What Harvard’s Lawsuit Should Have Said
“Known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Harvard Corporation is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” So reads the Harvard Corporation website. But you would hardly know it was a corporation at all based on Harvard’s recent fifty-page complaint against the federal government, which attempted to commandeer the university through an April 11 letter demanding that Harvard change its governance, hiring and admissions practices, and faculty viewpoint diversity on pain of losing research funding. You also wouldn’t know that Harvard possesses an array of corporate rights that predate the creation of the United States, were transformed into constitutional rights in 1780, and offer powerful arguments against invasion of the university’s autonomy. This Essay argues that Harvard’s lawsuit should have invoked these corporate-constitutional rights.
Table of Contents Show
Introduction
“[The university’s] autonomy as an independent corporation is another building block of academic freedom.”[1]
“Known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Harvard Corporation is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” So reads the Harvard Corporation website. But you would hardly know it was a corporation at all based on Harvard’s recent fifty-page complaint against the federal government,[2] which attempted to commandeer the university through an April 2025 letter, demanding that Harvard change its governance, hiring and admissions practices, and faculty viewpoint diversity—on pain of losing research funding. You also wouldn’t know that Harvard possesses an array of corporate rights that predate the creation of the United States and offer powerful arguments against invasion of the university’s autonomy.
Harvard’s lawsuit rightly raised several claims under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but none sounded in the original basis for what we now call institutional academic freedom: corporate rights. I argued recently that universities need to go corporate. That is, they need to view themselves and their relation to civil authorities through the corporate framework,[3] including by asserting their corporate rights. By “corporation,” I mean the general legal term for a unity at law.[4] Church corporations, municipal corporations, non-profit corporations, and university corporations all have rights and privileges, and “the corporate form . . . was granted to them long before it was granted to business entities.”[5] Thus, in the university context, going corporate has nothing to do with business corporations.[6] Instead, going corporate entails the university acting as (and therefore literally becoming) itself. Happily, public and private American universities, which are all corporations, have energetically defended their corporate rights and privileges, often to very good effect, since at least the first decade of the nineteenth century.[7]
In Harvard’s case, going corporate means (1) naming its ancient corporate rights and (2) claiming its constitutional rights in its corporate capacity. Through their 1780 Constitution, the People of Massachusetts perpetuated Harvard’s corporate rights, which it first received in its 1650 Charter. I argue that these corporate-constitutional rights include the classic academic rights of self-constitution and self-governance, and that the APA protects Harvard’s state constitutional rights, which are its original constitutional rights,[8] as much as it protects Harvard’s federal constitutional rights.[9]
Accordingly, this is what Harvard’s lawsuit should have said:
“The Harvard Corporation is a 375-year-old university corporation that possesses ancient powers, authorities, rights, liberties, privileges, immunities, and franchises arising from its 1650 Charter, the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, and the U.S. Constitution, among other sources. Harvard holds in its corporate capacity many enumerated and unenumerated rights that predate the establishment of the United States. First, the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted Harvard a suite of rights and powers in its 1650 Charter. Then, the People of Massachusetts, in their sovereign capacity, perpetuated and protected these rights through their highest and most fundamental law—the Massachusetts Constitution—which itself predates the establishment of the United States. Thus, since 1780, Harvard has held its enumerated and unenumerated corporate rights as constitutional rights, and these rights include Harvard’s rights to govern itself, and to freely speak and associate. Moreover, Harvard holds in its corporate capacity federal constitutional rights, including to free speech and association. The APA provides remedy for federal violations of all of Harvard’s constitutional rights. The APA does not attempt to relegate state constitutional rights—Harvard’s original constitutional rights—to second-class status. Instead, Congress provided remedy for federal agency violations of a ‘constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity.’ Harvard’s many constitutional rights, powers, privileges, and immunities derive from both the Massachusetts Constitution and the U.S. Constitution, and the APA equally protects these constitutional rights, regardless of their origin. The U.S. government has no authority to disturb these ancient corporate-constitutional rights and, by extension, to disparage the sovereign People of Massachusetts. Nor does the government have authority to infringe on Harvard’s federal constitutional rights, which it holds in its corporate capacity. But that is exactly what the government’s April 11 demand letter did.”
Part I is about naming Harvard’s corporate rights; Part II is about claiming Harvard’s corporate rights.
I. Naming Harvard’s Corporate Rights
Harvard has powerful and ancient corporate rights. Invoking them first requires naming them. On May 31, 1650, the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered Harvard. In that document, the colonial legislature, with the governor’s assent, ordained that, “[w]hereas through the good hand of God many well devoted persons have been and daily are moved and stirred up to give and bestow sundry gifts legacies lands and revenues for the advancement of all good literature arts and sciences in Harvard College,” the “President and Fellows for the time being shall for ever hereafter in name and fact be one body politic and corporate in law to all intents and purposes and shall have perpetual succession.” Further, the charter stipulated, Harvard “may sue and plead or be sued and impleaded by the name aforesaid in all Courts and places of judicature within this jurisdiction,” and,
for the better ordering of the government of the said College and Corporation be it enacted by the authority aforesaid that the President and three more of the Fellows shall and may from time to time upon due warning or notice given by the President to the rest hold a meeting for the debating and concluding of affairs concerning the profits and revenues of any lands and disposing of their goods.
What is more, the charter read, “all the lands tenements or hereditaments houses or revenues within this jurisdiction to the aforesaid President or College appertaining not exceeding the value of five hundred pounds per annum shall from henceforth be freed from all civil impositions taxes and rates.” And
the President and Fellows or the major part of them from time to time may meet and choose such officers and servants for the College and . . . to make from time to time such orders and by-laws for the better ordering and carrying on the work of the College as they shall think fit.
Further,
the said President Fellows and scholars together with the servants and other necessary officers to the said President or College appertaining not exceeding ten, . . . shall be exempted from all personal civil offices military exercises or services watchings and wardings and such of their estates not exceeding one hundred pounds a man shall be free from all country taxes or rates whatsoever and none others.[10]
The phrase In Christi Gloriam adorned Harvard’s 1650 seal.
