Freedom cannot be preserved by compromise with power. It must be safeguarded by principle.
The Trump administration has frozen $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard University. The administration argues that Harvard, through policy and permissiveness, has created an environment hostile to Jewish students and to America’s ideals. Harvard, in return, protests its constitutional rights and academic independence, claiming this is an unprecedented government overreach.
This episode raises fundamental questions beyond Harvard concerning the Constitution and the meaning of education.
Where in the Constitution, you may ask, is the federal government empowered to give money to Harvard in the first place? You will search in vain for the word “education” in that document. The supposed authority lies in the Spending Clause, which begins Article I, Section 8. That clause permits Congress to tax and spend “to provide for the common defense and general welfare.”
James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, warned repeatedly that this clause was not a blank check. To read it as a general grant of power would render the rest of Section 8 — a careful enumeration of specific and limited powers — pointless. Yet that is how we read it now. If Congress is willing to tax and borrow for something, it claims the right to do it. Presidents then execute and enforce such claims. And so, Harvard takes billions.
But as with all subsidies, the money comes with strings. The federal government is not a disinterested donor. It is a centralizing authority. It has turned higher education into a mechanism for social engineering and intellectual conformity. One day, it demands that Harvard count its students by race and sex; tomorrow, it demands something more.
At Hillsdale College, we are in a singular position: we do not take taxpayer funds from any government, state or federal. Not one dollar. We never have. We do so for two reasons, and not out of any animosity to President Trump or to any other president.
First, because we believe in the Constitution. We believe that liberty, to be preserved, must be bounded by law and ordered by principles higher than those of contemporary politics. The Constitution is a document of enumerated powers only because centralizing power over matters not national in character is dangerous. The further government reaches into private life — including into education — the more freedom withers. A government that controls half the economy and reaches into every crevice of the land is unaffordable and dangerous.
Hillsdale was founded in 1844, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Our original charter states that we will admit students “without regard to race, sex, or national origin.” That was true long before the federal government demanded it. It is true still today — without federal compulsion. And it is precisely because we refuse federal aid that we are free to live by that meritocratic principle, without distortion.
Harvard now protests government intrusion, yet it has welcomed and cultivated it for decades. It accepts billions in taxpayer dollars while resisting the responsibilities and scrutiny that naturally follow. This is what Scripture might call swallowing a camel and choking on a gnat. Title IV of the Higher Education Act — the source of federal student aid — runs to hundreds of pages and spawns thousands more in regulation. And yet only now does Harvard cry foul?
In a fine irony, the ideas that have transformed the federal government into a behemoth came into America through progressives at just such places as Harvard. Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, John Dewey at Columbia, and Frank Goodnow at Johns Hopkins are key examples. They invented the power from which Harvard now wishes to reclaim its independence.
Perhaps Harvard should live on its endowment, which is vast. It could then allow its students to protest as they wish, disrupt classes at will, and harass Jewish students without fear of losing federal funds. But perhaps it might also then recover the courage to govern itself, to discipline excess, and to recommit to its highest academic ideals — if those still live.
This present conflict is a tragedy, but it is also a lesson. Freedom cannot be preserved by compromise with power. It must be safeguarded by principle. That is why Hillsdale stands for limited government as prescribed by the Constitution and its mother, the Declaration of Independence.