JW: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: Harvard versus Trump. After going to court to challenge Trump’s cut of $2 billion in federal grants, Harvard is now in negotiations with the administration, seeking “common ground”—raising fears that even the most established and wealthy university will submit to his demands.

E.J. Dionne comments. He’s part of the alumni group Crimson Courage, urging the school’s leaders not to submit.

But first: Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary—and what it means for Democrats everywhere. Bhaskar Sunkar has our analysis in a minute.

[Break]

We’re still thinking about Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City last week. Of course, he’s the democratic docialist who beat the party establishment. The final vote was reported this week on Tuesday: Mamdani 56 percent; Cuomo 44 percent. What can other Democrats learn from Mamdani’s victory? For that, we turn to Bhaskar Sunkara. He’s president of The Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, a contributor to The Guardian, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities. Bhaskar, welcome back.

Bhaskar Sunkara: Thanks for having me, Jon.

JW: Establishment Democrats ran millions of dollars of ads calling Mamdani “a Muslim socialist.” Back in May, a good poll showed Cuomo, the former governor, winning this Democratic primary for mayor with 53 percent compared to, they predicted, for Mamdani, 29 percent. According to the polls, Cuomo would beat him by 24 points. But then on election day, Mamdani won by eight points. That’s a 32-point shift. How did he do it?

BS: I think the key to it was he actually managed to put Bernie Sanders’ theory into practice, and if you remember in Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns—in 2016, in 2020—Sanders had this mobilizational theory of change where he had this new expanded electorate that he would bring to the fore, mostly consisting of young people inspired by his image, but also other lower-income non-voters, and the expanded electorate would take him to victory. In practice, it obviously didn’t work out that way for Bernie, even though he ran superb campaigns. But with Zohran, he really did have this surge of young voters, both Gen Z and millennial voters turnout for him and he was able to convince a lot of other working-class people through a very focused message on housing, transportation, wages, the everyday cost-of-living crisis in New York City, and it was his opponents that kept changing the conversation to Israel/Palestine and to antisemitism and all these other issues to his identity as a Muslim socialist. But his actual campaign was absolutely relentless and focused on not rallying the base, but in reaching as many new voters as possible.

JW: In your analysis for The Guardian, you argued “it wasn’t simply messaging discipline that made Mamdani so successful.” What do you mean?

BS: Well, I think he is a truly generational politician. He has charisma. He has the ability to go into a hostile environment and to say, “I’m going to clearly explain my positions and I’m curious about why you disagree with me, and then let’s have a conversation.” That’s the basic of rhetoric. Being able to say, “Jon, I see what you’re saying about this, but I also have this other concern. What do you think about this?” It’s how every conversation, good conversation, at least in the history of human civilization, has actually worked: the basics of rhetoric, and it’s something that’s been lost on the Democratic Party. As a journalist, I’ve talked to plenty of cowardly Democratic Party politicians whose comms teams beforehand say, “We don’t want to talk about this, that, or that.” It was clear that Zohran would just go into hostile interviews and just be ready for whatever.

He was never frustrated, even when he was baited. “Oh, Zohran won’t condemn ‘globalize the intifada.’” His actual statement there was basically saying “it is not necessarily language I would use. I believe really in bringing together people, bringing together communities. I’m against antisemitism though. I’m also in favor of Palestinian rights. It’s not my job to police language, though, as mayor, because people might mean different things when they say it. Some of it might actually have a positive meaning. Some might in fact have an antisemitic or a negative meaning.” Whatever you think of his response, it was much more reasonable than the way it’s been depicted in the media. But it’s clear that these sorts of moral panics just aren’t working, and people really just want to try something new. They want to try a politician who can speak to them about their most basic concerns and is a good communicator. It’s basically anti–Joe Biden.

JW: And there’s one other thing that he was fantastically good at, and that was his social media. Those little videos that he posted were just, I don’t know, irresistible. That one about halal trucks was the one that really got to me. How did he manage to do such a great job on social media?

