Harvard Must Take a Stand for Democracy

Democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. President Donald Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish media critics, and deploy the military to repress protest. Now, with stunning speed, he is doing just that.

In the face of this assault, Harvard’s silence has been deafening.

Instead of turning inward and protecting itself, Harvard must set an example for civil society by making a firm public defense of democracy.

The threat to democracy is unambiguous. Like his authoritarian counterparts in Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela, Trump is purging government agencies like the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, and the military and packing them with loyalists.

Government agencies are being weaponized and deployed against critics. Media companies face lawsuits and threats of regulatory action against their parent companies. The DOJ has threatened opposition politicians with investigations and student protestors with arrest.

And crucially, Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists sent a clear signal that violence by his supporters will be tolerated. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that physical threats and fear of violence are intimidating Republican politicians into doing Trump’s bidding.

Democracy’s demise is not inevitable. Authoritarians can be stopped — think of South Koreans’ successful mobilization against martial law last year. But they can only be stopped when societies react. And so far, U.S. civil society — including media, business, unions, churches, and universities — has been stunningly passive.

There is a reason behind this inertia: weaponized states create a difficult collective action problem for civil society. Individual leaders seek to protect their organizations against costly government reprisal. CEOs seek to avoid losing profits and missing out on business opportunities; media owners seek to avoid costly defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings; universities seek to avoid congressional investigations and punitive funding cuts and endowment taxes. This creates an incentive to lay low — and sometimes even cooperate with — authoritarian governments.

But such individual acts of self-preservation have a collective cost: when prominent civil society actors silence themselves or retreat to the sidelines, society’s capacity to fight back is diminished, weakening our democratic defenses.

To overcome this collective action problem, those with the means to do so must step up and lead. As America’s most prominent university, Harvard should be among these leaders.

Harvard must speak out, clearly and forcefully, against attacks on U.S. democracy. University President Alan M. Garber ’76 could do three things: First, he could give a high-profile speech defending democracy and condemning the administration’s assault on it. This may seem risky given the recent public pile-on against elite universities, but even if Harvard is unpopular in some quarters, it retains considerable prestige. And if we allow fear of detractors to deter us, nobody will speak out.

Second, Harvard could take the lead in coordinating a more vigorous collective response among institutions of higher education. University leaders are already doing some of this, but mostly behind the scenes, among elite universities, and around funding for scientific research. Those efforts are important, but Harvard could also use its prestige to help forge a broad coalition of the country’s nearly 6,000 colleges and universities — which reach into nearly every community in America — to speak out in defense of democracy.

Third, the University could use its convening power to defend democratic principles. It could tap into its extraordinary network of faculty, alumni, and affiliates around the world to offer platforms and material support to efforts to promote and defend democracy.

Might Harvard face government retribution if it sticks its neck out? Perhaps. But history tells us that quiet appeasement won’t work. Whether it’s Chávez, Putin, Orbán, Modi, or Erdogan, autocrats almost always attack universities. Indeed, Harvard has already been targeted for politicized investigations, research funding freezes, and an endowment tax despite its effort to lie low. Not only does a strategy of silence fail to defend our democracy, then, but it may not even protect Harvard.

More importantly, when democracy and our freedom are on the line, we must do what is right. We have confronted national crises before. In the years prior to the Civil War, Harvard authorities stayed out of the public debate over slavery and even “attempted to suppress abolitionist sentiment” on campus. Although many faculty and alumni supported the abolitionist cause, University leaders viewed it as divisive and harmful to Harvard’s “national” aspirations. As the University later acknowledged, its leaders came up morally short on a matter of great national consequence.

Harvard leaders did take a stand before World War II, when fascism was on the march in Europe but Americans were divided over whether the U.S. should aid its European allies. In 1940 Harvard President James Conant became a leading public voice urging America to join the Allied war effort.

Harvard is at its best when we look beyond our gates and contribute to the country’s collective well-being, for example, in public health, the defense of the environment, and training our leaders. Few would disagree that democracy is an essential part of this well-being.

Harvard’s recent commitment to institutional neutrality — a policy we support — is not a reason to remain silent. The defense of democracy transcends partisan or policy debates. Harvard’s policy on institutional voice states that we “must defend the university’s autonomy and academic freedom when threatened,” and that “the university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function.”

Our autonomy and academic freedom are now clearly imperiled; the government’s effort to investigate and punish schools that don’t bend to its will directly threatens the core function of universities. To silence ourselves in the name of neutrality would not only violate our own policy but also abdicate our broader civil responsibility.

Universities have always thrived in free societies and been smothered in autocracies. Our free society is now under threat. Faced with an authoritarian government, Harvard can either retreat into a defensive shell or stand up and help lead our country’s defense of democracy. The former path — abdication — may seem easier, but it is a choice we will ultimately regret.

Ryan D. Enos is a professor of Government. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and a professor of Government.