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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
Activists Pushing Leftist Agenda In Our Classrooms; COVID Relief Funds Used For Woke School Programs; Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action In College Admissions; U.S. Judge Rules Trump Admin Unlawfully Blocked $2.2B In Grants For Harvard; House Expected To Remain In Recess As Shutdown Nears; Jimmy Kimmel Blackout Ends As Local TV Giants Back Down. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired October 18, 2025 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:37]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, ANDERSON COOPER 360: Welcome to The Whole Story. I'm Anderson Cooper. Harvard is the richest and oldest university in the country and one of the best known academic institutions in the world, but it's now in the middle of a very public, high stakes battle with the President of the United States, who's targeted a number of colleges across the country. It started with allegations that Jewish students weren't being properly protected from rising antisemitism on campuses. There were further allegations about liberal bias and other issues.
The administration froze billions of dollars of federal funds that these universities rely on, not just for their academic programs, but for science and research programs as well. Some schools like Columbia and Brown settled with the Trump administration and paid large fines, but Harvard was the first to fight back in court. Over the next hour, CNN's Omar Jimenez takes us through the twists and turns of this ongoing battle what it may mean for the future of higher education.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Trump administration is taking aim at Harvard University as part of its crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Up, up, with liberation.
(CROWD CHANTS, UP, UP, WITH LIBERATION)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Down, down, with occupation.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Down, down --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're turning our students into communists and terrorists.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're the elitist of the elite. They're the wokest of the woke.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why are we spending $9 billion with them when they couldn't protect Jewish students?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Amelia Heller is a rising junior at Harvard from Sandy Springs, Georgia, the daughter of a rabbi who graduated from Harvard. She grew up with her sights set on the university and became the first student from her high school to attend.
A. HELLER: If there's two teams and one's Harvard and one's the Jews, it's like, I'm both.
W. HELLER: We're in Jerusalem, and we went to the Kotel, the Western Wall. It's traditional to write notes to put inside. And so Amelia was going into first grade, and so she's writing in her little Barbie notebook. She said, "Well, I'm writing. I want my family to be healthy. I want to have my friends in my class and I want to go to Harvard.
A. HELLER: I'm currently the President of Harvard Hillel, which is one of the big Jewish organizations on campus. It's very hard to be Jewish alone. You really need a community.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So good to see you.
A. HELLER: You too, yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I missed you so much.
MAHMOOD AL-THABATA, ORGANIZER, HARVARD PALESTINE SOLIDARITY COMMITTEE: So I'm a Palestinian. My family is from the occupied West Bank. My parents made sure that Palestine was something that I would see like every single day. So I got involved in PSC freshman year, the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
VIOLET BARRON, JEWISH STUDENT, CLASS OF '26: This is a Star of David necklace I got in Israel when I was five. I think I had a much more solid Jewish community before coming to college. I went to Hillel, I think a few times my freshman year, but didn't always feel welcome there. I think in large part, because I don't look stereotypically Jewish. The first few weeks of my sophomore year was all going pretty smoothly.
October 7, I was up really late working on a paper, and I saw the first like news blast.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've been getting reports of warning sirens going across Israel.
A. HELLER: I woke up and my phone was like blowing up.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are also hearing reports of a festival that was attacked.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As the Prime Minister said, we are at war.
A. HELLER: I was very worried. BARRON: So the week after October 7, I walked into Harvard Hillel, seeking Jewish community. I was also really interested in some sort of joint vigil between Hillel and our Palestine Solidarity Committee, and was immediately shot down.
AL-THABATA: It was a very difficult time just watching videos of people of my own being absolutely slaughtered by Israeli Occupation Forces or being terrified over my family living in the West Bank, definitely organizing felt worthwhile.
A. HELLER: I think the first time all of the anti-Semitism and anti- Zionism reared its head was the statement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On October 7th, Harvard's Palestine Solidarity Committee released a letter, cosigned by 33 student groups. It read, "We the undersigned student organizations hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence."
A. HELLER: I was still new to Harvard.
And then it felt like kind of everyone was against me.
BARRON: I remember just being shocked, and I think hurt. How could that possibly have been Israel's fault?
[22:05:05]
But I definitely did not think that the people would sign that letter were hateful or anti-Semitic, just thought they were deeply misguided.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the university's President issued a statement condemning Hamas and said that, "No student group speaks for Harvard."