BS: He’s had a great team. There’s a wealth of talent around him, and honestly, there’s a wealth of talent I think in New York City DSA. I remember in April of 2007, right before my 18th birthday, I joined the Democratic Socialist of America, and I went to my first DSA meeting in New York City, and there were about five people in the room. Now, DSA in New York City could reach as many as 20,000 people potentially by the time this—New York City DSA—by the time this campaign is over. So there’s a lot of talented people. There’s a lot of young people willing to donate their time and resources from within the organization, but also just ordinary people in the city that wanted to be a part of something, were excited about the candidate, felt like Zohran was someone they could trust, and that is very different than Andrew Cuomo. I think it’s worth, for all we want to praise Zohran, I think he was a remarkable candidate who ran a great campaign. But Cuomo, on the other hand, first of all, he ran a very uninspiring campaign. He was also very, very careful in where he showed up. He didn’t want to go to most mayoral forums, including the Nation mayoral forum. We did it with the WFP. We had eight different candidates there—

JW: The Working Families Party.

BS: Yes, the Working Families Party. We invited both Mayor Adams and Andrew Cuomo. They did not come. Of course, we would’ve been gracious hosts and instructed the crowd to be gracious to Andrew Cuomo. He was just afraid. And I think this is one strategy of how the Democratic Party has run. “Let’s keep our head down. Let’s not be in hostile environments.” A lot of fuss, maybe too much fuss has been made of Kamala Harris not showing up on the Joe Rogan podcast, but I think it is a sign of the Democratic establishment politicians just being afraid of going out there and engaging in debate and conversation.

JW: Let’s talk about New York’s Jewish voters for another minute. New York, of course, has the largest Jewish population of any city in the world except for Tel Aviv, and a lot of Zohran’s critics focused on his support for Palestinian rights and his opposition to genocide in Gaza. But let’s say there were also a lot of Jews who supported Mamdani, as Michelle Goldberg wrote.

BS: Yeah, I mean, for what it’s worth, there are far more than twice as many Jews in New York than in Jerusalem, maybe three times more than Haifa. So this is a city that of course has a deeply rooted tradition where Jewish Americans have helped build the New York that we know and love, and I think it’s worth noting—we don’t have the final figures—that we know, as a matter of fact, that Zohran either finished one or two among Jewish New Yorkers in even the first round of voting. So there were thousands of Jewish New Yorkers who supported Zohran, who canvassed for him, who truly believed in his mission.

Among the other people, I think there are some who have genuine concerns about some of his views. There are some who feel like some of the rhetoric on campuses and elsewhere have been profoundly alienating. There are some who, on the other hand, I think are completely cynical. Then I think this combination of both real concerns and cynical concerns has created a bit of panic about the level of antisemitism in New York City.

JW: The LA Times on Tuesday had an article quoting an unnamed veteran New York Democratic strategist saying, “It’s the end of Jewish New York as we know it,” and he predicted “a hasty exodus of religious Jews from the city.” What do you think about that?

BS: Well, it’s so ludicrous. You could tell that in certain communities, like in Hasidic and super Orthodox communities in Borough Park and others, you could tell just by the block-by-block and borough precinct data that they went for Cuomo. But in other areas like on the Upper West Side and places like Park Slope, Zohran did great. Zohran did better than Brad Lander, who is a Jewish New Yorker from Park Slope, in Park Slope.

So I think in general, this capital-C community that implies that there’s a unified belief of everyone in this community is just silly. It’s silly when people do it with Black Americans. It’s silly in this case too. There are a lot of people, Jews in New York, who have very different views on Zohran, very different political beliefs. And on the one hand, I think it’s easy to just want to dismiss all of these concerns out of hand because I do firmly believe that we are witnessing a bit of a moral panic about antisemitism. But at the same time, there’s real antisemitism and there are real reasons that people feel concerned, and I think Zohran has threaded the needle quite well, being willing to talk to people about their concerns and what he could do about it.

But fundamentally, New York is a great place for everyone, all of us. We’re a city of immigrants. All of us have diverse backgrounds. I certainly don’t think I’m part of a rising ethnic bloc because I’m South Asian and we likely will have a South Asian mayor. I don’t think of the world with the zero-sum conflicts between different ethnic groups, and if New York City was built that way, we wouldn’t have a city where people get along very well. I mean, if you want to actually look at a future in which Jews and Muslims and Hindus all get along extremely well, look at this campaign and look at New York City. I mean, this is what’s wonderful about America. We’re truly a non-sectarian country. But of course, I feel terrible by the fact there are many legitimate, earnest Jewish New Yorkers who feel uncomfortable or perturbed by certain language, including language that comes to the left. And for them, I think we should be willing to have conversations and just generally embrace a politics that’s built around our shared humanity and shared needs instead of this extremely divisive sort of politics.

