, “it takes discipline to remember…deep and long lasting obstacles to open inquiry, and to continue our steady work – in the classroom, in departments and disciplines, on campus, and in the realm of policy – to address them.”

At HxA, even as we react to fast-moving actions by elected officials and their appointees, as we remain concerned about academic freedom being the baby tossed out with DEI political litmus tests, activism taking the place of scholarship, open inquiry being critically comprised, political grandstanding by university leaders, and the risk of classroom bans turning professors into thought police, we’re working on the nonpartisan long-game of advocating for open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.

Want to work with us? Become a member of HxA and start an HxA Campus Community if there’s not already one on your campus. Register for our conference in New York City this June. Subscribe to our Free the Inquiry newsletter, and don’t forget to also subscribe to our periodical inquisitive. You can also learn more about our work in our 2024 Annual Report. Thanks for reading.