In 1780, the People of Massachusetts perpetuated Harvard’s privileges in what is today the world’s oldest Constitution. Specifically, that document proclaimed that
the President and Fellows of Harvard College, in their corporate capacity, and their successors in that capacity, their officers and servants, shall have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy, all the powers, authorities, rights, liberties, privileges, immunities and franchises, which they now have or are entitled to have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy: and the same are hereby ratified and confirmed unto them, the said president and fellows of Harvard College, and to their successors, and to their officers and servants, respectively, forever.[11]
Thus, Harvard’s enumerated and unenumerated corporate rights became its constitutional rights.[12]
The People justified this extraordinary endowment by recalling that through Harvard
many persons of great eminence have, by the blessings of God, been initiated in those arts and sciences, which qualified them for public employments, both in church and state: and whereas the encouragement of arts and sciences, and all good literature, tends to the honor of God, the advantage of the Christian religion, and the great benefit of this and other United States of America.[13]
The People believed that Harvard deserved its privileges because of its “public utility.”[14] Harvard was of use to the public because it prepared public servants for both Church and state, and honored God. None of this should surprise us, since “[a]cademic freedom’s connection to religious liberty runs . . . deep.”[15]
For 375 years, Harvard has held “the powers, authorities, rights, liberties, privileges, immunities and franchises” conferred by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For 245 years, the People of Massachusetts have directly protected these grants through their fundamental law. Yet Harvard’s lawsuit makes no mention of these ancient rights.
Medieval scholars knew well what modern scholars have seemingly forgotten: the university’s rights and privileges are its main treasures. Medievalist Pearl Kibre observed that “the collection of documents or privilegia in which were enumerated their specific rights, privileges, and immunities came to be the most carefully guarded of the scholars’ treasures.”[16] Importantly, these were not individual rights, but rights of the scholars’ corporations. These corporations are universities: “ ’university,’ derived from the Latin universitas, simply means “corporation.’ ”[17] Kibre wrote: “[t]he rights, privileges, and immunities of the mediaeval scholars’ privilegia were concerned almost entirely with the external conditions surrounding them rather than with the less tangible circumstances of intellectual activity.”[18] At issue in Harvard’s lawsuit are exactly these kinds of external conditions.
Potentates starting with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1158 justified granting privileges to scholars, Kibre tells us, by reference to “[t]he principles of public utility and compassion.”[19] The scholars, Frederick I proclaimed via his Authentica Habita, “illuminated the whole world with their learning,” and sacrificed to do so.[20] I use the term “privilege” in its medieval sense, meaning a “special favor” conferred in return for some public service, instead of its modern sense, meaning “unearned advantage.” Scholarly privileges were earned.
These privileges, according to Kibre, granted scholars exemptions from taxation, civic duties, and military service—exemptions that Harvard’s scholars also enjoy. Those privileges also “gave scholars the right to be tried in ecclesiastical courts, and by judges of their own choosing; and the right to summon their adversaries before these judges at the place of the schools, while they themselves could not be summoned to appear outside the city walls.” To this list, historian of science William Clark, would add the following privileges:
● to be able to silence the players of silly games interrupting their studies;
● to be able to stop buildings that would block the light in their studies;
● to be able to stop buildings that would block the light in their lecture halls;
● in cases of equal merit, to have their sons preferred for academic positions;
● to be able to sit in the presence of magistrates;
● to be able to give a legal deposition at home;
● to be freed from quartering soldiers and performing night -watch;
● to be able, along with their wives, to wear the same clothing as nobles;
● to have rights of social precedence over knights;
● after twenty years of teaching, to be held as the equal of counts;
● to receive the benefit of doubt in any suspicion of crime;
● to be free from being either manacled or detained in prison;
● and, happily, doctors could not be tortured.[21]
While considerable, our list remains only partial: a sixteenth-century author documented 180 scholarly privileges.[22]
Now, what do these ancient European privileges have to do with modern American universities? The privileges enjoyed by scholars across the centuries and continents are similar because universities, across time and space, enjoy an “unbroken continuity,”[23] borrow from one another,[24] and share common problems. One historian of the university put it this way: “many of the topical problems of the universities in the twentieth century go straight back to events in the thirteenth,”[25] what another historian called “[t]he great century of university growth.”[26] As mentioned above, these topical problems concerned the university’s external relations.
And how did these individual rights relate to the rights of the scholarly corporate body? Medieval scholars “expressed their individuality by folding themselves into [corporate] groups, for only in this way could” they “protect and assert themselves.”[27] The medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, writing in 1950 against the loyalty oath imposed on University of California faculty by the California Regents,[28] argued that, just as “the judges are the Court, the ministers together with the faithful are the Church, . . . the professors together with the students are the University.”[29] The rights pertaining to the individual scholar’s office[30] therefore protected the scholars’ university as a whole.
American universities have long prioritized their relationship to external authority. Indeed, historian Jurgen Herbst claimed, with regard to colonial American colleges, that “[w]hat was taught was seen as a means to an end; the circumstances under which instruction was offered came as close to being the end itself as anything within the college possibly could.”[31]
This remains the case today. Indeed, Harvard’s lawsuit complained that the federal government’s “demands on Harvard cut at the core of Harvard’s constitutionally protected academic freedom because they seek to assert governmental control over Harvard’s research, academic programs, community, and governance.” That control, Harvard alleged, would “overhaul Harvard’s governance, control Harvard’s faculty hiring, and dictate what faculty may teach Harvard students.”[32] In the end, this would vitiate the university’s “ ’autonomous decisionmaking.’ ”[33] Put differently, the federal government’s demands intrude into the circumstances under which Harvard delivers instruction and undertakes research.