JW: Your love for New York and what makes it great is very appealing, but of course they’re saying terrible things now among the Republicans. Stephen Miller posted on Twitter, “New York City is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.” There’s this guy, Andy Ogles, Republican representative from Tennessee, who’s publicly called for Mamdani’s deportation. And then there’s Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who said on a right-wing podcast, “These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. That’s one reason why we’re $37 trillion in debt, and it’s time we find these rats and send them back home. They are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.” So the amount of racism, especially anti-Muslim racism, that this has aroused on the right is terrifying.

BS: Yeah, and the easy response, of course, that you don’t want to concede any of their points, is obviously New York is a donor city, that’s part of a donor state, and these groups that have gotten behind in Zohran Mamdani, including the Asian, Hispanic population, are doing quite well in New York, are not living off of the state, to the extent anyone can live off of our meager welfare state. I think there has been an uptick in a certain type of rhetoric on the right that is explicitly racialized.

JW: Let’s talk about the implications for Democrats outside of New York City. What should Democrats campaigning in purple districts for swing seats learn from this? Bernie says the lesson for Democrats is: “have the courage to address the real economic and moral issues that face the majority of our people. Take on the greed and power of the oligarchy and fight for an agenda that can improve life for working families.”
Of course, others say New York City is so far to the left of most American congressional districts that it would be a disaster for swing district candidates to run on Mamdani’s issues. What do you think?

BS: Well, I think they’re both right to a certain extent. Obviously, Democrats have been struggling in rural districts and semi-rural districts. These struggles make the math in the Senate and in the Electoral College, in the long run, quite difficult in the US. And also, to be honest, in the House, there’s a lot of Americas, rural and semi-rural—Democrats have been struggling there. I’m not sure that progressives in the mold of the Democratic Social of America/Working Families Party progressives have the clearest answers on how to win there. I think we can see that while also saying that Zohran tried to run a campaign that was rooted in economic populism and relentlessly focused on cost of living, relentlessly focusing on reaching new voters with a cost-of-living analysis. He didn’t get distracted with the culture war. They tried to distract him with the culture war; he had to defend himself.

He also distanced himself quite explicitly from some of his earlier positions that he held when he was in his twenties, like Defund the Police and other issues that might’ve shifted attention from his core economic message. I think it’s clear that he saw some of his prior beliefs on social and cultural issues as being impediments to his core message. It didn’t mean that he became conservative overnight. There’s a big difference from saying, “I’m going to maintain existing NYPD funding” and “I’m going to add more social workers, so the cops don’t have to do the same work as social workers.” That’s a very different message than we’re going to defund and radically uproot public safety in New York City.

And just fundamentally, he was authentic, and he wasn’t afraid of conversations. And I think that’s something Bernie Sanders—I’m sure you’ve been in many conversations around the country with people who say, “I don’t like Bernie, but Bernie doesn’t lie. He says what he believes, he’s honest.” And I think whereas someone like Harris or Clinton or these other candidates, people had the perception that they were going to speak left in a room full of progressives and right in a room full of conservatives.
And I think that’s a message for Democrats. Be authentic. Don’t be afraid of media appearances, be able to talk unscripted and stick to a core economic message. And I think that is pretty universal and translatable. And again, a lot of these areas, a lot of these parts of Queens that he went over, for instance, Zohran went over in Queens, are not this boho, socially left areas. I think it’s much more complicated to get the aunties and uncles in the Asian community on board and the tíos in the Latino communities on board.

JW: One more thing, winning a primary election is a lot different from governing the city of New York. His promises are pretty big: a rent freeze, free buses, universal childcare, city-owned grocery stores, all paid for by taxing wealthy New Yorkers. It’s not going to be easy for him to achieve any of these.

