Harvard-Trump spat digs up old debate

Harvard University could stand to lose $8.7 billion in federal funds if it doesn’t comply with a set of demands outlined by the Trump administration. Earlier this month, the federal government demanded Harvard implement governance and leadership reforms, viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring, and increased student discipline and accountability policies. The administration says those requirements will help protect Jewish students. On Monday, Harvard sued the administration in a 50-page filing, calling those requirements an attack on the First Amendment and “unlawful.”

Harvard’s lawsuit reignites a power struggle between federal authorities and higher education institutions that has been around for decades. In the last 100 years, federal funding has provided colleges, students, and the government itself with opportunities—security-related research and development—unlikely to come outside that partnership. But the assistance also carries a question of control: Is the government’s oversight worth the dollars it’s willing to give?

For Grove City College, the answer is a firm “no.”

In the 1970s, the Christian school in Grove City, Pa., saw these questions coming—and took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court. The government had asked Grove City to sign an “assurance of compliance form,” a pledge that the school’s admissions and financial aid office would provide equal opportunity of education for women.

The college had no objection to the pledge itself. Because of its Christian worldview, Grove City College had always maintained equality between men and women. Lee Wishing, the school’s current vice president for student recruitment, explained that school leaders at the time worried about future demands.

“We did not sign that form,” Wishing said. “Fine print at the bottom of that form essentially said, ‘by signing this form, you agree to all current and future federal regulation.’ It was a kind of power grab.”

Although the case clearly revealed Grove City did not discriminate against women, the Supreme Court in 1984 gave Grove City College a choice: either submit to federal regulation in its departments of admissions and student aid or forgo federal dollars to those departments.

The college chose to discontinue federal aid.

Today, there are only a handful of higher education institutions that, like Grove, don’t take any federal funding, whether in grants, federal assistance, or student loans. The list is dominated by Christian institutions like Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Crown College, Pensacola Christian College, and Christendom College.

Patrick Henry College, a relatively newer entry on that list, was founded in 2000 by Michael Farris, a constitutional attorney who believes the government has vastly overstepped what the founders originally envisioned for a federal role in education. He said the Trump administration’s pressure on more liberal institutions doesn’t change what he sees as the ideal for a government-higher education relationship: “That some federal officials occasionally attend basketball games at the alma mater. That’s it.”

“I’m not satisfied with the shoe being on the other foot,” Farris said. “I want [government] out of the shoe business.” He pointed to regulations such as restroom requirements that authorities have applied to conservative schools and colleges for years. Farris hopes conservatives will realize from Trump’s fight with Harvard that administrations can change the climate for higher education institutions rapidly.

“Conservative institutions have been reeling under pressure to conform to woke policies for a long time,” Farris said. “Schools have been taken to task by the Department of Education under the prior administrations for not conforming on transgender policies and various gay rights policies.”

With that kind of instability, I asked Wishing, the vice president of recruitment at Grove City, if he expected more conservative schools to reject government funding.

“They can’t really afford to. It’s very difficult for colleges to pull out,” Wishing said. “We’ve had a number of colleges and universities call us throughout the years wanting to know how we did it. And usually they find ‘boy, it’s just too hard.’”

The government first got involved in higher education funding back in the late 1800s through land grants—land holdings sold to fund schools like Texas A&M University and the University of California. But the government really became a player in college funding during World War II.

Ethan Schrum, director of the humanities program at Azusa Pacific University in California, explained that the government needed technology—and fast.

“What they did during the war was they typically funded these large centers: the grad lab at MIT that worked on radar, the underwater sound lab at San Diego managed by the University of California that worked on sonar. These kinds of centers [were] dedicated to specific war-related technologies,” Schrum said.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, federal support for research and development at universities went from about $8 billion in the 1960s to well over $30 billion by 2022.

In that time, the government also came to dominate the student loan market. According to the Education Data Initiative, federal loans represent 92% of all student debt. In the 2023-24 school year alone, the government issued $114 billion in new loans.

For many of those colleges, that partnership has been extremely fruitful—both for the students and for the schools themselves. That includes some conservative Christian institutions like Cedarville University in Ohio.

Thomas White, the school’s president, said Cedarville officials believe the federal dollars make the school more competitive and allow their students to pursue more careers and callings.

“Our center for cyber-operations is one of 20 or so schools in the nation that’s considered a center of academic excellence in cyber operations,” White told WORLD. “To be able to do that wouldn’t be possible without some funding from the [National Science Foundation].”

But Cedarville leaders are keenly aware that the school’s relationship with the government comes with strings attached. White said the school is financially prepared to back out of federal aid if federal requirements would jeopardize their mission.

“If the government starts requiring that you have teachers of other faiths or if you have to accept students of other faiths at a Christian institution that has a clearly defined line for faculty to sign their doctrinal statement or for believers to have a testimony as a believer in Christ, then at that point you have to walk away,” White said. “You have to stick to your values.”