AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show on the campus of Harvard University as the Ivy League institution pushes back against President Trump’s attacks on higher education. This week, the Trump administration said it’s freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, after it defied an order to eliminate all DEI initiatives, further crack down on Palestinian rights protests, including reporting international students to federal authorities, among a number of other issues.

Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a letter to the school community Monday, quote, “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. … 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,” unquote.

On Tuesday, President Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?' Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” — exclamation point, the president of the United States tweeted.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Trump’s threat to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status. This was her response.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: When it comes to Harvard, as I said, the president has been quite clear: They must follow federal law. He also wants to see Harvard apologize — and Harvard should apologize — for the egregious antisemitism that took place on their college campus against Jewish American students. … As for the tax-exempt status, I would defer you to the IRS for any updates.

AMY GOODMAN: Also this week, Harvard joined a group of universities that sued the Department of Energy over cuts to federal research funding.

For more, we go to Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we’re joined by professor Andrew Manuel Crespo, the Morris Wasserstein public interest professor of law, where he joins us now from. He’s the general counsel of the Harvard faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which last Friday filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the administration’s funding cuts and that sought a court order to block them. Last year, Professor Crespo was one of dozens of Harvard University professors who staged a study-in protest at the school’s library in solidarity with students disciplined for taking part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. He was then banned from the Harvard Law Library temporarily.

We welcome you, Professor, to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the stance that Harvard has taken, which has surprised many?

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: Yes. And thank you for having me. It’s really wonderful to be with you.

I think it was really encouraging and important to see the Harvard administration leadership here send the letter that it did to the Trump administration. You know, our chapter had gone to court, as you mentioned, a few days prior to file a lawsuit to block these cuts from happening, because these cuts are unquestionably unconstitutional. Our Constitution has a First Amendment that protects freedom of speech. And as the U.S. Supreme Court has made abundantly clear, academic freedom on university campuses is a central component of that right to free speech.

What the Trump administration is trying to do is use massive coercive pressure and threats to make universities across the country switch to talking about what the Trump administration wants them to say. He wants to control what’s said in our classrooms, what’s said on our campuses, what we research about, what we write about, the questions we ask and the answers we give, so that they fit the ideological agenda of the Trump administration. That’s dangerous, and it’s unconstitutional. We went to court to stop it from happening. And I was really glad to see our leadership here at Harvard a few days later follow suit and say that they are not going to accede to these demands.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Crespo, I want to congratulate the AAUP chapter there for taking this stance, but I’m wondering: Why didn’t — since it appears to be so clearly illegal to do this, why the university itself hasn’t gone to court?

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: Well, we’ll have to see what happens there. You know, the university is taking its own sort of deliberations into account. It has big questions ahead of it. These are hard questions. You know, no university should be in this position. No institution in this country should be in this position. It is dangerous and scary to see the president of the United States threatening law firms, trying to bankrupt them, when they dare to go to court and file suits that try to hold our government to account under the laws of this country. It’s dangerous and scary and authoritarian to see the president of the United States trying to bankrupt our leading research universities because he wants to control what they’re teaching, control what they’re saying in the classroom.

I mean, this is a critical point to realize. In the demand letter that the Trump administration sent to my university Friday night, that became public on Monday, one of his demands was to have the school appoint, or allow him to appoint, a federal overseer who would audit every course on this campus, every department, to try to figure out if it met the ideological balance that’s preferred by the Trump administration. And that federal official would then require us to hire new teachers to teach the way that Trump wants us to teach, to change our courses. This is absolute, outright efforts to take over federally what is taught on American campuses. It’s a move that we see in countries across the globe when dictators are trying to come into power. We’ve seen it in Hungary. We’ve seen it in Russia. It is the exact move that the Trump administration is trying here right now.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to, well, now-Vice President JD Vance, but this was him speaking in 2021 at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida.