BS: Well, I think, for one, we already do have extensive childcare in New York City, so this is just about shoring up that existing universal program, maybe expanding it a year. On the public grocery store campaign: That is really a pilot—one in each borough and designated areas that are considered food deserts, and see if there’s some utility in having a public option. On free buses: There is a real cost to it. The cost might be around $700 million, which is not much in the context of the New York City budget. We’ll have to see and examine whether or not reducing user fees on buses, what impact it has. I would imagine the revenue income impact might be somewhat limited and offset by other knockdown economic benefits or from the fact that a lot of times when people use the bus, they’re using it to transfer to the nearest subway or something like that. So they’re going to end up paying the system anyway and they were going to get a free transfer to get on the subway anyway. So I don’t think any of his plans are particularly radical.

I will point maybe one part of his plan that I think people have expressed wariness of, and I think we need to have more investigation of. So one would be the taxes on additional income tax on the millionaires. So, New York City is one of the few parts of the country that has a citywide income tax. I think we’ve seen from our evidence that even though there is some tax evasion in general, it does not lead to mass flights of millionaires. I’m not so concerned about raising incrementally a 2 percent tax on people earning a million dollars; it could be as little as $20,000 for people that are already earning $1 million. Again, not of wealth, but of new income that year. And I think I would love to be in that situation where I was bringing a million dollars. My only worry was whether I’d have to pay an additional $20,000 to live in a great city.

But the increasing of the corporate tax rate, so an additional corporate tax levied on companies who operate or are based in New York City—to me, I have to examine this policy a little bit more. I do have some worries in general about capital flight, other forms of capital resistance, derailing the early days of an administration. I think that the worst thing he could do is push hard for something and then back off after he faces some resistance, because you might actually have the flight and disorder without actually the revenue benefits.

But fundamentally, New York City is a very wealthy place. These programs are not so radical. We already have all the infrastructure for what people used to call Social Democratic New York in the 1970s. We have an extensive welfare state. We have a lot of revenue. So in my mind, Zohran is really just talking about a reordering of some of our existing spending rather than a radical shift.

JW: And there’s one other thing we haven’t talked about: Donald Trump.

BS: There are a lot of concerns about what Trump can do in his war on New York City. And obviously New York City is an unusual place in that it is both the most important city in the United States, it’s also not a capital. It also is a net donor, not a recipient. So if you’re in a city like Paris or London, you’re also in the capital city. So you’re getting a ton of investment from the national government, let’s say in your transit and all sorts of other things, even if they’re managed by local authorities. In New York, we don’t have any of those benefits. So obviously relationship to the federal government to some extent but especially relationship to Albany is extremely important for any mayor. Zohran does have the advantage of already serving as a state assemblyman. But listen, Trump’s going to be distracted by a lot of stuff. We’ll see what happens if this bill passes, the kind of resistance from even some parts of the Republican Party. Hopefully he’ll be too distracted to direct too much ire at New York.

But fundamentally, Zohran has already exceeded our expectations. He’s already been able to face down an intense amount of media scrutiny and attention without wavering. He’s been able to win over his critics. He’s been able to be gracious in victory. He’s been able to beat a very well-known and actually somewhat popular, despite all his faults—and his crimes, to be honest—Andrew Cuomo.
The only shame in my mind is that he was not born in the United States, and we will have to think about who can be our next presidential candidate, maybe in 2036, because it can’t be Zohran. But I think, at the very least, he has a bright future ahead of him.

JW: Bhaskar Sunkara. His essay “Zohran Mamdani offered New Yorkers a political revolution — and won”—it appears at The Guardian. Bhaskar, thanks for talking with us today.

BS: Great, thanks Jon.

[Break]

Jon Wiener: We want to talk about Harvard and Trump. Harvard is 140 years older than the United States. It has an endowment greater than the GDP of nearly a hundred countries. It has educated eight American presidents. If any institution was going to stand up to the Trump war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list. That’s what The New York Times reported when Harvard sued Trump. After Trump cut more than $2 billion in federal funding from the school, Trump declared on social media that “Harvard teaches hate and stupidity and should no longer receive federal funds.” Trump’s also tried to block Harvard from enrolling international students, and floated the idea of revoking Harvard’s tax exempt status.

The big picture here is that attacking universities is a classic element of the authoritarian playbook. Universities everywhere have been a key center of resistance to authoritarianism, and authoritarians everywhere have tried to weaken and if possible, destroy them. So Harvard challenged Trump’s budget cuts in court, arguing they were unconstitutional and against the law. And Harvard, not surprisingly, has won initially favorable court rulings.

