Update. Yesterday (May 12) #Harvard President #AlanGarber released his response to #LindaMcMahon and the #Trump admin.
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/05/Letter-from-Harvard-President-Alan-M.-Garber-to-the-Honorable-Linda-E.-McMahon.pdf

#Academia #DefendResearch #Funding #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

“They can make your life unpleasant, even if they’re violating the #law & a court ultimately determines they’re violating the law,”said Samuel Bagenstos, who was general counsel of #HHS under #Biden.

#Harvard declined to comment, but the dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard’s largest division, acknowledged the scale of the problems….

“These federal actions have set in motion changes that will not be undone, at least not in the foreseeable future,”said dean Hopi E. Hoekstra….

The crosscurrents are unlike any that the #university has faced in its modern history. For centuries, #Harvard has cherished its #independence, its swaggering pride & its record of #academic excellence. But #Trump has reveled in unleashing #chaos that many believe will be difficult to contain as long as he sees the #university as a target.

On Mon, the Trump admin intensified the clash & threatened to choke off #grant money to Harvard indefinitely.

Any outcome seems likely to lead to significant cuts to #Harvard’s #research & #workforce & undermine its pre-eminence for years. Without its sprawling research apparatus, there is a fear that it could become more like a small, teaching-focused liberal arts college.

#University leaders believe the only clear options are either working w/ #Trump or somehow securing huge sums of money quickly, perhaps from private donors….

…But behind the scenes, several senior officials at #Harvard & on its top governing board believe that the #university is confronting a crisis that could last until #Trump is out of power, acc/to 3 people involved in the discussions. Even if Harvard’s #legal case is successful, these officials say, the school will still face enormous troubles that may force the nation’s oldest & wealthiest university to rethink its identity & scale.

#HarvardUniversity became the leader of #academia’s resistance to the #Trump admin—& soaked in acclaim from the White House’s critics—when it refused a roster of intrusive demands & took the govt to court last month.

#Legal experts saw a strong case, built by a team of elite conservative lawyers, to win back billions of #research dollars that the govt had stripped away. Supporters cheered on #Harvard’s unusually sharp public tone.

#BostonWeekend 7/x
Thu Merritt Moore - dancing (ballet) with a robot(?!) at #harvard (but it looks sold out)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Nl6ZS9hhc
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/are-we-human-or-are-we-dancers-with-merritt-moore-tickets-1224180710459
#BostonDance #MerrittMoore #ModernDance #Ballet #robots #WeirdFuture #dance #ballet #LanaDelRey

Cratering in the polls, and losing left right and center in court, the Trump regime spent this week scrambling to install a permanent fascist order before the peasants show up on the National Mall with pitchforks; and we wrote about it all in this week's The Skinny.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/05/07/the-skinny-may-1st-7th/2/

The Skinny: Building A Patchwork Enabling Act

"I confess that on some level it’s probably amusing to picture Trump sitting in front of a TV and getting big mad when it tells him Black and trans people exist, he shouldn’t bully overweight people, and the abortion bans he facilitated are hurting American women. The reality here however is that in signaling what the president doesn’t want to see in publicly-funded media, he’s effectively articulating a Christian Nationalist agenda. As we’ve discussed numerous times on this blog, the regime is not just fighting a material war to install a fascist dictatorship in our society; they’re also fighting an authoritarian cultural war on our discourse, our history, and who is allowed to matter in our media entertainment complex. The ideological headcage Trump is trying to use state power to enforce here, is just as important to the Trumpenrich project to create a white ethnostate dictatorship under the Kelpto Kaiser, as its material expansion of the American fascist police state is."