A. HELLER: A bunch of student leaders came forward saying, they regret signing it, but I think once the word's out, you can't take it back.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The statement quickly gained national attention.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So Bill Ackman is saying, "Look, we ain't going to hire you."
MIKE HUCKABEE, UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL: I'd say to all the donors, close your check books.
BARRON: And the donors teamed up and sent this truck to campus. I remember some very close friends being labelled Harvard's leading anti-Semites. And I think in that moment, I knew something was deeply wrong.
AL-THABATA: I would have my information be put on a doxing website having death threats against me. I mean, when you see so many attacks happening, students being chased with knives, having alcohol being poured on their faces for wearing keffiyeh, being called terrorists.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two reports from Harvard found that nearly half of Muslim students who responded felt physically unsafe on campus during the 2023 school year. Jewish students reported similar fears.
BARRON: I'm Jewish, never once felt unsafe, and was seeing my pro- Palestine peers being afraid. So that was a large motivation for starting Jews from Palestine.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have a unique privilege as Jews, to use our voices.
(CROWD CHANTS, CEASEFIRE NO)
A. HELLER: Jews for Palestine protested some of our Hillel events, people chanting, you know, "If you go to Harvard Hillel, you support genocide" and things like that. It's their right to protest, but just very difficult.
CROWD: Not another nickel, not another dime. No more money for Israel's crimes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Along with calling for Harvard's divestment from Israel, Jews for Palestine had three major demands.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hey, hey, ho, ho the occupation has got to go.
A. HELLER: I was walking back to my dorm one Friday afternoon, and I just hear like chanting.
CROWD: Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.
A. HELLER: I can handle people yelling, but I like had a physical reaction. I was very scared walking back to my dorm.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Harvard is complicit.
CHRISTOPHER RUFO, CONSERVATIVE POLICITAL ACTIVIST: You see students and also many faculty members celebrating the Hamas terror attack against Israel, whom they consider to be the great oppressor.
OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: Well, I don't know that Harvard University, the -- the institution was coming out and celebrating October 7, but if I'm understanding you correctly, it was sort of the feeling that because these protests were going on the way that they did on these campuses, and that they were allowed to continue, that it projected this feeling that the universities were okay with it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chris Rufo is a well-known Conservative Activist who's advised the Trump administration.
RUFO: The university system does not have an unlimited right to promote an ideology and --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And is a leading voice against DEI in America.
RUFO: I think many Americans, in retrospect, that was a turning point, not just about universities, but about the culture as a whole. People said, "Hey, wait a minute, something has gone terribly wrong with America's institutions." If you look at the statements from President Claudine Gay in the wake of October 7, they were equivocal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On October 12, Claudine Gay released a video response after two separate written statements were met with criticism.
GAY: Our university rejects terrorism, that includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. Our university rejects hate.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But Gay's statement wasn't enough for the university's critics.
RUFO: In politics, when you find someone in a dilemma, that's the moment where you can attack.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Happening today, House lawmakers will begin a hearing on combating anti-Semitism on college campuses.
STEVEN LEVITSKY, PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: This was a political assault. The problem is, at the time, university presidents didn't realize it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or No?
GAY: Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct, again, it depends on the context.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign.
RUFO: They couldn't react even in a kind of minimally human way.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Claudine Gay is, "Sorry" if she offended anyone. I don't consider that an apology.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And then came the reports of plagiarism.
RUFO: And so when that drip, drip, drip, drip of all the papers and all the citations and all the stealing, I knew it was only a matter of time before we could just push, push, push, and that she would be gone.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Under intense pressure, including a campaign led by Rufo, Claudine Gay resigned in January and was replaced by Alan Garber.
LARRY SUMMERS, FORMER PRESIDENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: It was a sad episode for President Gay, who's been a committed scholar all her life.
A. HELLER: I think this spring a lot of Jewish students went back with hope, thinking that it would die down. But then things started picking up again.
[22:10:11]
BARRON: We launched our encampment on April 24, 2024. For the most part, it was very joyful.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One, two, three.
AL-THABATA: They were just meeting together, reading books about Palestine. We hear debates happening on campus. It felt like a really big community advocating for like one shared goal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are here today to tell the story of liberation.