But now, now Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, has acknowledged that the school is in negotiations to find common ground with Trump. After Trump declared on June 20th that it was “very possible that a deal will be announced over the next week or so with Harvard. If a settlement is made on the basis that is currently being discussed, it will be mindbogglingly historic and very good for our country.”

Harvard’s faculty, students, and alumni and dozens of other schools are urging Harvard not to submit to Trump’s demands. For comment, we turn to E.J. Dionne. He’s a longtime writer on politics, and among his other distinguished achievements, he was a visiting professor at the Harvard Divinity School in 2018. He’s also part of the group Crimson Courage, an organization of alumni supporting Harvard’s independence, which has recently urged President Garber and the Harvard Corporation to resist compromising Harvard’s values and integrity “in any sort of deal with the federal government.”

E.J. Dionne, welcome back.

E.J. Dionne: It’s a real joy to be with you, always. I should say I speak only for myself today and not for any institution, and I suspect lots of people who care about Harvard have complicated views about how do you move forward from this mess. One thing I’d like to say right at the outset: A lot of people view it as an elite or elitist institution, all of that. And I think what’s important here is what you said at the beginning, which is that it’s very, very important for institutions, free institutions in society, to resist dictates from what’s looking like now an authoritarian government.
I want to talk a bit about Jim Ryan, who was forced out as UVA’s president. Another place I have a lot of affection for. He said that “all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” And so I think the fight for Harvard is not just a fight for Harvard; it’s a fight for the freedom of all universities. It’s a fight for freedom of law firms to represent people against government. They’re under attack. It’s a fight for independent civil servants. It’s a fight for independent institutions in civil society. So that’s why I think this fight needs to engage people, even if they don’t have a lot of affection for Harvard.

JW: Among the big news in the last week has been this news that the president of the University of Virginia, Jim Ryan, who you just quoted, has been forced out after Trump went after him. You find that a significant and important moment in this whole discussion that has a lot of relevance to the larger picture.

EJD: When I look at the Harvard situation, I get why Harvard wants to make a deal of some kind that tries not to compromise its principles. And that’s really hard, but I get it because what you could destroy is extraordinary, $2 billion to $3 billion, destroying extraordinary research in the health sciences and other areas. So I get why those conversations are going on, but my position on this has hardened some with the resignation of Jim Ryan. Jim Ryan—who, by the way, had been the dean of the Harvard education school—was an extraordinarily admired figure at Harvard. When UVA made him president, there was real celebration across a very broad front of people because he is so open-minded and committed to higher education. Jim Ryan’s slogan is one that I think all kinds of people from right to left should welcome. It was a catchphrase for him, telling students, “Be curious, not judgmental.” Isn’t that a great model for a college president? That’s not the kind of college president who is some radical trying to shove ideology down students’ throats, but he did believe in equal opportunity—which, God forbid, I hope we continue to believe in, because UVA is a state institution and because its board is now dominated by appointments by Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has his own ambitions in Republican politics going forward, it should be mentioned. He basically decided he had no choice but to resign. And what he said is, my instinct is to fight on, but I don’t want to be fighting for myself in ways that hurt the university. But this Ryan episode shows how destructive this heavy hand of the White House on universities can be to institutions all over the country.

So again, I get why Harvard would like to make a deal, because the government can keep going after it no matter what the courts say. And this administration has shown an absolute willingness to ignore or get around the courts or pretend they didn’t rule as they did. So Harvard’s in a really tough position. But when you look at what happened to Ryan, it says, boy, what we really need is extraordinary solidarity across institutions of higher ed, that say there are certain things you just can’t interfere with: how students are admitted, which teachers can be hired, what courses can be taught. Those aren’t things that you want dictated by the White House.

JW: Well, all eyes are on Harvard now. More than 50 colleges, academic associations, and First Amendment advocacy groups have publicly backed Harvard in court by filing amicus briefs. One amicus brief was signed by 24 prominent research universities, including Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Hopkins, Penn, Georgetown, where you teach. Another was filed by 12,000 Harvard alumni. And it’s not just academia that cares about this. Twenty Democratic-led states have filed an amicus brief supporting Harvard. And after that, 16 Republican-led states filed their own amicus brief in support of Trump and against Harvard. The red states argued that the $2 billion or $3 billion in funding cuts were a reasonable punishment for permitting antisemitism on campus. This is the attorneys general, you know, of Texas, Iowa, Arkansas, South Dakota, Nebraska, and so on, say they want to protect Jewish students at Harvard. Somehow, I feel skeptical about their motivation, but I guess we have to start with antisemitism, which Harvard has said is one of the areas on which they are currently negotiating with Trump.

