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The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.
Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.
I don't agree with this, at least in terms of the war on higher education. Can you substantiate? Take what happened with Columbia:
March 7th: $400MM funding frozen to Columbia. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-cancels-400-million-grants-columbia-university-rcna195373
March 21st: Trump admin sends CU a list of demands to unfreeze funding. Columbia publicly agrees to Trump admin's demands. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-response-trump-demands.html
March 26th: Leaked conversations reveal that, internally, CU was singing a very different tune than what they publicly agreed to. CU president Katrina Armstrong minimizes and downplays changes. https://freebeacon.com/campus/what-columbia-university-president-really-told-faculty-members/
April 1st: CU president Katrina Armstrong deposed by congress and questioned, among other things, about the faculty meeting. Transcript (again) leaks. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/04/09/federal-government-questioned-armstrong-over-campus-antisemitism-on-april-1-according-to-leaked-transcript/
April 6th: Katrina Armstrong steps down as interim president of CU
April 9th: CU gets hit with another $250MM funding freeze https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/09/nih-freezes-millions-more-funding-columbia
This sequence of events does not read as CU gets hit, capitulates, and then gets hit with their belly showing. It reads as CU gets hit, lies that it will make changes, gets exposed for lying, and then gets hit again. There was never any capitulation by CU.
Do you have any examples of colleges who actually capitulated and got hit again?
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