A. HELLER: The freshmen live in Harvard Yard, so I lived very close.
CROWD: We will (Inaudible). We will (inaudible).
A. HELLER: My parents were very worried about me going back, because, you know, the encampment wasn't violent, but there's always that question of like, "What if we were not making campus a dangerous place for Jewish students?" I think any sort of fear or anxiety was purely due to a disconnect between them and the people in it.
SHABBOS KESTENBAUM, JEWISH GRADUATE STUDENT, CLASS OF '24: As a very visibly Jewish student, when they would see me approaching, they would put on these bright yellow safety vests, and they would take out their phones, and they would start recording me.
KESTENBAUM: Coming from the Harvard Homeless Shelter. When we talk about anti-Semitism on college campuses this is what we're talking about. Every time we walk somewhere, we get followed.
And then they would start following me on my way to class. And not only did Alan Garber never respond, he actually told the encampment leaders, "If you agree to pack up your tents, we will allow you to meet with the Harvard Management Corporation." If you call for the Intifada loud enough, and if you follow Jews on their way to class long enough, because he will be rewarded. That's what Alan Garber did.
BARRON: The only thing that Alan Garber wanted to communicate to us was that, he was not willing to negotiate with us and that there would not be any future negotiations.
(CROWD CHANTS, GARBER, GARBER YOU CAN'T HIDE)
(CROWD CHANTS, WE CHARGE YOU WITH GENOCIDE)
LEVITSKY: The idea that anti-Semitism was rampant at Harvard, I tell you, as a Jew who was here every day and who walked among the encampment, is just preposterous. No authoritarian wakes up in the morning and says, "I'm going to tell everyone that I really want to crush the universities." They got to have a reason. In this case, the first pretext that the Trump administration grabbed was anti-Semitism.
STEVEN PINKER, PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: The actions that they're taking aren't good for -- for the Jews in general. They have indulged anti-Semites, including having a Holocaust denier for dinner.
JIMENEZ: We talked with Harvard professors who believe the Trump administration is using anti-Semitism as an excuse to crack down on Harvard as a whole. Do you see it that way?
RUFO: No, and I don't see it that way, because I've seen the -- the inside Harvard perspective. And the problem is much deeper than anti- Semitism. Anti-Semitism is only one of a number of serious legal, cultural and institutional problems at Harvard.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:15:01]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is Harvard, a mighty symbol of America's faith and education.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A monument to the universal idol of education as a uniting force for people everywhere.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Harvard is the oldest, richest, most famous American university.
KESTENBAUM: You know prestige of Harvard was one of the reasons I applied.
A. HELLER: I like screamed when I saw I got in.
BARRON: A lot of people will film opening their letter.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh my god.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah. Yeah.
BARRON: I didn't want to do that. I thought it might jinx it. I remember just like running out of my room kind of screaming.
A. HELLER: I was talking to my parents the night I got in, and I was like, "Should I commit?" And they're like, "Are you kidding? You just don't say no to Harvard."
LEVITSKY: Harvard is simply the most influential of US private universities is also able to send a message if, in fact, the Trump administration is able to beat Harvard, every other university and college in the United States is going to know that it cannot afford to take on the Trump administration.
RUFO: You want to always try to go as high on the chain as possible. And you -- you work your way up, you experiment, you learn, but then eventually you're going to have to say, "We're going to have to go into the ring with the biggest, meanest, baddest, strongest opponent."
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And this is that title fight?
RUFO: And this is that title fight.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: When I'm President, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals.
NIALL FERGUSON, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION: It's not like Trump was the first President to start seeking to exert power over the universities.
JOHN F. KENNEDY, 35TH U.S. PRESIDENT: It ought to be possible for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.
ADAM HARRIS, EDUCATION POLICY SENIOR FELLOW, NEW AMERICA: An institution like Harvard, prior to the 1960s had token enrolments of black people. It was quite literally three or four in each class.
Affirmative action comes in --
HARRIS: 1961. And so from 1961 to 1966 you have colleges actually saying, "Hey, we need to comply with Title VI, because now it says that we can't discriminate against black people if we want to continue to receive federal funding."
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At the same time, college campuses erupted with civil rights and antiwar protests.