On Monday morning of this week, the Trump administration announced they had found Harvard guilty of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, that Harvard “acted with deliberate indifference” after Jewish and Israeli students reported being spit on and targeted with antisemitic imagery. Harvard says its tightened protest policies, provided resources for Jewish students, overhauled programs accused of antisemitism, and, very important here, Title VI says the government can take funding away only from the program where it has found discrimination occurred. And, before taking any money away, they are required to notify a congressional committee and provide a 30-day period for negotiating a resolution. None of this has happened at Harvard. Trump issues the punishment first and then later holds the trial.

EJD: The difficulties universities have faced after Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack is something that I think troubles people all across the board at universities. As a professor, I talked to a lot of Jewish students and Israeli students in that period who did feel that some of the attacks crossed into antisemitism. And so I think a lot students of universities struggle to say, how do you guarantee the right to protest—students have a right to protest—and continue to ensure mutual respect? All universities should stand up against hate. They should stand up against antisemitism. They should also stand up against Islamophobia. They should stand up for the right of people to have disagreements about the nature of Israel’s war since October 7th. They should stand up for the right of students to disagree on what the right way forward is, how the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, should be settled.

What’s really galling is to see the administration use what is a really difficult conversation on college campuses about how to defend free speech and fight antisemitism and Islamophobia, turned into a tool to radically transform universities in other ways that have absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism, to try to exert a degree of control over universities that no administration, Republican or Democrat, has ever tried to do. That’s why we can’t let the administration get away with saying this is all about antisemitism. It is not. Since I was a kid, my parents, who were both Catholic, taught me to hate antisemitism since I was a kid. We lived in a Jewish neighborhood. I want nothing to do with it. But that’s not what this is about.

JW: I’m very glad you mentioned Islamophobia because the Trump administration letter that was released on Monday cited, among the sources of evidence of antisemitism at Harvard, the internal report that Harvard itself conducted. The internal report, among other things, did a survey that included Muslim students. Let me just briefly summarize what they found. Six percent of Christian students said they felt physically unsafe at Harvard. Fifteen percent of Jewish students did. But 47 percent of Muslim students said they felt physically unsafe. And 92 percent of Muslim students—virtually all—said they were worried about expressing their views on the Harvard campus. So did 61 percent of Jewish students and 51 percent of Christian students. So we have a majority of all Harvard undergraduates say they’re worried about expressing their views. What should Harvard do about this problem?

EJD: We need to find ways of bringing students who disagree together in venues where they can have honest conversations. Again, in my own classes, I regularly bring in speakers who disagree with me because I’m trying to model the idea that you can disagree and have real arguments around a lot of issues, because a lot of issues are really complicated. I think those are good things to do. I don’t think we need Donald Trump dictating how that is done. And again, that’s why I think it’s so important to resist this heavy hand. Universities can and should solve this problem themselves.

JW: So antisemitism is Trump’s number one pretext for going after Harvard and other schools. But in the official Department of Justice letter to Harvard a month ago that set off the lawsuit, they listed several other goals and requirements to restoring the funds that had been cut. And the second big one was what they call “viewpoint diversity.” They demand that Harvard bring in outside auditors to determine whether each academic department has viewpoint diversity. The demand that the government has made of Harvard is that by August 2025—this is a month from now—the university shall commission an external party which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence 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. They have to report to the federal government their findings by the end of 2025. And every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty. Is there any constitutional basis for the federal government imposing viewpoint diversity on private universities?

EJD: The answer is no. And whenever this issue comes up, I start thinking, gee, I guess they want to bring more democratic socialists and social Democrats into economics faculties. Wouldn’t that be interesting if they demanded that kind of viewpoint diversity? But this notion that you’re going to get a list from the administration and say, “you got to hire these folks,” is absurd. And again, I think what’s so poisonous about this conversation is, yeah, there were a lot of debates about the academy. We ought to be having what should be a really searching conversation turns into an awful fight over concentrated government power.