It is telling that universities cry foul when governments intrude in this manner. This was also where Columbia University, facing similar pressure from the federal government, drew the line after Harvard rejected the government’s demands in April. In his announcement that month, Harvard’s president insisted that the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” He then wrote that “[n]o government . . . should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” For its part, Columbia’s acting president declared that the university “would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution,” including “any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire.” Then, in June, the acting president stated that Columbia’s “red lines remain the same,” and entail “maintain[ing] our autonomy and independent governance,” and deciding questions concerning teaching and research. In July, Columbia settled with the federal government, thereby engaging in the time-honored academic practice of publicly settling disputes with civil authorities.[34] In exchange for agreeing to a “sweeping“ set of requirements, including appointing faculty members in specified institutes and departments and paying $221 million, Columbia regained most but not all federal research funding. In announcing the settlement, Columbia’s acting president stated: “[c]ritically, Columbia retains control over its academic and operational decisions,” meaning that “[t]he federal government will not dictate what we teach, who teaches, or which students we admit.”[35] Retaining this control, she wrote, was Columbia’s “north star.” Separately, the acting president said the deal “safeguards our independence,” calling that independence “a critical condition for academic excellence and scholarly exploration.”
These four statements reword T.B. Davie’s classic 1953 articulation of the “four essential freedoms of a university—to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”[36] The four freedoms were imported from South Africa and popularized by Justice Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1957 academic-freedom decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire.[37] Davie’s lesser-known, earlier formulation of the four freedoms made clear that these educational freedoms concerned, in the first instance, external relations. In a 1950 graduation address at the University of the Witwatersrand, Davie said that “intellectual freedom” in universities “means our freedom from external interference in (a) who shall teach, (b) what we teach, (c) how we teach and (d) whom we teach.”[38] The university’s intellectual freedom (what I would call educational freedom) required freedom from external interference.
Crucially, these intellectual or educational freedoms are at bottom associational freedoms—the corporation, an “institutional citizen[],”[39] determines with whom it will associate when it determines, on academic grounds, who will teach and who will be taught. Because the university is a corporation, its right to freely associate buttresses its first civil right[40]: the right to freely constitute itself. Freely associating, and thereby freely constituting itself (including, if a university so chooses, with international scholars), is what the four freedoms are all about.[41] A university that relinquishes these interrelated and indivisible freedoms therefore literally unbecomes itself. For these reasons, it was surprising that Harvard’s lawsuit quotes the Harvard president’s invocation of Davie’s four freedoms[42] but does not raise any associational claims under either Article 19 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights or the First Amendment.[43]
The order in which the presidents addressed these issues is itself telling: governance comes first; teaching and research come second.[44] The reason for this is that the university’s educational freedom—the freedom to decide questions relating to admissions, teaching, and research—depends on its governmental freedom—the freedom of the corporation to constitute and govern itself. Because the federal government threatened the universities’ governmental freedoms (and therefore necessarily threatened their educational freedoms), the universities “had no choice” but to fight back.[45]
The three main reasons for naming these ancient corporate rights are prevailing in court, building a case to the public, and preserving the rights for future use. Accordingly, Harvard should claim its corporate rights early and often. Indeed, I would argue, Harvard is duty-bound to do so. As it claims these rights in court, Harvard should simultaneously work out of court to show that universities have earned the aforementioned rights, which the People of Massachusetts perpetuated unto them for the same reason they were granted to their medieval predecessors: it was, as Kibre noted, “because of the public utility that abides in scholars.”[46] (I will say more about this in the conclusion.) The next section discusses the nuts and bolts of claiming these rights.
II. Claiming Harvard’s Corporate Rights
Here, I show how Harvard can claim its corporate rights under the Massachusetts Constitution and how it can claim its federal constitutional rights in its corporate capacity. Advancing claims under the federal Constitution is a good place for Harvard to start, but by no means a good place to end. This is for four reasons. First, Harvard’s original constitutional rights are found in the Massachusetts Constitution. Second, most of Harvard’s constitutional rights derive from the Massachusetts Constitution, rather than from the federal one. Third, state constitutions often protect more rights than the federal Constitution does.[47] Fourth, when state constitutions overlap with the federal Constitution, the former often guard rights more jealously than does the latter.[48]
Consider Count I of Harvard’s complaint, which was filed in federal court.[49] This count claimed that, under the APA, courts must strike down federal agency actions “contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity.”[50] Harvard claimed that the federal government’s threat to withhold funding “unless Harvard restructured its internal governance, changed its hiring and admissions practices to strike [their] preferred balance of viewpoints, and modified what it teaches its students to align with [their] views” violated its rights under the First Amendment, which provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of Speech.” Harvard argued that academic freedom is “ ‘a special concern of the First Amendment,’ ” and that that concern extends to universities, in addition to professors and students.[51] That is, Harvard claimed, “ ‘academic freedom thrives . . . on autonomous decisionmaking by the academy itself.’ ”[52] Thus, by threatening funding to “curtail academic freedom,” the government, through its agencies, violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights. Wielding “the threat of withholding federal funds in an attempt to coerce Harvard to conform with [their] preferred mix of viewpoints and ideologies,” is just the kind of constitutional violation that the APA furnishes redress for.
