For the past month, President Donald Trump has been stalking the richest universities in the world like a horror movie serial killer picking off a group of frightened teenagers one by one. Why aren’t they using their multibillion-dollar endowments to fight back?

The spree started in early March, when the administration announced it was holding $400 million in federal grants to Columbia hostage until the university agreed to a lengthy list of demands. As experts immediately noted, this is plainly against the law. And Columbia has plenty of money to temporarily fill in the gap while hiring legal counsel — its $14.8 billion endowment grew by more than $1 billion just last year.

But instead of lawyering up, Columbia gave in to the demands. Emboldened, the administration next threatened to freeze $175 million in grants to the University of Pennsylvania. Penalties for Princeton and Brown followed, and just this week the administration announced it would freeze $1 billion in funding for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern University.

Trump is also going after the biggest target of all: Harvard and its $9 billion in federal contracts and grants. An April 3 letter demanded that Harvard effectively put its hiring, admissions, discipline, governance, leadership, and academic oversight under the thumb of the administration.

Hundreds of faculty members urged the university to resist. “Harvard has the capacity to withstand the blow,” said a professor who studies authoritarian regimes. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers confirmed that “ways can be found” to use the university’s $53 billion endowment to cover lost federal funding in........

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