In an April 11, 2025, letter to Harvard University President Alan Garber and Harvard Corporation Lead Member Penny Pritzker, Trump administration officials from the General Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Education outlined terms of an agreement between the administration and the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. The multi-pronged proposal raised two major questions: Were the government’s complaints against Harvard justified? And did enforcing its demands for reform fall within federal government’s limited powers?

The Trump administration observed that the U.S. government “has invested in” Harvard because the nation benefits from the university’s “scholarly discovery and academic excellence.” However, the letter stressed, “an investment is not an entitlement.” Because “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the administration requested the university to undertake substantial reforms or lose federal funding.

In particular, the April 11 letter called on Harvard to practice merit-based hiring and admissions; recruit and admit international students committed to America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions; stop university programs and faculty from promulgating antisemitism; discontinue diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI); enforce student-discipline policies; establish reliable whistle-blower reporting and protection procedures; and create institutional mechanisms to facilitate transparent cooperation with the government.

The Trump administration’s most controversial demand involved steps to enhance “viewpoint diversity” throughout Harvard. “By August 2025,” the administration’s letter specified, “the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Guided by the audit’s findings, the government would require Harvard to eliminate “ideological litmus tests” in admissions and hiring, and to achieve viewpoint diversity in the university’s departments, fields, and teaching units.   

Critics accused the Trump administration of overreaching. Even distinguished conservatives who advocate viewpoint diversity objected on free-speech and limited-government grounds to the intrusive oversight that the Trump administration sought over the mix of opinions and perspectives at Harvard.

In “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” published this fall in Academe (the quarterly magazine of the American Association of University Professors), Lisa Siraganian adopted a........

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