How Trump vs. Harvard is a page out of the Project 2025 playbook

The extent to which the Trump administration has gone to strong-arm the world’s wealthiest university into abiding by its wishes has sent shockwaves through higher education.

But the actions taken thus far against Harvard University — and other academic institutions across the country — were essentially laid out two years ago in Project 2025, a 900-plus page master plan of sorts that reenvisions a federal government with expanded presidential power.

Though President Donald Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial conservative initiative while on the campaign trail, many of his moves related to higher education in recent months have come straight from it.

“Project 2025 is being carried out in almost every aspect of the Trump attacks on higher education,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and a former president at Mount Holyoke College.

Published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation — a nonprofit whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies — Project 2025 proposed some of the following in its blueprint for higher education:

• Curtail student loan forgiveness and repayment programs 
• Eliminate federal student aid programs 
• Eliminate the Department of Education
• Allow states to create their own college accreditors  
• Ban critical race theory
• Roll back Title IX protections and consider only biological birth sex
• Cap indirect cost rate paid by the National Institutes of Health to universities for research

Trump has gotten the wheels turning on nearly all of those stated objectives. The administration also carried out mass student visa revocations, and later decided to reverse them after weeks of scrutiny from courts and several restraining orders. Still, the future of international students at American colleges and universities remains uncertain.

• Read more: Harvard has a $53 billion endowment. Could it be a weapon in its fight against Trump?

One of Trump’s proposals includes creating the American Academy, a federally funded online university that awards a bachelor’s degree, as an affordable alternative to a traditional four-year college degree, according to his website.

It would be paid for by institutions like Harvard University by taxing, fining and suing selective institutions’ endowments. Harvard has the world’s largest higher education endowment at $53.2 billion.

Trump and Harvard are currently in the midst of a historic showdown. Last week, Harvard sued the Trump administration after it threatened to pull $9 billion in federal funding unless the university agreed to a series of demands ordered in the name of addressing antisemitism.

Sending a wave of resistance through higher education, Harvard said it would not comply with the demands.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,“ Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a letter to the school community.

While the Trump administration is positioning its actions against colleges and universities as a quest to clamp down on antisemitism, “this was not something that came as a result of the attacks on Israel by Hamas, this was something that they said they were going to engage in years before,” Pasquerella said, citing Project 2025.

Some higher education leaders took the document’s contents seriously when it was first published, she said, though they didn’t necessarily anticipate what has actually come to fruition. Others viewed it as a worst-case scenario, and thus, have been shocked.

“This couldn’t even have been imagined, that this kind of attack on higher education would be leveled,” Pasquerella said.

Growing resentment toward higher ed predates Trump

Bruce Kimball, emeritus academy professor at Ohio State University and co-author of Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education, said Trump is far from being the architect of what’s transpiring between the federal government and the higher education establishment.

He cited growing disdain and resentment, specifically toward the country’s wealthiest and most elite universities, that took root in the 1980s and has mounted since. As endowments increased, so did the cost of a college education and student debt.

“What we’re now seeing, this attack by the Trump administration, draws on 30 or 40 years of growing resentment in the public,” said Kimball, who holds two degrees from Harvard.

Ryan Wells, a professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the sheer cost of colleges and universities alone “makes people feel resentment toward them.”

The authors of Project 2025 capitalized on the snowballing narrative pushed by members of the Republican Party that higher education institutions have become liberal bastions that espouse anti-American teachings.

• Read more: Trump signs executive orders targeting colleges for ‘wokeness’

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who’s led the national movement opposing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), says colleges and universities should “reform, or lose funding.”

“The Trump administration has a once-in-a-generation chance to reform higher education,” he co-wrote in a February blog post titled “How Trump Can Make Universities Great Again.”

He went on to write that higher education institutions have devolved into “left-wing propaganda factories” and abandoned the “pursuit of knowledge.”

“These schools posture as though their position is untouchable, but their business model is nearly entirely reliant on federal largesse,” Rufo wrote. “Demanding that universities behave in a manner worthy of their unique financial and cultural position is long overdue.”

Why Project Esther matters, too

UMass Amherst professors Jennifer Lundquist and Kathy Roberts Forde are among faculty members who recently organized a letter — signed by approximately 5,000 people at universities and colleges across the country — calling for higher education to stand together.

The federal government is “inserting itself into higher education in a way we’ve never seen before,” Lundquist said.

They, too, see the fingerprints of Project 2025 on nearly every decision Trump is handing down.

“Project 2025 is one of the playbooks and a pretty powerful one at that,” said Roberts Forde, who cited what she views as being at the heart of the hard-right initiative: maintaining dominance and control of information.

Lundquist said perhaps equally as important as Project 2025, but not receiving nearly the same attention, is Project Esther, another publication by the Heritage Foundation that came out last October before the election.

Project Esther describes the pro-Palestinian movement as a “Hamas support network” that’s disrupting the American education system. It advertises its contents as a national strategy to combat antisemitism.

“It lays out a blueprint for exactly what’s happening around the weaponization of antisemitism,” Lundquist said.

The Boston Globe recently interviewed Jewish students and recent graduates at Harvard University about how they see antisemitism manifesting on campus. The response was nuanced: While they’re concerned about antisemitism, many said they are far more worried about the Trump administration’s actions against higher education institutions.

UMass Amherst was included on the list of 60 universities the Department of Education released in March, announcing investigations into whether the schools have failed to meet their obligations to Jewish students under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Other schools in Massachusetts included on the list were Boston University, Tufts University, Emerson College, Harvard University and Wellesley College.

Being named beside Harvard means the schools’ futures are closely intertwined. What happens to one could likely happen to the rest.

“Harvard is the test case,” Roberts Forde said. “If the federal government can bring Harvard to its knees, then there goes higher education. We’re watching really closely what Harvard is doing and we’re hoping they stay the course and continue filing lawsuits.”

MassLive reporter Juliet Schulman-Hall contributed to this story.