ELLEN SCHRECKER, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR, NO IVORY TOWER - MCCARTHYISM AND THE UNIVERSITIES: In the 1960s that's when students became active. This began this process of Right-wing politicians delegitimizing higher education.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When students on university campuses engage in violence. I think bums is perhaps too kind a word to apply to that kind of person.
SCHRECKER: A lot of what you're seeing today is the culmination of 50 to 60 years of backlash.
HARRIS: Around September 2020 post the George Floyd reckoning. You have universities saying that they will try to be better in terms of how inclusive their environments were on campus, and that's really where you start to see conservative interest and higher education really explode.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Diversity, equity and inclusion.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Critical Race Theory.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everything we hear about white privilege and systemic racism began as a lecture.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: DEI and affirmative action became two of the biggest partisan rallying cries against Harvard.
RUFO: Harvard's leaders believe that their ideology, let's call it, Left-wing racialism, had primacy over the constitution of the United States.
ELI SOLOMON, VP, HARVARD REPUBLICAN BOARD: It sort of worked in the reverse way that you would expect it would.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sophomore Eli Solomon sits on the Board of the Harvard Republican Club. He's a self-described Right-wing student, and believes DEI efforts sometimes deepen rather than bridge divisions.
SOLOMON: When the DEI office comes in and has programming where it's, you know, just sorting people into buckets, you see how that actually creates like a segregated space.
RUFO: Harvard as an institution, its central administration is a systemically racist institution that has embedded explicitly discriminatory policies of --
JIMENEZ: Towards -- towards race?
RUFO: Towards whites Asians and Jews.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Equal --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In 2023, a discrimination case from Asian-American applicants to Harvard made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the justices ruled that Harvard's admissions practices violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the law.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Supreme Court has gutted affirmative action as we know it in college admissions.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So there were many indicators that all was not well in the culture of the university.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You were a more conservative history professor at Harvard University during your time there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But that's not hard, given that the faculty are overwhelmingly to the left or center. Political discrimination became overt along the lines of we can't hire X conservative.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Along with DEI and race-based admissions, critics of Harvard have pointed to what they see as a lack of viewpoint or ideological diversity.
JIMENEZ: How do you see the diversity of viewpoint? Is that still an issue?
SUMMERS: I think it is an issue, and I think you learn the most from being exposed to ideas that make you uncomfortable, not from being exposed to ideas that confirm your prejudices.
[22:20:02]
SOLOMON: The issue definitely lies more with the faculty. Nobody's going to give you an F because you took a conservative view. But they might give you a bad grade for not understanding something the way they did. And I think that there are more conservative students who people realize that think they're just quieter because there is that fear that if they express their political beliefs, it might be damaging for jobs or you know they might say something controversial get canceled, things like that.
KESTENBAUM: Students repeatedly report that they self-censor their projects, their essays, the things they say in class.
A. HELLER: I was in a club, and I just didn't tell them I was going to Israel. I was worried that would change how they'd feel about me. I'm just more guarded.
SOLOMON: I've definitely lost friends, because they've discovered that I have certain beliefs or because of things that I've said.
LEVITSKY: The current generation of students, they're not very good at dealing with differing opinions. They have a tendency to shun people of minority ideological views, which is terrible. It's a challenge that we were trying to get better at.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And then came 2024, and the return of Trump to the White House. It was what critics of Harvard and other universities needed to strike.
RUFO: Day one of Trump too, I realized they're ready, and they're going to go big. It's like having a water pistol at the beginning, and then suddenly you have a tank.
TRUMP: The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On April 11, the battle between Trump and Harvard escalated. The university received an emailed letter of sweeping demands from the Trump administration. A letter that was reportedly sent by mistake. Mistaken or not, the demand sent shockwaves through Cambridge and led Harvard to believe a confrontation with Trump was now unavoidable.
Among the many demands, "Eliminate the university's Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs. Ban masks on campus and shut down initiatives it claimed fueled anti-Semitic harassment." It even called for an external viewpoint diversity audit of faculty and students.
SOLOMON: I was a little bit shocked, but at the same time, I was glad that somebody had been putting real pressure on the university to make these needed changes.
