"Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They've got to behave themselves. You know, I'm looking out for the country and for Harvard. I want Harvard to do well. I want Harvard to be great again, probably. And Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them. They're hurting themselves. They're fighting. You know, Columbia has been really - and they were very, very bad what they've done. They're very antisemitic and lots of other things. But they're working with us on finding a solution. And, you know, they're taking off that hot seat. But Harvard wants to fight, they want to show how smart they are, and they're getting their ass kicked."

"Harvard University students can take “Marxist Concepts of Racism,” which examines “the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality.” You can bet there’s no mention of the genocide in Africa and former communist regimes like Yugoslavia."

"The ambience of Harvard University comes not so much from its profusion of museums and libraries, or the rat's maze of its narrow streets, but from its compression of time and space that speak centuries of history."

"The rooms, libraries, and hallways of our university have been host to the exploits of legendary individuals — folks with names like Peirce, , , , Morse, , , , , , Zariski, , , and Tate. The influence of these scholars is still quite palpable, and their legacy is inspiring. In a half dozen or so separate fields—such as analysis, differential geometry and topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic topology, representation theory, group theory, and number theory — Harvard has led the way."

"Our founders praised the free press and free academic inquiry as on par with free elections in safeguarding the republic. Some, including Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, Virginia’s George Wythe and New Jersey’s John Witherspoon, were themselves respected academics and classroom professors. They spoke with passion about protecting universities from federal pressure because they understood that the first act of an autocrat is to exert state control over the production of ideas. What’s unfolding at Harvard represents perhaps their worst nightmare — an American president trampling the intellectual freedom of his own people. As Trump’s pressure campaign against higher education shows, that threat is just as real today as it was when Rush used his academic post at the University of Pennsylvania to promote controversial ideas like the emerging science of vaccination. Prominent academics today are right to wonder whether their universities will stand behind them if their research angers the White House. The result will be a chilling effect that makes our country less intellectually dynamic and more susceptible to Trump’s dangerous illiberalism."

"I was never fortunate enough to attend Harvard. Yet after the school’s stunning surrender to President Trump’s $500 million shakedown on Monday, I’m not sure the nation’s most venerated university has much to teach anyone. Back in April, Harvard President Alan Garber drew praise from civil society groups for urging the university to “stand firm” against Trump’s brazen extortion scheme. Harvard’s resolve didn’t even last the summer. Harvard’s elite administrators may think it’s easier to simply pay off the strongman at their gates, but giving the bully your lunch money only invites him to demand more. Harvard’s full-on retreat is the latest in a string of high-profile payments the White House has extracted from institutions it views as left-leaning, and its half-billion-dollar protection payment won’t be the biggest or the last. With a $53 billion endowment and towering cultural standing, Harvard had plenty of resources to challenge Trump’s lawless demands in court and in the press. Instead, university leaders kept the cash and sold out the students, teachers and administrators who had been counting on them to take a stand."

"Americans across the political spectrum are realizing that for-profit universities and media outlets are anything but “independent,” despite what they might claim in press releases. That’s driving a historic collapse in public trust for the media and higher education — and making it easier for Trump to divide and conquer what were once the nation’s most-trusted safeguards of free expression and critical thought. It’s hard to blame the 56 percent of Americans who have lost confidence in higher education as a positive force in our culture. After all, if the best-funded independent university in the world can’t or won’t defend itself against blatant Republican authoritarianism, what good is its alleged independence? From the beginning it’s been clear that Harvard didn’t actually violate any laws, but institutions seen as left-leaning by the MAGA movement don’t need to do anything wrong to be targeted. Just ask Columbia University, which sent Trump a $221 million payoff after he threatened to cut off their federal funding, or Paramount, whose browbeaten executives gave Trump $16 million for airing news that offended him. But the size of Harvard’s payment boggles the mind. Half a billion dollars. For what?"

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."