HGSE Faculty, Students Sign Letters Condemning Trump’s Education Agenda

In the days leading up to Harvard’s dramatic refusal of the Trump administration’s demands, more than 140 Harvard Graduate School of Education students, faculty, and staff signed onto a letter urging Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and HGSE Dean Nonie K. Lesaux not to capitulate to the government.

The letter mirrored similar efforts at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard School of Public Health, each of which laid out point-by-point requests that ran directly counter to the federal government’s nine initial demands.

In another letter, sent Tuesday morning and addressed to HGSE students, more than 100 HGSE faculty wrote that “current federal initiatives and rhetoric threaten our fundamental rights to free speech, education, and safety.”

In the letter — titled “Our Commitments” — instructors affirmed their support for students and said they were inspired by students’ efforts to oppose President Donald Trump’s attacks on education.

Both letters were drafted before the Trump administration announced it would cut more than $2.2 billion in funding to Harvard over the University’s rejection of its demands. But they show a groundswell of support behind Harvard’s decision to oppose federal calls to cooperate with immigration enforcement, dismantle diversity programming, and crack down on student protests.

Spokespeople for Harvard and for the Graduate School of Education did not respond to requests for comment.

The letter to Garber and Lesaux also invoked another threat that has cast a pall over campus in recent weeks: the State Department’s mass revocation of student visas, which has sometimes targeted students for pro-Palestine speech. At least 12 Harvard students and recent graduates have had their visas revoked.

“Fear grows within our community,” the letter, which asked Harvard not to share students’ information with immigration authorities, stated. “Students are not leaving their dorm rooms alone. International students are having nightmares of being kidnapped off the streets.”

Harvard has not identified the students whose visas have been revoked or which schools they attended.

The letter to Garber and Lesaux argued that the Trump administration’s education agenda was not only undermining HGSE students’ learning, but also the well-being of “students around the world whom our graduates go on to serve.”

“Funding for research seeking to improve educational equity has been slashed,” it read. “The Department of Education has been gutted, significantly disrupting the distribution of resources supporting special education and making quality education accessible to all.”

In the letter to students, HGSE faculty members said they would remain committed to HGSE’s core values of free expression and inclusion — even as student protest and DEI programs come under fire on a national level.

HGSE lecturer Gretchen Brion-Meisels, who helped draft the faculty letter, said that faculty needed to take collective action to support students who felt increasingly at risk.

“We are consistently hearing from students that they are concerned about both their own safety, their own capacity to remain in this country to learn and to remain at Harvard in a safe way, and their rights to speak freely,” Brion-Meisels said.

Professor Meira Levinson, who also helped draft the faculty letter, wrote in an email that she took inspiration from a similar letter written by Harvard Law School faculty. As a HGSE faculty member and education expert, she wrote, she felt a special duty to speak up.

“I believe that as experts in the field of education, and as members of the Harvard faculty, we have not only the opportunity but also the obligation to speak out on the core threats to education that we see in the current moment,” Levinson wrote.

HGSE lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy, another of the letter’s writers, wrote in an email that he hoped the letter “demonstrates to the broader public that there is a strong movement growing in higher education to oppose the Trump administration’s unethical and unconstitutional attempts to control and otherwise destroy our institutions.”

“We did not pick this fight, it picked us,” McCarthy added.

—Staff writer Mackenzie L. Boucher can be reached at mackenzie.boucher@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @Mactruck0528.