A. HELLER: I honestly wasn't sure how I felt. Is he really doing it for Jewish students? Is he really doing it for me?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three days later, Harvard made the government's letter public, and Harvard President, Alan Garber fired back, rejecting the demands. That same day, the Trump administration took action, targeting the university's money.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: More than $2.2 billion in federal funding has been frozen --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cutting off all new federal research grants.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And now the administration has asked the IRS to revoke Harvard's tax exempt status.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And it didn't stop there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Saying that Harvard is in, "Violent Violation" of the Civil Rights Act.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: President Trump barring Harvard University from enrolling international students. Nearly 30% of the student population.
HARRIS: International students are also typically full pay students. This brings in the tuition revenue that institutions rely on.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And that ban threatened the visas of students like Abdullah Shahid Sial.
SHAHID SIAL: So I'm from Lahore, Pakistan. We only had two students admitted from our country of 240 million people. I was lucky enough to be among those two people. I had made my peace with you know, getting deported and getting my visa revoked when I decided to speak at the first protest. When they come for one of us, they're coming for every single one of us.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Within 24 hours, a federal judge blocks the move to ban international students, but Sial still feared coming back for the fall semester.
SHAHID SIAL: I've never gone through immigration when I know there is a big target on my back.
TRUMP: Now Harvard has to understand the last thing I want to do is, hurt them. They're hurting themselves. They're fighting.
JIMENEZ: Some have looked at this and said, "Well, because universities handled October 7 poorly, it left the door open for the Trump administration." Do you lay any blame at Harvard's leadership for the moment we're in right now?
SUMMERS: If I leave my door open, then I make it possible and I facilitate somebody stealing my property. That doesn't mean it's okay. What the universities did does not justify what the Trump administration is doing, but that doesn't mean that they didn't make serious mistakes, and that doesn't mean those mistakes aren't having consequences.
FERGUSON: I think there was different way of approaching this, which would have involved the use of a scalpel rather than a bazooka. I think the government would have won a case on discrimination on civil rights issues relatively easily. Harvard would then have lost its tax exempt status. The lesson of history is that when universities become dependent on the government for money, it tends not to end well.
JIMENEZ: So why does the richest university in the world even need federal funding? Harvard's endowment is huge, about $53 billion but what makes it complicated is that most of it actually can't be touched.
Roughly 80% of the endowment is restricted to donor-specified purposes, things like scholarships, professorships or certain academic programs. So then, when you look at billions frozen by the Trump administration and added costs of endowment taxes, yes, even Harvard, the richest university in the world is going to feel it.
[22:25:20]
LEVITSKY: What big institution doesn't make mistakes? But I think the Trump administration was going to come after us no matter what.
PINKER: They're carrying out their strategy of making universities the enemy.
We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.
PINKER: They are trying to cripple, punish, bleed out the universities, as they have with the media and the law firms.
LEVITSKY: This is an authoritarian assault, and when civil society begins to give in to authoritarian demands, you lose your democracy.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:30:36]
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The White House continuing to wage war against Harvard University.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Trump administration announcing a freeze of more than $2 billion in promised US government funding.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: 950 ongoing research projects stopped cold.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A week after President Trump turned off the flow of federal funds to Harvard, the school fired back filing a lawsuit demanding the money be restored, claiming the cuts were jeopardizing the institution's ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries and innovative solutions.
JIMENEZ: By summer, the metaphorical bazooka President Trump fired at Harvard had definitely hit, and there were some real world implications already being felt.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As Harvard's lawyers battled to restore more than $2 billion worth of federal funds for science, tuberculosis researcher Dr. Sarah Fortune was scrambling, along with other scientists at Harvard School of Public Health to figure out how and if she could continue potentially lifesaving research.
FORTUNE: TB is the leading infectious cause of death in the world. We are trying to understand drug resistance in TB, we're trying to understand immune protection from TB, and we're trying to understand how to diagnose TB better.
The contract that was cut was a seven-year contract, roughly worth $8 million a year that funded a little work at Harvard, but probably 85% of the funding went to other institutions. We've -- our consortium, actually, of 21 labs at 14 institutions, and that money just stopped, and for us, importantly, there were research animals that were supported on the grants, which is like a half a million dollars, we gave serious thought to euthanizing the animals. We luckily didn't have to do that because a philanthropic donor stepped forward. We should not have to count on philanthropic donors stepping forward to save research animals in a research system that is as sophisticated as the United States.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Those animals did survive, but substantial portions of the research may not.