As mentioned, the Massachusetts Constitution protects “all the powers, authorities, rights, liberties, privileges, immunities and franchises” that Harvard has or is entitled to have, and Harvard should have claimed these expansive grants in its lawsuit. Harvard’s enumerated entitlements—granted in 1650 and perpetuated by Massachusetts fundamental law in 1780—include the right of “the President and Fellows or the major part of them” to “from time to time . . . meet and choose such officers and servants for the College and . . . to make from time to time such orders and by-laws for the better ordering and carrying on the work of the College as they shall think fit.” In other words, the Harvard Corporation has the constitutional right to constitute and govern itself without external interference.[53]
Because the federal government’s demands divest Harvard of its constitutional right to constitute and govern itself, those demands violate Harvard’s constitutional rights. Among other things, the government insisted that Harvard “make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” Accepting these terms would cede the aforementioned right.[54] The federal government has no power to disturb constitutional rights that Harvard has anciently held since before that government even came into existence.[55]
Additionally, claiming First Amendment rights in the university’s corporate capacity makes the typical First Amendment argument for academic freedom make sense.[56] David Rabban, one of the foremost authorities on American academic freedom, writes that “[t]he general right of free speech is egalitarian and individualistic” because “all citizens have equal rights to free speech” and “its exercise does not depend on others.”[57] However, academic freedom is “meritocratic and communitarian” because academic “expression is protected only if it meets academic standards” and “the community of faculty peers makes the determination of merit.”[58] What I call the corporate theory of academic freedom explains the meritocratic and communal regulation of academic expression internal to the corporation while also explaining the individualistic and egalitarian speech of the university itself. The corporate theory does so by distinguishing sharply between the university’s two faces—the external, corporate-governmental face and the internal, academic-educational one—and likewise distinguishing between the kinds of arguments obtaining in the one and the kinds of arguments obtaining in the other. (To grasp this distinction’s value, one need only attempt to evaluate on academic grounds a given university corporation’s decisions regarding real-estate contracts, sports-media agreements, police-officer hiring, and whether to prosecute intellectual-property claims.) The crucial difference is not between general and specific, but between internal and external. The upshot is that the Harvard Corporation may claim free-speech rights against governments, even as Harvard scholars, on academic grounds, “silence voices” rather than “license them indifferently.”[59]
In short, Harvard should have added a claim under the APA for federal violations of its constitutional rights, powers, privileges, and immunities under the Massachusetts Constitution, which antedates the creation of the United States altogether. Harvard also should have explicitly claimed its First Amendment rights in its corporate capacity. In doing so, it would find aid in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which held, among other things, that “the Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity.”[60] Although lamented among many in the university,[61] Citizens United is actually, under the corporate framework, the university’s friend. Because all American universities are corporations, they can all avail themselves of these kinds of corporate arguments.[62]
To the likely response that Congress intended to protect only federal constitutional rights, one might point out that the text of the APA does not support that interpretation. The APA offers redress for violations of a “constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity.” It does not provide protection for federal constitutional rights, powers, privileges, or immunities. Congress could have limited constitutional claims under the APA to those based on violations of federal constitutional rights, but it plainly did not do so. “Constitutional right” means constitutional right. Put differently, the APA guards constitutional rights as such. It does not prefer federal constitutional rights over state constitutional rights, although Congress could have included such a preference. Harvard’s constitutional rights derive from two sources—the Massachusetts Constitution and the U.S. Constitution—and the APA protects those rights without regard to whence they came.[63] American law knows no second-class constitutional rights.[64] Nor does American law relegate to second-class status Americans’ original constitutional rights, located in the charters of what Justice Joseph Story called the “essential constituent parts of the general government,” meaning the states.[65] While the states “can exist without the [general government],” Story wrote, the general government “cannot exist without them.”[66] Recovering this foundational but forgotten understanding of our constitutional system is crucial for protecting rights generally and academic freedom specifically.[67]
Further objections to these arguments come to mind. For example, no oath binds federal agency officials to protect and defend the state constitutions. (State officials, on the other hand, swear oaths to their state constitutions and to the federal one.) And, even if these officials were bound by such oaths, how could they possibly ensure that their actions, the impact of which is sometimes felt nationwide, do not run afoul of the fifty state constitutions (not to mention the hundreds of tribal and territorial constitutions)? Wouldn’t this require federal courts to apply state law in adjudicating federal APA claims, increasing expense and delays?
Responses could be offered to these counterarguments, but my intention here is not to rewrite Harvard’s complaint; instead, I aim to identify Harvard’s expansive corporate-constitutional rights and commend them and the aforementioned lines of argument to Harvard and other universities facing similar challenges. (One wonders how Columbia might have made out with these arguments at their disposal.) Notwithstanding the above objections, my main point remains: Harvard’s corporate rights, along with its explicit constitutional rights, could open the door for new, creative legal arguments of the sort I describe above.
While I focus here on Harvard’s expansive corporate rights, arguments like the one I outline above are not only available to universities that hold themselves out as “private.”[68] Public universities also have corporate rights, including constitutional-corporate rights.[69] Creative deployment of corporate-rights arguments could help Harvard and other universities, all of which are corporate bodies, meet the challenges that no doubt lie ahead.[70]
Conclusion
In a May 2025 Harvard Crimson editorial, long-time Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield asked, “Why should Harvard be independent?” After positing the typical claim that Harvard helps society by providing it with experts, he wondered whether Harvard “need[ed] some standard from outside society to justify itself as independent.” Professor Mansfield then suggested that Harvard should be independent because it “looks for the wisdom that makes science valuable to human beings,” and, to his mind, “this wisdom centers on politics.”
The answer to Professor Mansfield’s question as to why Harvard should be independent has to do with political wisdom, but not with any such wisdom that Harvard can offer. Instead, it has to do with the wisdom of the People of Massachusetts, who decided, before the formation of the United States, that Harvard deserves (an always imperfect) independence. They held, speaking through their Constitution, that Harvard, an ancient corporation, deserves independence because it honors God, advantages the Christian religion, and benefits Massachusetts and other states by training public servants and encouraging arts, sciences (themselves initially developed for God’s glory[71]), and good literature. Agree or disagree with this line of reasoning, Professor Mansfield’s question was decided long ago by the sovereign People themselves, whose right it is to so decide. In this way, “ordinary Americans can say that academic freedom is their freedom, too.”[72] We need not, and therefore should not, dream up any new justifications, at least not before considering the old ones.[73]
As Danielle Allen, another distinguished Harvard political scientist, wrote recently, Harvard owes its thanks to Americans for granting Harvard “great gifts.” But the gifts of “generous support for research” and “young people to educate” are not those for which Harvard, in the first instance, owes its thanks to the public. Rather, Harvard owes its thanks to the People of Massachusetts for wisely deciding that Harvard deserves independence and safeguarding that independence by perpetuating Harvard’s corporate-constitutional rights. Those same rights enable Harvard to accept and make use of the gifts Professor Allen described. More important than both endowment and any amount of federal funding, Harvard’s rights remain its main treasures.
