Editorial: All quiet on our campuses

CHENNAI: Tensions between Harvard University and US President Donald Trump peaked this week when the US federal government froze $2.2 billion in funding and research grants, accusing the university of encouraging antisemitism. Using pro-Palestinian student protests as a ruse, the White House is threatening to bar Harvard from accepting international students unless it agrees to report on their activities. The administration is proposing to appoint censors who will vet academic courses and programmes conducted by the private university.

Even for a despot like Trump this is a staggering and unacceptable assault on a university’s autonomy. Harvard’s response to it has been forceful. Its president Alan Garber rejected the administration’s demands outright as an attack on academic freedom. Harvard is preparing for a long court battle and has decided to build a coalition of resistance with peer institutions such as Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, and University of Chicago.

Harvard’s resistance is significant for two reasons. First, it defies the worldwide trend of institutions surrendering to despots. In every country where there has been a resurgence of fascism, institutions have willingly bent their knee to authoritarians, thereby discouraging individual actors from standing firm in defiance and denying them a platform from which to express dissent.

Second, the university has decided to wage a tactical battle and forge a coalition with other institutions. If peer institutions came together and stood up to autocracy, it would impart some courage to other autonomous institutions. In many countries, the media, the bureaucracy and the judiciary made no efforts to rally resistance, which emboldened the fascist right to become ever more brazen. By choosing to pick a fight, Harvard has shown us the way.

For us in India, the obvious question to ask in the context of Harvard’s defiance is why private universities in India can’t be like that. Although they are not dependent on government funding—unlike Ivy League universities, which are—India’s pricey private educational institutions are notoriously craven. Not only do university presidents shake like a leaf when they receive a minister’s phone call, their administrations do not allow even a whimper of dissent on campus.

One remembers all too well how in 2021 Ashoka University caved in to pressure from its trustees and sought the resignation of its vice-chancellor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a critic of the Modi government. In 2023, economics professor Sabyasachi Das was hounded out for publishing a peer-reviewed paper on manipulation of elections. Most universities did not even allow students to organise screenings of a BBC documentary on the 2002 Godhra riots.

Indian universities’ timidity arises from several reasons. Foremost of them is stringent regulatory oversight by bodies like the University Grants Commission and All India Council for Technical Education, which wield recognition, funding eligibility, faculty recruitment norms, and even curriculum design as weapons against errant institutions. There are stru ctural issues, and it is not useful to expect founder-based and profit-driven educational companies to see the benefits of free expression. It’s fair but that burden can for the moment only fall on students and faculty with a little help from the media and the courts.