"Finally!"

That was my first reaction to Harvard's letter on Monday, which pledged to resist the Trump administration's attacks on its autonomy. You can't have a free university or a free society when the government is dictating what you can teach, think or write. Good on Harvard, for stating what most schools have been too scared to say.

Yet we should also read the letter as a challenge to our universities, which haven't always lived by their ideals of free expression and open inquiry. President Trump's proposed restrictions and penalties pose a dire threat to these values, as the Harvard letter makes clear. But we shouldn't pretend that we have made good on them ourselves.

Consider the question of viewpoint diversity, which the Trump administration highlighted in its own letter to Harvard earlier this month. The university was instructed to abolish "ideological litmus tests" and to "hire a critical mass of new faculty" in departments where everyone thought the same way.

I heartily endorse that goal, even if I detest Trump's mechanism for achieving it. Surveys have repeatedly confirmed that faculty at elite schools like Harvard lean heavily and almost uniformly left in their politics. That's a big problem if you think that education should expose us to a wide range of perspectives. And it also helps explain the rising public disdain for universities, especially — but not only — among conservatives.

But I don't want Trump or any other government official deciding which departments or schools are so........

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