That Harvard might settle its lawsuit against the federal government does not make addressing these issues any less urgent.[74] Regardless of the outcome in Harvard’s case, universities need to redevelop their lost capacity for corporate thinking and action, not least because attacks on particular universities affect the rights of all universities.[75] Quoting the Authentica Habita, Kibre wrote that public authorities “between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries recognized the scholars who ‘illuminated the whole world with their learning,’ as well as those who basked in their reflected light, were worthy and deserving of solicitude and favor.”[76] Today, we must convince the public—not just the courts—that scholars still deserve this solicitude and favor.[77] That starts, but does not end, with understanding and invoking Harvard’s ancient corporate-constitutional rights—its privilegia—and the justifications for the conferral of the same. The history of and justifications for our privilegia hold the key to undertaking “the long overdue work of restoring trust in universities.”[78] To do that, the arguments that we advance have to resonate with the public as much as with the courts.
Other American universities came into existence after Harvard, but they all have privilegia conferred by public authority. All American universities need to understand these gifts and why public authorities granted them in the first place. The European scholars’ privileges, having been “so firmly planted and cultivated in the middle ages could not be wholly obliterated by the revolutionary changes that took place in Europe” as the ancien régime collapsed at the end of the eighteenth century.[79] So too in the United States, where scholarly privileges, ensconced in corporate charters, have received the full protection of American corporate and constitutional law. Under that protection, even the American Revolution could not destroy those privileges.[80] The question is whether universities will make use of them.
Medieval scholars rose, according to Kibre, with “seeming alacrity . . . to resist any attempt to infringe upon their individual or corporate rights and prerogatives.”[81] The scholars’ approach seems to have changed by the seventeenth century. Kibre recounts how one scholar, writing exactly 400 years ago (just twenty-five years before the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered Harvard), explained “the increasing tendency of judges to apply customary law and hence to rule against the scholars” by reference to “the failure to produce these privilegia.”[82] This 400-year-old lesson is one we need not learn twice.
Copyright © 2025 Michael Banerjee, J.D., Harvard Law School. Ph.D. Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley Law. Nandina Babic, Jonathon Booth, Bennett Capers, Ming-hsi Chu, Haris Durrani, Jonathan Glater, Alexa Herlands, Mark Howard, Joan Wallach Scott, and William Robert Thomas gave helpful feedback. The California Law Review Online editors provided excellent assistance. All errors are my own.
[1]. Ian F. McNeely & Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet 99 (2008).
[2]. Nor did Harvard’s May 2025 lawsuit against the federal government concerning the government’s revocation of Harvard’s certification to host F-1 and J-1 visa holders advance corporate arguments. I limit my focus here to the April lawsuit.
[3]. Thanks to Adam Sitze for pointing out that the corporation offers an entire framework under which these problems may be analyzed.
[4]. This merely rephrases Hastings Rashdall’s translation of universitas. See Hastings Rashdall, 1 The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages 5 (F. M. Powicke & A. B. Edmen, eds., 1895) (1936) (“[T]he word ‘university’ means merely a number, a plurality, an aggregate of persons. Universitas vestra, in a letter addressed to a body of persons, means merely ‘the whole of you’; in a more technical sense it denotes a legal corporation or juristic person.”); see also Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of the Universities 9 (Cornell Univ. Press 1965) (1923) (noting universitas refers to “the totality of a group”). In 1959, former South African Chief Justice Albert Centlivres called this “the wholeness of a university.” David B. Oppenheimer, The South African Sources of the Diversity Justification for U.S. Affirmative Action, 13 Calif. L. Rev. 32, 48 (2022) (quoting Albert van der Sandt Centlivres, Address at Jameson Memorial Hall 1 (1959)).
[5]. David Ciepley, Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation, 107 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 139, 141 (2013). A general rise in corporate consciousness might be underway in the United States. Though lacking the long experience with the corporate form that professors enjoy—indeed, one cannot separate the history of the professor from the history of the corporation—certain artists have resolved to form themselves into corporations. See Yancey Strickler, Forget Hustle Culture. Behold the Artist Corporation, TED (Apr. 2025), https://www.ted.com/talks/yancey_strickler_forget_hustle_culture_behold_the_artist_corporation [https://perma.cc/J5BG-RGQQ]. Others, including Planned Parenthood, seem to have recognized the power of corporateness. See James Taranto, Planned Parenthood Is People, My Friend, Wall St. J. (July 9, 2025), https://www.wsj.com/opinion/planned-parenthood-is-people-my-friend-law-policy-history-abortion-personhood-8156001f?mod=hp_opin_pos_4 [https://perma.cc/6NHP-ZHVF].
[6]. When modern scholars hear the word corporation, they tend to think of the business corporation. This unfortunate semantic narrowing presents a perennial problem for corporations scholars. See David Ciepley, Democracy and the Corporation: The Long View, 26 Ann. Rev. Pol. Sci. 489, 491-92 (2023) (noting that corporation was “reconceived” during nineteenth century, from “(legally limited) government[]” to “purely a market phenomenon”); Ciepley, supra note 5, at 141 (“[T]he primary rights of a corporation . . . have nothing to do with business per se.”).
[7]. See, e.g., Tr. of Univ. of North Carolina v. Foy, 1 Mur. 58 (N.C. 1805); Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819); Sterling v. Regents of the Univ. of Michigan, 110 Mich. 369, 382 (1896); State ex rel. Black v. State Bd. of Educ., 33 Idaho 415 (1921); Bd. of Regents of Higher Educ. v. State, 409 Mont. 96 (2022).
[8]. See Donald S. Lutz, The United States Constitution as an Incomplete Text, 496 Annals Am. Academy 23 (1988) (“Americans are the heirs of a constitutional tradition that was mature by the time the national Constitution was framed in 1787. The national document was preceded by 18 constitutions adopted by the states . . . . The 3 states of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts used as their first constitutions colonial charters that had been written during the previous century and that described systems of politics that had been developed by the colonists.”).
[9]. See Joseph Story, 1 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 197-98 (Thomas M. Cooley, 4th ed. 1873) (“[W]hile the corporations exist, though the State may lay down rules for the regulation of the affairs and the management of their property, it is nevertheless a part of the right of self-government that the people concerned should choose their own officers who are to administer such rules and have the care of such property, and the State cannot appoint such officers, as it might those who are to perform duties of a more general nature for the public at large.”).
