Harvard wants you to feel sorry for it, and Donald Trump wants you to cheer its humiliation. The Left should refuse both invitations.
Start with the number. Harvard's endowment grew 27.1% to nearly $68 billion, beating the S&P 500. By my rough math, that is a gain on the order of $14 billion in one year, before payouts. Over the same period, Harvard's federally sponsored research revenue fell 19.5% to $509 million, a loss of roughly $120 million. The university also says the coming excise tax increase, from 1.4% to 8% on net investment income, will cost it about $300 million a year.
Put those side by side. The tax is real money, but it is a small fraction of one good year's investment gains. Harvard is not a besieged institution scraping by. It is a tax-advantaged investment fund with a university attached, and its own annual report says so.
Then look at the biggest holding: $2.2 billion in SpaceX. Elon Musk's company lives on public contracts, from NASA launches to Pentagon work, and Musk spent early 2025 running a DOGE operation that slashed grants for the very scientists Harvard employs. Harvard's money managers saw that and still made Musk's firm their largest bet. They are entitled to chase returns, but they should drop the pose of being above the scramble for power and money. The most celebrated university in America is now financing a billionaire who helped defund American science.
That is why the Left's position has to be uncomfortable. Yes, the Trump administration's war on Harvard is lawless coercion. Freezing research money to force changes in hiring, admissions and speech on campus is not reform. It is extortion, and it hits cancer researchers and graduate students, not trustees. The Left should say so loudly and keep saying it.
But the Left has also argued for years that giant university endowments are an affront to a country that makes working families borrow to educate their kids. We said it when Republicans first taxed endowments in 2017. The tax is not wrong merely because Trump's allies enjoy the political theater of it. A tiered tax that hits the richest per-student endowments is defensible. What is indefensible is a government that raises that tax while cutting the research funding that justified the tax exemption in the first place. It punishes Harvard for being rich and for doing science at once.
Harvard's own answer is revealing. Its financial leaders say the endowment is managed to provide steadier support rather than swing with markets. That is sensible budgeting. It is also a choice, and the choice is to bank most of a historic windfall. A university sitting on $68 billion cannot plead poverty over a $300 million bill while it spends so cautiously. It could expand undergraduate enrollment, which is absurdly small for an institution of its wealth. It could cover more tuition, raise graduate stipends, backfill the research it says it needs, and pay Cambridge and Boston more than token sums in lieu of taxes. These would be modest sacrifices for an institution that claims a public mission.
The lesson is not that Harvard deserves what it gets. It is that wealth makes an institution safer, but not safe, and that the real answer to a bullying federal government is a public research system no president can hold hostage. Harvard can weather this fight. Most universities cannot. The state school lab, the community hospital trial and the young postdoc without a billion-dollar cushion will absorb the damage first.
If Harvard wants moral standing in this fight, it should spend like it believes its own mission statement. Until then, it is a very rich institution with a legitimate grievance, and the Left should be able to say both things at once.
