What The Hell America!

Harvard University student Prince Williams has long suspected that his school’s administration has been watching him closely. 

Williams, an organizer with the African and African American Resistance Organization, was one of several students who were suspended by the school’s administrative board last year for participating in the encampment on Harvard Yard to protest the war in Gaza. The decision by administrators was later downgraded to academic probation. 

“I got cases for real,” said the senior, who is a history major. 

Williams and many student organizers like him have been fighting against Harvard’s strict policies regarding campus organizing. As a result, tensions have been building between campus organizers and the school’s administration.

But in the wake of the legal battle over academic oversight between President Donald Trump and Harvard, Williams said that students’ relationship with the school isn’t so oppositional. 

The federal government announced Tuesday it would cut about $450 million in grants to Harvard for failing to address what it said was rampant racial discrimination and antisemitism on Harvard’s campus.

That move came after the school filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration last month for freezing $2.2 billion in multiyear grants after it refused to comply with the government’s list of demands.

The ongoing legal battle between the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the federal government underscores the social and cultural challenges that Black students and Black professors often face at Harvard and other elite institutions: On one hand, they applaud the school’s efforts in standing up against the Trump administration, but on the other they have to grapple with how Harvard’s new policies and decisions have disproportionately harmed them. 

The school renamed its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging to Community and Campus Life on April 28, according to an email sent out to students. Hours later, Harvard also announced it would no longer host or fund affinity groups’ ceremonies, such as the Black student graduation during commencement, according to the Harvard Crimson, the school’s student-run newspaper.

Black students and professors said they feel like a wave of uncertainty has washed over them as they work to figure out how to navigate being Black on campus. 

“In this moment, we have an interesting position of trying to figure out, ‘OK, what is our positionality’ when the university is fighting a legal case against Trump, but at the same time, we know that the university has proven time and time again that it’s not for the students in sincerity, but it’s about defending its own interests,” Williams said. 

The university did not respond to Capital B’s requests for comment regarding the sentiments of Black students in this story. In a letter to the Trump administration, the school’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote that “Harvard is a place to bring people of all backgrounds together to learn in an inclusive environment where ideas flourish regardless of whether they are deemed ‘conservative,’ ‘liberal,’ or something else, a place where assumptions and claims are tested and challenged, respectfully and thoughtfully, in pursuit of knowledge and truth.” 

Black students and professors said they feel unprotected and unsure of their academic futures because of the ongoing legal battle. Black students said they are pushed to rethink how to create safe spaces for themselves on a campus that is slowly rolling back its DEI initiatives, and Black professors said they are unsure that the school can continue being a beacon of academic freedom under Trump’s heightened attacks against the university.

Even before Trump stepped into office for a second term, Black academics at the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning said they felt a shift in the campus climate last year. 

The resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s only Black president in its 388-year history, and the allegations of plagiarism against four Black women professors at the school from right-wing activists, were some of the early warning signs that the atmosphere at the school was changing, according to Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of sociology at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. 

Smith, a Black female professor, thought the university should’ve run a campaign to make it clear that Black academics were just as credible as any other scholar. But, it didn’t.

Feeling abandoned and betrayed by her university, she decided to go on a sabbatical to focus on her research and writing. 

“[Harvard] failed to protect members of the community,” said Smith, who is the director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “We are people that they recruited to be here, and yet in the face of attacks by those who want to de-legitimize Black scholarship, Black scholars, and the quality of the work that we bring to what we do — I feel like that was a real failure. For me, that was a major turning point.” 

At other colleges, Black professors have been facing similar stressors. At Columbia University in New York City, Karen Attiah, a columnist at The Washington Post, taught a course called “Race and Western Journalism” at the school’s School of International and Public Affairs. But Attiah recently had her class canceled for the spring 2025 semester. 

“There’s this sense of, ‘Is my institution going to have my back?’ It’s just this sense of ‘Am I safe; is my work safe?’” said Attiah, who added that in the wake of right-wing attacks on higher education, Black academics have been “canaries in the coal mine” for a broader assault on democratic institutions. 

Trump has said that the ongoing assaults on Harvard are part of a broader effort by his administration to purge the nation’s higher education landscape of what he’s called “wokeism” and “liberal ideologies.” 

Sa’maia Evans, a sophomore majoring in social studies and African American studies, said that although the university likes to imagine itself as a bastion of racial diversity, she hasn’t felt protected as an African American student on campus since the school entered into legal battle with the federal government.

“Harvard likes to pretend it’s Wakanda,” she said, referencing the fictional African nation depicted in Marvel’s Black Panther comic books and movies. Evans said the university acts as if “we aren’t like the rest of the world” and as if the campus is an “isolated bubble of diversity, but that’s not true.” 

Harvard Undergraduate Black Community Leaders, the organization that had spent months preparing its Black student graduation, found out on May 2 that the university abruptly canceled their reservation at Memorial Church, an interdenominational church on campus.

“It was really frustrating because we had done a lot of work on this since the fall,” said Elyse Martin-Smith, one of the organization’s co-chairs. The group is now working with the Black Graduate Student Association and the Harvard Black Alumni Society to find a new space to host the event and to fund it. 

The changing climate on Harvard’s campus has pushed Black organizers to focus on creating safe spaces for students to talk about how they feel on campus, whether that be through campus discussions or holding events dedicated to Black students. 

“Folks have taken this as a time to really build and also understand what’s the end goal and vision for students. What could that look like in a positive framework rather than constantly fighting in a negative way as to what Black student life on campus can be,” Martin-Smith said. 

Last year, students created the African and African American Resistance Organization, also known as “AFRO.” One tenet of the activist group is that its members adhere to the philosophy that they are vulnerable alone.

The organization was formed as a space for students to organize around issues that affect Black Americans at Harvard, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. The group was created in response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning affirmative action and an April 2023 swatting incident, where a crime was falsely reported and prompted a large police response. In this case, four Black students were forced out of their dorm rooms at gunpoint.

Mia Montrose, a member of the organization and a junior studying environmental science and engineering, said that the current climate on campus has created “increased fear and increased resistance.” 

Still, in the wake of Harvard cancelling the Black student graduation, Montrose wonders if this moment will push organizations to form larger-scale acts of resistance. 

“These are very clear attacks against all students of color,” she said. 

Cornell Williams Brooks, a civil rights attorney turned Harvard professor, said that his biggest fear is that higher education will mirror the federal government’s inconsistencies and incompetence.

It doesn’t bode well for Harvard, a global leader in education, to be run by the same administration that has shrunk the economy and divided its citizens, said Brooks, who is Black.

“If we have the federal government trying to micromanage classes, can we trust the people trying to ban books to teach students?” said Brooks, who directs the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. 

Despite its flaws, Brooks believes Harvard is sincere in its efforts to protect academic freedom and its students and staff. 

“Harvard has to win this fight, not because of the Ivy League and the prestige and the endowment,” he said. “Harvard needs to win this fight in terms of the vitality of this democracy.”