[10]. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote in an 1828 case that Harvard’s 1650 “grant or charter was irrepealable in its nature.” Hardy v. Inhabitants of Waltham, 7 Pick. 108, 115 (Mass. 1828). In this Essay, I quote liberally from original sources because I have found it most effective to put readers in direct contact with what are often unfamiliar materials. I hope that encountering Harvard’s charter might encourage scholars to study the charters of their respective universities, if they have not already done so.
[11]. Mass. Const. ch. 5, § I, art. I (emphasis added).
[12]. On the corporate origins of American constitutions, see Nikolas Bowie, Why the Constitution Was Written Down, 71 Stan. L. Rev. 1397, 1405 (2019) (showing “how a corporate charter in New England adopted the characteristics of a modern, American-style constitution”); Mary Sarah Bilder, The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review, 116 Yale L.J. 502, 504 (2006) (arguing that “judicial review arose from a longstanding English corporate practice under which a corporation’s ordinances were reviewed for repugnancy to the laws of England,” and, “[a]fter the Revolution, this practice of bounded legislation slid inexorably into a constitutional practice, as ‘the Constitution’ replaced ‘the laws of England.’”). More specifically, these corporate rights became Harvard’s explicit constitutional rights. By contrast, the rights Harvard holds under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says nothing about universities, professors, or academic freedom at all, were discovered only in 1957 through a kind of judicial plyometrics. See David Rabban, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right 61–71 (2024) (discussing U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 355 U.S. 852 (1957)).
[13]. Americans have also endowed universities we consider “public” with perpetual constitutional grants. For example, the 1890 Idaho Constitution included the following provision, which refers to the University of Idaho and remains effective today: “All the rights, immunities, franchises, and endowments heretofore granted thereto by the territory of Idaho are hereby perpetuated unto the said university.” For a discussion of this provision, see M. M. Chambers, The University as a Corporation, 2 J. Higher Educ. 24, 27-28 (1931) (discussing State ex rel. Black, 33 Idaho 415 (1921)).
[14]. Pearl Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages: The Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford 325 (1962).
[15]. Adam Sitze, We Need a New Theory of Academic Freedom, Inside Higher Ed (July 22, 2025), https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/07/22/we-need-new-theory-academic-freedom-opinion [https://perma.cc/X99Y-TQND].
[16]. Id. at 90. Taking my cue from the medieval scholars, I focus here on violations of Harvard’s privilegia, rather than on funding freezes.
[17]. See Michael Banerjee, Universities Need to Go Corporate, Inside Higher Ed (July 2, 2025), https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/07/02/university-autonomy-stems-corporate-rights-opinion [https://perma.cc/Z69X-YNYM]. Here, we should remind ourselves of the university’s two faces: that which is vested in the government corporation and that which is vested in the educational academy. Medievalist Helene Wieruszowski put it this way: “[t]he term studium generale was used for schools of higher learning until late in the fifteenth century” and “[t]he Latin word universitas, our ‘university,’ was applied solely to the guild or society of masters and students,” but, “[g]radually, as schools and scholastic guilds fused and for all practical purposes, became identical, the term ‘university’ replaced the word studium.” Helene Wieruszowski, The Medieval University: Masters, Students, Learning 16 (1966). Then, “[t]he professional collegia took over the universitas, creating the modern confusion of the studium with the university, the confusion of the educational ‘academy’ with the legal corporation.” William Clark, From the Medieval Universitas Scholarium to the German Research University: A Sociogenesis of the Germanic Academic 252 (unpublished dissertation 1986). Recovering this forgotten distinction might help resolve much of the widespread confusion regarding the many noneducational activities of modern universities.
[18]. Kibre, supra note 14, at xv. This is important because scholars today tend to think of academic freedom first in terms of the internal relations between governing board and faculty. See Austin Sarat, We Need New Ways to Protect Academic Freedom, Inside Higher Ed (Jan. 29, 2025), https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/01/29/we-need-new-ways-protect-academic-freedom-opinion [https://perma.cc/3RWY-SRSY].
[19]. Kibre, supra note 14, at 325.
[20]. Id.
[21]. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University 187 (2006).
[22]. See Kibre, supra note 14, at xiii.
[23]. Haskins, supra note 4, at 24. This unbroken history concerns neither courses nor curriculum, but, instead, “[t]he essentials of university organization.” Id.
[24]. See M.J. Toswell, Today’s Medieval University 5 (2017) (“Their structures, their set texts, their rituals: all these elements were established in one university and replicated in all the others so rapidly that in most cases the origin of a given element can only rarely be traced.”).
[25]. Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe 158 (Richard North, trans. 1997). That modern universities descend directly from their medieval counterparts is well-accepted among university historians. See, e.g., Walter Rüegg, Foreword, in 1 A History of the University in Europe: Universities in the Middle Ages xix (Hilde De Ridder-Symoens & Walter Rüegg, eds., 1992) (noting university “is . . . the only European institution which has preserved its fundamental patterns and its basic social role and functions over the course of history; it has indeed been strengthened and extended in these respects”); A. B. Cobban, The Medieval Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 235-36 (1975) (“Universities in the twentieth century, whatever their deviations from traditional norms and alleged innovations, are still the lineal descendants of medieval archetypes, and they continue to perpetuate a competitive degree system and habits of ceremonial procedure, which, however disguised, are fundamentally derivates from the medieval universities.”).
[26]. Wieruszowski, supra note 17, at 16.
[27]. McNeely & Wolverton, supra note 1, at 96.
[28]. On the California Regents’ legal personality, see generally Michael Banerjee, California’s Constitutional University: Private Property, Public Power, and the Constitutional Corporation, 1868–1900, 18 Cal. Leg. Hist. 215 (2023).
[29]. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The Fundamental Issue: Documents and Marginal Notes on the University of California Loyalty Oath 16 (1950), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006608167.
[30]. See Adam Sitze, The Strange, Secret History of Tenure, Chron. Higher Educ. (Aug. 4, 2022), https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-strange-secret-history-of-tenure [https://perma.cc/QDQ3-P3T8].
[31]. Jurgen Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government 1636-1819 17 (1982).