FORTUNE: We have basically $32 million worth of data that has not been fully analyzed or put into the public domain that understands that the emerging lessons of the data is sitting in the hands of the research scientists who are dealing with the data, and as those people are laid off, even though the data technically still exists, it loses its value because nobody understands how It got there, what the next step is, and so the data is wasted. It just doesn't come back even if the money does come back.
SHAPRIO: This research is really in jeopardy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. Roger Shapiro works with Dr. Fortune at Harvard School of Public Health, and he runs several HIV studies in Botswana. Shapiro's team has been focusing on three antibodies that have been shown to suppress HIV and are naturally occurring in some people.
SHAPRIO: We have 40 children that we're following, and we're just about at the point where we are doing the critical science we use these new antibody drugs on top of the standard HIV treatment that they're receiving that might ultimately lead to these children being able to control HIV on their own, without anything. HIV might still be in these children's bodies somewhere, but it'll be so well contained that it won't give them any trouble, and that's the goal of our current research study that was just terminated.
RUFO: Look, the universities put themselves unknowingly into an enormous vulnerability when they started accepting federal funds, and then when they started accepting a systemically critical amount of federal funds, taxpayers give universities about $150 billion a year. Harvard made a calculation that in -- in retrospect is astonishing for -- for an institution that probably has a higher you know median IQ than any other institution in the country.
[22:35:00]
It's run by some very dumb people with extremely poor political instincts. They thought that they could you know hoover up federal support, adopt Radical Left-wing positions across the board and violate the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act with no consequences in perpetuity.
FORTUNE: Did you think about the economics of Harvard's endowment, which are $50 billion which sounds like a whole lot of money. If you're paying out $2 billion of that every year, short order, it's gone, and that's just for research costs that were actually part of a research agenda that was driven by the federal government. Our endowment cannot support the research agenda of the federal government.
JIMENEZ: Because of some of the federal freezes you got research on tuberculosis, cancer, HIV, transmission to babies, other important issues have been cut off pretty suddenly. And, you know, they might not have a chance to pick back up in the same way if, when funding is resumed. Are you okay with sacrificing I guess that scientific progress?
RUFO: I would actually phrase the question differently. The question is, why is Harvard so committed to violating the Civil Rights Act that they are willing to sacrifice the good scientific research that they do?
SOLOMON: Harvard could have never paused any of these research programs at all by simply accepting the federal demands immediately.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: However you view these funding cuts, the fallout from them extends way beyond Harvard and will for a long time.
DAVID CHRISTIANI: These are the freezers that are important for our day-to-day use.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. David Christiani's lab collects studies and sustains 30 years of lung cancer data.
CHRISTIANI: After extract the DNA, we put it in a deep freezer. The problem is you have to maintain their temperamental freezers. You have to keep the room cold. If there's no funding, we have to either destroy the samples or give them away to somebody. We'll just lose a very, very valuable resource that will not be easy to reproduce. A new study in the future might tell you what happens at one year, two years or three years, but not 25 years. So I think that's a very big loss to the research community and to the patients who suffer from this.
FORTUNE: What is most damaging about all of this, it's clearly the effects on the trainees. They are the people who are going to develop the new vaccine for TB or the new cure for cancer, and this is pitching them out on the street. You cannot just cook that person up again if the money comes back in two years' time, like you have lost a generation of scientists.
When you think about what medical research has done, sometimes it's easier to put it in terms of like one person. So my brother died in 1975 of a Wilms tumor. So he was three years old. I was six, and at that point, the mortality of a Wilms tumor was like 90%. Today, the mortality of the Wilms tumor is less than 10%. So that is what medical research does. It takes all those kids and it saves them.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:42:54]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just moments ago, a crucial hearing wrapped in a Boston courthouse as Harvard fights back against the Trump administration for blocking more than $2 billion in federal funding.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: While Harvard publicly fought what it considered government overreach into a private university, the school began making changes aligned with the Trump agenda almost as soon as the encampment came down in 2024 before Trump was re-elected.
BARRON: May 14th, we left the yard in exchange for the President's written promise that he would set up two meetings with us in the fall and that the President would urge the disciplinary boards to, I guess, try the cases in line with past President. A few days after we struck that deal, the Dean of my house tells me that I've been suspended for a year. I started crying. I was shocked. It ended up being five of us in total, four other students were suspended for a year or longer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And about 20 were put on probation. But the strict punishments didn't even last through the summer.