JD VANCE: I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: “We have to … attack the universities” of this country. Professor Crespo, you have talked about Trump’s demands, and now Trump-Vance demands, saying that they’re right out of the authoritarian’s playbook. And you just talked about other countries in the world. Explain exactly what you mean and the many demands that the Trump administration has made of Harvard. Of course, it did it of Columbia, and you might have something interesting to say about Columbia caving to those demands; making demands of Northwestern, where Juan is, in Chicago, saying that they’ll cut $750 million; Brown University, they’ll cut $500 million. Explain exactly what they’re demanding Harvard do.

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: Well, I think it’s so critical that you played that clip from the now-vice president from years ago, because I think it really makes clear what this is all about. You know, the Trump administration is asserting and claiming in these most recent threats that it is trying to purge these universities of antisemitism. Now, look, I am second to no one in making clear that antisemitism is something that is vile. I think of it as a form of racism and intolerance. But that is not what these investigations are about, as evidenced by the fact that JD Vance was talking about the universities as enemies years and years ago.

This is an effort to try to take over the ideological agenda of the country by taking over universities. It’s an effort — when I say a page out of the authoritarian playbook, I’m talking about what we learn from lessons of history and across the globe. When people come into power and try to control and hold onto power contra the norms of a constitutional democracy, they attack the critical institutions of a free and open society. They attack the press, they attack the courts, they attack the legal profession, and they attack universities.

And that is exactly what we have seen this administration doing relentlessly over the first months of its second term. Why is it putting all that energy into this at the beginning of its term? Because it knows that those are the institutions where open and free inquiry, where dissent, where protest, where critical thinking, where questioning are not only prized, but treated as the core value of the institution.

This is a university, like so many others across the country, where diversity of viewpoints is celebrated — and not only celebrated, but central to our mission. I teach at a law school. Every year I stand up in front of hundreds of students and try to get them to lean into all the different ways in which they disagree with each other, in productive and exciting ways. That’s how new knowledge is formed. When you try to suppress that type of differences of opinion and impose your own ideological agenda on a university from the government, you’re trying to suppress speech on a campus. And I think the reason to do that is because people know that open, free inquiry and free speech are some of the critical aspects of maintaining a democracy in the face of threats to it. So that’s why I say it’s a page out of that playbook.

The demands that have been made of our university make that clear. This demand list go so far beyond even anything remotely touching antisemitism. They’re asking us to shutter all programs and offices related to DEI. Now, look, we know from experience in Florida and when Ron DeSantis did the dry run of this with the universities there that the administration uses DEI as a code word for saying they want us to stop teaching anything about race or the American history with respect to questions about our racial history. They want us to stop teaching questions about social inequality. They want us to stop researching about the impact and the different and disparate impacts of different policies on different groups of people. They want us to stop pursuing the truth, when it touches on parts of our American truth that they don’t want us to acknowledge or talk about or study or try to redress, because they have a political agenda, and they know that universities don’t, that universities are trying to pursue knowledge where we find it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are of how other university should be acting. Clearly, Harvard is in perhaps the best position, with a more than $50 billion endowment, to be able to withstand these kinds of cuts and attacks. But higher education institutions around the country, especially even public universities, have already started to cave in to a lot of pressure from the Trump administration. What is your advice to these other institutions?

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: It’s such a critical point. I mean, you are right. Harvard is the best positioned to take this stand. It’s the most well-known and wealthiest university in the world, and that’s why so many of us here, including our AAUP chapter, felt that we had a moral obligation to take this stand at the front of the line.

But the hope is that we are not going to be doing this alone. There is no institution that, by itself, can stand up to the onslaught that is coming from the federal government right now. It’s a dangerous onslaught, and the only way to resist it is, in fact, to stand together.

That’s why I think it’s so important, and we’re starting to see statements from other university presidents across the country, from other leaders throughout the sector, from former President Barack Obama, standing up in favor of higher education, explaining not just to the other members of this sector, to our other, you know, faculty colleagues at other schools, university leaders at other schools, but to the American people, just how critical higher education is, not just for the people on these campuses, but for the country.