[32]. Complaint, at 32 President & Fellows of Harvard College v. U.S. Dep’t Health & Hum. Serv’s No. 25 Civ. 11048 (D. Mass. Apr. 21, 2025). Analyzing these problems under the corporate framework might have led Harvard’s lawyers to certain corporate-rights cases involving universities, including an 1854 case in which a South Carolina chancellor wrote that “[a] chartered university has authority to teach all knowable things.” Ex Parte Tr. of Greenville Academies, 7 Rich.Eq. 471, 483 (Ct. App. Eq. S.C. 1854) (Wardlaw, Ch., concurring).
[33]. Complaint at 32, President and Fellows of Harvard Coll. v. U.S. Dep’t of Health & Hum. Serv’s (quoting Regents of Univ. of Mich. v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214, 226 n.12 (1985)).
[34]. See Wieruszowski, supra note 17, at 71 (“In the middle of the thirteenth century the universities [at Bologna] began to settle their controversies with the city magistrates. The results of these agreements were written into the statutes of the commune.”).
[35]. The settlement clause to which the acting president adverts provides that “[n]o provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, or the content of academic speech.” Resolution Agreement Between the United States of America and Columbia University (July 23, 2025).
[36]. Oppenheimer, supra note 4, at, 32 (quoting T.B. Davie, Address to New Students at the University of Cape Town (Feb. 28, 1953)).
[37]. Id. at 37 (discussing Sweezy, 355 U.S. 852).
[38]. T.B. Davie, Address on the Occasion of the Graduation Ceremony of the University of the Witwatersrand 7 (1950). David Oppenheimer and Isabelle Borchardt kindly provided this and other helpful materials relating to Davie.
[39]. Francie Diep, Evan Goldstein, & Eric Kelderman, ‘The Best Day Higher Ed Has Had in a Year’: Larry Summers on the Columbia Settlement, and why it’s a good model for Harvard, Chronicle Higher Educ. (July 24, 2025), https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-best-day-higher-ed-has-had-in-a-year. Thanks to Emma Brush for alerting me to this quotation.
[40]. This repurposes President Richard Nixon’s famous phrase. See Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America 12 (Princeton Univ. Press 2014) (quoting Richard Nixon’s Acceptance of Republican Party Presidential Nomination (August 8, 1968)).
[41]. Even in thirteenth-century Bologna, during what was one of the lowest points in the history of professorial academic freedom, when the student corporations took control and subjected the masters to “an almost incredible servitude,” Wieruszowski, supra note 17, at 68 (quotation marks omitted), the masters “kept for themselves as unalienable” the right to decide “the qualification of the candidates through examination and about admittance to the collegium doctorum,” id. at 72. The masters insisted that the right to decide their constitution was theirs alone, and this right “also implied a certain control of the curriculum.” Id.
[42]. See Harvard Complaint, supra note 33, at 3.
[43]. This is true even though Chief Justice Warren’s opinion in Sweezy discussed the petitioner’s associational rights. See Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 249 (“The State Supreme Court thus conceded without extended discussion that petitioner’s right to lecture and his right to associate with others were constitutionally protected freedoms which had been abridged.”). On associational rights under article 19 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights and the First Amendment, see infra descriptions in n. 52.
[44]. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers recently said that Harvard’s “red lines” should include denying the government “approval or rejection of any personnel choice, whether it is a faculty member, an individual admissions decision, or an appointment within the university to any kind of academic position.” Diep, Goldstein, & Kelderman, supra note 39. After mentioning these governmental issues, the former president said that the government also should “not get to dictate what’s going to be taught in any particular class or what the expectation of any major is going to be.” Id. Note also the order in which the shall-not-be-construed clause unfolds in the Columbia Agreement, supra note 35.
[45]. See Michael C. Dorf, Harvard Had No Choice, Chronicle Higher Ed (April 16, 2025), https://www.chronicle.com/article/harvard-had-no-choice [https://perma.cc/Q7DX-7UET].
[46]. Kibre, supra note 14, at 15.
[47]. See, e.g., Mont. Const. art. II, § 3 (including among Montanans’ “inalienable rights” the “right to a clean and healthful environment”).
[48]. See, e.g., Fashion Valley Mall, LLC v. Nat’l Lab. Rels. Bd., 42 Cal.4th 850, 868 (2007) (noting “California Constitution provides greater, not lesser, protection” for boycotting than does U.S. Constitution).
[49]. Because state courts must interpret and enforce both the Massachusetts Constitution and the U.S. Constitution, Harvard might have filed this lawsuit in a Massachusetts court.
[50]. 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(B).
[51]. Harvard Complaint, supra note 33, at 30 (quoting Keyishian v. Bd. of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967)).
[52]. Id. (quoting Ewing, 474 U.S. at 226 n.12).
[53]. Harvard holds rights to free speech and association under the Massachusetts Constitution. See Associated Indus. of Mass. v. Att’y Gen., 418 Mass. 279, 288 (1994) (noting that art. 16 of Massachusetts Declaration of Rights protects “corporate expressive activity” and art. 19 of Declaration protects “corporate associational rights”); Commonwealth v. Carrasquillo, 498 Mass. 107, 114 (2022) (“Given the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s association, associational privacy is necessary in order for the associations protected by the First Amendment and art. 19 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights to flourish.” (quotation omitted)). It also holds these rights under the federal Constitution, which guards against governmental “interfere[nce] with the internal organization or affairs of the group,” Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 623 (1984), and “plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate,” id. When the university decides with whom it will associate by deciding who will teach and be taught, it necessarily decides with whom it will not associate by deciding who will not teach and be taught. For a slightly different view of a university’s right to free association, see John Shattuck, Secrecy on Campus, 19 J. Coll. & Univ. L. 217, 219 (1993) (“Freedom of association in a university is freedom of a professor to work with anyone, whether a foreign scholar or a controversial government agency.”). I do not discuss Harvard’s unenumerated corporate-constitutional rights here, but Harvard might profitably rely on those as well.
[54]. It is unclear whether Harvard could, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, delegate this authority to the federal government in the first place.