BARRON: This group of faculty -- members had put enough pressure on administration to ensure that we would all have our levels of discipline kind of walked back. So I entered the fall of 2024 on probation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Harvard has made numerous changes aimed at addressing anti-Semitism, including adopting a formal definition of anti-Semitism, which can include certain heated attacks on Israel, expanding trainings, new class offerings. Harvard also terminated the leadership at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
AL-THABATA: It was really hurtful. In the spring, you would get an email that both of the directors would be fired.
We felt like a home, honestly, where you -- I would work there, I would study there.
[22:45:05]
SCHRECKER: They're doing what we call anticipatory obedience. They are rushing to get ahead of what they see as the forthcoming pressures on them.
PINKER: Harvard has eliminated the diversity statements in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It has adopted a policy of institutional neutrality. It has ceased to promote so called affinity celebrations, where students sort themselves after graduation into racial and ethnic and religious groups.
BARRON: We don't think Harvard has taken the stand that many people think that it has against Trump. We have seen Harvard carry out many of the things that Trump would like it to do.
FERGUSON: I think the shock of the new administration is going to cause change, but I don't think it's necessarily the right change. The only way really to change American academia is to create new institutions that model academic freedom and model meritocracy and compete with the established institutions. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And for him, that's the University of Austin. This startup University was cofounded in 2021 by Ferguson, Journalist Bari Weiss and Tech Entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, among others.
FERGUSON: I hope that at least some of the innovations that we're pioneering will influence the established universities. My copy of the Iliad, which I bought.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At the University of Austin, there is no DEI, Ferguson says.
FERGUSON: We can't do admissions or promotions on anything other than academic achievement and potential, and that's why we said, "Look, you know what? Let's just look at the test scores."
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two or three.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think if you pursue a really merit-based admission system, you'll get diversity.
JIMENEZ: If one year it was overwhelmingly black people from the American south who were middle class, that was the most talented group, and then it swung just by pure happenstance. This year it's the Latino population has swelled.
FERGUSON: There'll be fluctuations from year-to-year. If you start prioritizing social engineering, which is exactly what the established universities have been doing, then the law of unintended consequences kicks in. Once you start doing that, one thing's for sure, you're not prioritizing academic excellence.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Among the priorities here what's called viewpoint diversity and academic freedom. In other words, hire professors of all political persuasions and allow them to say what they think without fear of repercussions.
MADELINE MEEGAN, FRESHMAN, UNIVERSITY OF AUSTIN: I had gone to their high school program, and it was just this incredible mix of opinions in this incredible openness that really attracted me to the university.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Former Harvard President, Larry Summers was a member of the University of Austin's Advisory Board until this past summer.
JIMENEZ: I saw you put out that you resigned from the Advisory Board at UATX.
SUMMERS: I was enthusiastic about the idea of an institution that would be much more balanced on, for example, left-right issues than many other universities are. But when I saw evolution towards being an aggressive Right-wing counterweight engaged in ideological battle against the rest of the academic community, that wasn't the approach that felt right for me.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The school's new President has heard the argument he runs a conservative school.
CARLOS CARVALHO, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF AUSTIN: I don't accept that label. We are unapologetically American and Western civilization base in our ideas and our curriculum. If that reads conservative in 2025, that's somebody else's problem, not ours.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The school has a few 100 students and isn't yet accredited. For now, it runs largely on donations, but Ferguson says, "It will never take federal funding."
FERGUSON: We don't want $1 from the federal government, because we really value our freedom from political control.
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[22:53:50]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: After months of fighting, just as Harvard students were starting fall classes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Federal Judge has handed Harvard a major legal win. Ruling at the White House unlawfully canceled more than $2 billion in grants.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She writes in her opinion that the administration used anti-Semitism as a smoke screen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assaults on this country's premier universities.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Harvard won for now. By mid-September, the federal government had restored some of Harvard's federal grants, but it's just a small fraction, and the Trump administration is still pushing for massive long-term cuts to the government funding of scientific research.
CHRISTIANI: It's part of a larger attack on universities, on science, and that worries me, because it's going to be hard to come back from as a society.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr. Fortune and Dr. Christiani have been told their federal funding is being restored.