JW: And concentrated government power is also an issue in Trump’s demand that Harvard change its admission process for international students. The Department of Justice letter requires that Harvard screen international applicants to determine whether they support terrorism or antisemitism, and they have to immediately report international students who’ve already been admitted to federal authorities if they broke university conduct policy. We do not really want the federal government requiring that universities investigate and report on the political views and activities of their foreign student applicants.

EJD: We don’t want universities reporting on the views of any student, foreign or domestic, as it were. University is a time when students experiment with ideas. They get engaged. Thank God, young people feel passionately about issues related to justice and fairness and equality, but they’re also very conservative students on campus who are also themselves very engaged. I wouldn’t want a left-wing administration launching an inquiry into the conservative students’ association on any campus. And the same reason I don’t want a government launching an inquiry into left-wing students that the Trump administration doesn’t like.

JW: So as we speak this week, Harvard is negotiating with the Trump administration to see whether they can find common ground that would lead to Trump restoring the $2 billion or $3 billion in funding which has been cut. What do we know about the deals that Trump has promised to make? For instance, Columbia submitted to Trump’s demands in March. That was five months ago. Columbia has not gotten any of the $400 million of the federal funds that Trump cut. The secretary of education, Linda McMahon, recently stated that Columbia is “on the right track, but that further negotiations are required.” So I can imagine that even if Harvard agrees to Trump’s conditions, Trump would keep negotiating for another six months, a year. What do you think?

EJD: Many years ago, an important thing about the problem of negotiating with Donald Trump, there were many people in the real estate industry in New York who didn’t like making deals with Donald Trump. And the reason they didn’t like making deals is, as somebody put it to me at the time, with Trump, the deal is only the beginning of the negotiation. It’s not an agreement. He comes back and makes new demands and wants something that he never said was required in the original deal. And I think what you’re seeing at Columbia and what you’re seeing elsewhere is that Trump says, “Great, there’s a deal, but I also want this. And by the way, I also want that. And if you don’t do that, then the deal is exploded and I will do it unilaterally.” So I think that’s the biggest fear that any institution should have about negotiating with Donald Trump. There is no endpoint to the pressure that he is going to keep bringing, and that making a deal can simply be seen as a form of capitulation that he’ll take advantage of and push you farther down the road.

JW: One interesting exception here. Princeton continues to stand firm against Trump, led by its president, Chris Eisgruber, who declared on April 14th—this was two weeks after Trump cut $210 million in funding for Princeton—Eisgruber declared, “Princeton stands with Harvard.” And at Princeton’s commencement at the end of May, Eisgruber, in his commencement speech, said, “In this tender and pivotal moment, we must stand boldly for the freedom and principles that define this and other great universities.” And at that point, the applause from the crowd was so great it drowned him out, and they couldn’t hear the rest of his speech. The striking thing here is, to date, Trump has issued no demands of Princeton, nothing like what he said Columbia had to do, nothing like the letter to Harvard. It just announced you’re not getting $210 million. And Princeton has decided it will cover its losses, not so much by money from its endowment but by issuing bonds, which it had already done during Covid. So even if Harvard caves, Princeton then moves to take the lead of the resistance. So this is not over, no matter what happens with Harvard.

EJD: Bravo to him! And thank you to him for having the courage to stick with that. So none of what I’m about to say takes anything away from his witness. But I think that there are universities, the research universities as they’re called, that are more dependent on this money for a lot of their work than other universities. And I think that Trump would like to drive a wedge between the big research universities and other universities, and that’s why it’s so honorable that he is taking that position. In my ideal world, all universities would say no. And I salute President Garber for taking a look at that original letter and saying that “we’re not going to cave on any of this.” And that’s still where my gut is. But I guess when you asked me if Harvard University announced some kind of so-called deal, I would want to know exactly what it looks like before I could condemn it right out of the box. But I am very troubled with any agreement. As you said at the outset, if Harvard has to cave in, even to some degree, it’s not a good sign for other universities that are far less richly endowed than Harvard.

JW: E.J. Dionne writes about politics, and he’s part of Crimson Courage, the alumni group urging Harvard’s president not to compromise the school’s values and integrity in any sort of deal with the federal government. E.J., thanks for talking with us today.

EJD: Always a great joy to be with you. Thank you.