I mean, this is something we want to make sure everyone understands. These billions and billions of dollars that are being threatened come directly from science and medical research that is trying to solve and cure diseases, that is trying to invent the new technologies that will help us with climate change and other issues facing our country and our world. Everyone in the world benefits when the federal government partners with American research institutes to find these new solutions to the most challenging problems of our day.

And everyone in this country benefits, going beyond scientific research, when we have universities that study American history, so that we don’t repeat the problems of our past and so we can understand where we come from and what our values are; when we have law schools that teach about the rule of law and how central it is to the ongoing existence of a constitutional democracy; when we teach literature and art and dance and poetry, so we remember why it is that we flourish as human beings. These are essential aspects of a thriving society.

If you try to kneecap your universities, you’re kneecapping your country. You’re kneecapping the people across the world who depend on your research and your discoveries. That’s why this is so dangerous, and that’s why this whole sector has to come together. I’m proud to be a chapter of a national organization, the American Association of University Professors, that has been leading the way, with faculty members across the country taking initiative to file lawsuits, to organize on their campuses and to try to build that network of solidarity across the profession and across the sector.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the reason Harvard took this stance? I mean, the reason so many people were stunned is the stances it’s taken before. I mean, first you have the ousting, after a congressional hearing, of Claudine Gay, the president. Then you have the ousting of the head of the Middle East Department. It was really seen as a beginning of a way to deal with the Trump administration. You yourself were banned from your own library for supporting pro-Palestinian students. But now this enormous turnaround.

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: Well, I think there’s potentially a couple of factors to it, Amy, although I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t been speaking with the leadership of the university directly and don’t know their thinking on it. But I’m glad to see their actions.

You know, the timeline here is, when these threats happened, our chapter went into a real crisis mode, and we decided that we needed to file this lawsuit. And we had terrific help from wonderful law firms that rushed in to help us. And within a few days, we were in court, and we were filing our complaint on behalf of our chapter, on behalf of the professors here at Harvard who are harmed by this, and on behalf of our students.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to quickly — 

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: That lawsuit was filed Friday night.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to quickly ask you — I’m going to cut you off, because I wanted to get to the law firms —

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — and we just have a minute. A judge just ruled on behalf of Susman Godfrey that the Trump administration’s executive order against this law firm can’t stand for the moment. We did an interview with Steve Susman, oh, more than a decade ago, amazing, pioneering lawyer who represented an Indigenous community in Alaska against Big Oil because of climate change. But it’s not just Susman Godfrey. It’s all of these law firms. You’re a law professor. The significance of this attack on law firms?

ANDREW MANUEL CRESPO: The attacks on law firms are one of the most dangerous things we’re seeing. Look, one of the key checks that we have seen so far in the early days of the Trump administration on these authoritarian power grabs have been actions in court. Now, the president keeps flirting with the idea of not obeying court orders, but so far the courts have been holding. And you need lawyers to bring those cases in court. So, instead of attacking the courts directly, what he’s doing is attacking the lawyers. He’s trying to intimidate the entire legal profession into standing down and leaving him a free, open path to do whatever it is that he wants. He understands that law can be a check on authoritarian moves, so he’s trying to bankrupt these law firms.

Now, every law firm that has gone to court so far has gotten a quick and strong order from a judge protecting them from these executive orders. That should be a strong signal to every other law firm out there. What the Trump administration is trying to do with these attacks is unconstitutional. You are lawyers. You can go to court, and you can file for that type of protection. And I hope that each time a law firm does that, it will breed more and more courage across the profession, because that’s another sector that needs to stand united and stand tall in the face of these threats.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, and just add, on Susman Godfrey, that they did represent Dominion Voting Systems. Andrew Manuel Crespo, Morris Wasserstein public interest professor of law at Harvard Law School, general counsel of the Harvard faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Trump funding cuts, that sought a court order to block them. This is Democracy Now!