SHAPRIO: So we have 40 kids that we follow.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dr Shapiro doesn't know what will happen to his HIV research long-term. On top of that, he's worried continued fighting at Harvard could scare away future scientists, especially the ones from overseas.
[22:55:11]
SHAPRIO: We may see that students from other countries don't want to train at Harvard anymore. It's too risky. They don't have a clear path towards a scientific future here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Trump administration tried twice in the spring to suspend international students from coming to Harvard. Those attempts were blocked, but not permanently.
TRUMP: We have people want to go to Harvard and other schools they can't get in, because we have foreign students there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there is concern among international students like Abdullah Shahid Sial.
SIAL: That there is no certainty. And I think that is what the biggest impact on students like me or in the wider international community is. It's just that fear. It will take years and years for these institutions, not just Harvard, to regain the trust of incredibly smart individuals who don't happen to have a US citizenship.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The long-term status of international students isn't the only issue up in the air. So is the status of a deal between Harvard and the US government, which seemed imminent this summer.
SIAL: If a deal is to be made, there are some red lines which I wouldn't want to be seen across. Complete academic freedom, where professors can choose what they want to teach, is a big red line, keeping a policy in -- by which they admit international students completely independent of what the White House administration wants, should also be something which they should be strongly, strongly fighting for.
JIMENEZ: Hey, what's up, Eli?
SOLOMON: I hope that Harvard is mandated to conduct an internal audit of ideological diversity amongst its professorship and submitted for review. I hope Harvard's hiring practices are reformed such that all metrics involving race, gender and ethnicity are completely eliminated and that hiring is meritocratic-only.
FERGUSON: So I think what will happen is that the bazooka shells will land. Harvard will lose a lot of money, there'll be a great deal of disruption, and -- and then this too shall pass. And would have forgotten why it was that the university became a target, and the focus will return to, how can we repair the damage that Donald Trump did?
RUFO: What I think is so remarkable about what the administration has done, is that they're saying, "Let's use all of the tools available." Department of Education, Health and Human Services, Foreign Student visas, you know, litigation in the courts, Article II powers. And I personally believe that the President is not even going to the limits.
JIMENEZ: You think he could go further than he's gone right now?
RUFO: Yes.
TRUMP: Billions of dollars has been paid to Harvard.
RUFO: If these universities don't want to follow the law, I think he'd be justified in doing exactly what Kennedy did, sending in the 101st airborne to forcibly desegregate and eliminate racialist discrimination from federally-funded universities, and I don't think that the time has come to send in the troops, but the point is that, that is really the upper bound of what is possible under the Constitution and under the President.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pro Palestinian protests will be back at Harvard this semester. But there are new rules designed to keep them from becoming disruptive.
HELLER: (Inaudible).
BARRON: Yeah there's a lot of --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mahmood Al-Thabata and his friends are already organizing.
BARRON: Do we want to bring back Keffiyeh Thursday.
AL-THABATA: I feel like it'll be nice to bring back Keffiyeh Thursday.
BARRON: I'm going to protest until I feel like Harvard is doing everything it can to not be complicit in genocide and occupation of the Palestine.
JIMENEZ: Do you worry about jeopardizing your own degree and your own chance at graduation by participating in -- in protests?
BARRON: What feels most important to me is not getting that degree, but saying what I believe.
HELLER: I think when people inevitably look back on the past two years at Harvard, I hope that what people learn is that it's really important to have places where we can have dialog, even if we disagree, because it's really important to, you know, put our differences aside and still come together.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Student Body Co-President Sial says he already sees more students putting aside their differences.
CROWD: (Inaudible).
SHAHID SIAL: There was this deep sense of polarization on campus after two by seven. But when President Trump started attacking international students directly at Harvard, students found a very common enemy -- "enemy." And so now there's this very strong sense of unity.
JIMENEZ: None of the students I've spoken to have wanted to leave. They're here, they're still here.
SHAHID SIAL: I don't know what free of war, which I know we can win. Whenever I talk to people, they are like Oh my god (Inaudible). Its not an amazing time to be at Harvard. These are still very interesting times because were trying to fight a battle which no other university in the U.S. has fought.
JIMENEZ: A battle without a clear end in sight. Under Trump 2.0. (END VIDEOTAPE)