[55]. These developments oblige us more generally to explore the extent to which state law (including state constitutional law) binds federal officials, and, relatedly, whether state court orders bind federal officials. It also presents an opportunity to investigate whether the sovereign People can place their institutions beyond federal reach through their state constitutions.
[56]. The corporate framework can enhance Harvard’s First Amendment claims. That the People of Massachusetts believed they were granting constitutional rights to a religious corporation might enhance Harvard’s claims under the First Amendment, along with the religious-freedom claims it should also bring under the Massachusetts Constitution. See Rasheed v. Comm’r of Corr., 446 Mass. 463, 466 (2006) (“The Massachusetts Constitution broadly protects the rights of individuals to exercise their religious beliefs freely.”).
[57]. Rabban, supra note 12, at 139.
[58]. Id.
[59]. Stanley Fish, Free Speech Is Not an Academic Value, Chron. Higher Educ. (Mar. 20, 2017), https://www.chronicle.com/article/free-speech-is-not-an-academic-value/ [https://perma.cc/F3HG-2RDB].
[60]. Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310, 365 (2010).
[61]. See, e.g., Naomi R. Lamoreaux & William J. Novak, Introduction, in Corporations and American Democracy 5 (Naomi R. Lamoreaux & William J. Novak, 2017) (arguing that Citizens United and other recent corporate-rights cases represent a “radical break with the past” and did not reflect “the Framers’ original position on corporations”).
[62]. However, only eight universities other than Harvard came into existence before the United States: William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769). See James Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University 124-30 (Princeton Univ. Press 2016).
[63]. In 2000, the Michigan Attorney General advanced a version of this argument in the famous Grutter v. Bollinger case concerning the University of Michigan Law School’s race-based admissions practices, which was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. 539 U.S. 306. The brief urged the federal trial court to defer “to the University’s academic decisionmaking based not only on federal constitutional principles, but also based on Michigan’s Constitution,” which “conferred a unique status on public universities.” Brief of Attorney General at 3, Grutter v. Bollinger, 2000 WL 35575809. However, the brief did not argue that the University of Michigan’s unique status sprang from the fact that it was a corporation whose charter was granted by the sovereign People through their Constitution, not by the legislature. (That legislatures alone charter American corporations is an entrenched legal myth.)
[64]. See McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 780 (2010) (rejecting argument that, “in effect, ask[s] us to treat the [federal constitutional right] recognized in [an earlier case] as a second-class right”).
[65]. Id. at 870.
[66]. Id.
[67]. See generally Jeffrey S. Sutton, 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law (2018).
[68]. One way to interpret this moment of federal encroachment on university prerogatives: the government called our bluff. That is, they are exploiting the extent to which even those so-called “private” universities depend on public support. Here, we should recall that the private-corporation designation, which Harvard relies upon, springs from the judicial imagination, rather than from university charters. See, e.g., Dartmouth College Charter of 1769.
[69]. See, e.g., Foy, 1 Mur. 58; Sterling v. Regents of Univ. of Mich., 110 Mich. 369 (1896); Regents of Univ. of Montana v. State, 409 Mont. 96 (2022).
[70]. See Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder, & Michael S. Schmidt, Harvard Is Said to Be Open to Spending Up to $500 Million to Resolve Trump Dispute, N.Y. Times (July 28, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/trump-harvard-payment.html [https://perma.cc/F2VX-EFAL]; Michael S. Schmidt & Alan Blinder, Harvard Leaders See Only Bad Outcomes Ahead as They Battle Trump, N.Y. Times (May 8, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/us/harvard-trump-court-case-negotiation.html [https://perma.cc/8JMX-DS8P].
[71]. See, e.g., Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery 3 (2004) (“[T]heological assumptions unique to Christianity explain why science was born only in Christian Europe.”).
[72]. Sitze, supra note 15.
[73]. See Toswell, supra note 24, at 7 (noting university “must always look back before rushing into the twenty-first century”).
[74]. See Michael S. Schmidt. & Alan Blinder, Harvard and Trump Restart Talks to Potentially End Bitter Dispute, N.Y. Times (June 20, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/us/politics/harvard-federal-funding-trump.html?smid=url-share [https://perma.cc/SPM2-CNHY].
[75]. See generally Natalie Andrews, Douglas Belkin, & Sara Randazzo, White House Seeks Payments From Other Universities—Including Harvard—After Columbia Deal Sets Precedent, Wall St. J. (July 25, 2025), https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/harvard-columbia-trump-white-house-fines-payment-deal-settlement-d61aa9c6; Bonnie Gordon, They Will Not Stop With UVA, Inside Higher Ed (July 10, 2025), https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/07/10/they-will-not-stop-uva-opinion. See also Ryan D. Enos & Steven Levitsky, This Isn’t Negotiation. It’s Authoritarian Extortion, Harvard Crimson (June 26, 2025) (“If the country’s wealthiest university gives in to the government’s unlawful demands, then no university will be able to resist them.”).
[76]. Kibre, supra note 14 at 330.
[77]. See Steven Davidoff Solomon, You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors, Wall St. J. (May 1, 2025), https://www.wsj.com/opinion/you-wont-believe-the-tax-breaks-for-professors-c7e4644a?mod=wsj_furtherreading_pos_3 [https://perma.cc/J79Q-HSRM]; Allysia Finley, Madness at Columbia Was Your Tax Dollars at Work (March 23, 2025), https://www.wsj.com/opinion/madness-at-columbia-was-your-tax-dollars-at-work-federal-funding-taxes-radicalism-bce995f4 [https://perma.cc/W9KT-KDZ5].
[78]. Boaz Barak, I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All, N.Y. Times (May 2, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/opinion/work-school-classroom-politics-harvard.html [https://perma.cc/L798-WJSV].
[79]. Kibre, supra note 14, at 330.
[80]. See Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. at 651 (Marshall, C.J.) (“[A]ll contracts and rights respecting property, remained unchanged by the revolution.”).
[81]. Kibre, supra note 14, at 90.
[82]. Id. at 10 (citing Horatius Lutius, Tractatus de Privilegiis Studentium (1625)).
