Trump Is Doing to Harvard What Mussolini Did to Italian Universities. End It!

Seventeen of the top twenty research universities in the world are in the United States. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because the government kept its hands off what gets taught, researched, and published. The Trump administration is dismantling that tradition. In April 2025, it froze $2.2 billion in federal research funding to Harvard, money tied to cancer research, infectious disease labs, and medical training. A federal judge ruled the freeze unconstitutional, finding it violated both the Civil Rights Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. The Trump administration appealed anyway, then filed a new lawsuit in February 2026 demanding seven years of admissions records from Harvard's undergraduate, law, and medical schools. We have seen this before. In 1953, McCarthy's investigators came to Harvard demanding names. Historians credit the university's resistance as a turning point that slowed the entire inquisition. In 1931, Mussolini required Italian professors to swear loyalty oaths to the state. More than 1,200 complied, and within years their universities had become instruments of the regime. Hungary's Viktor Orbán followed the same playbook, and his country's academic freedom never recovered. Please introduce legislation that explicitly bars the executive branch from freezing congressionally approved research funding as political leverage. Then hold public hearings on the NIH's attempt to cap research overhead reimbursements at 15%, a policy the courts already blocked, but other federal agencies quietly copied. The courts keep ruling against this administration in university cases. Congress should not leave that work entirely to judges.