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America’s Ivy League universities are among the richest institutions in the world. Cushioned by large endowments, they are also rich in terms of scholarship, influence and networks. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s daughter studied at Harvard.

The largest international donation to Harvard Business School—approximately Rs 400 crore—came from the Tata Group. Sometimes criticised as islands of privilege, these Ivy League universities are nevertheless central to the story of America and its global leadership.

According to Statista, US universities collectively attracted more Indian students (331,602 in 2023–24) than students from any other non-US nationality, with Chinese students following at 227,398.

This kind of standing and money power should, in normal circumstances, shield them from rough weather and keep their future free of material worries. However, given the complex turn that America has taken today, it is that very same standing and money power that puts them at the centre of the firestorm unleashed by the Trump administration.

Adept as they are at protecting and growing their endowments, their success has brought on charges — fair or unfair — that they spend more on investment managers to grow their kitty rather than to grow the mission to deliver education for all.

This faintly echoes an unrelated remark by American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who, for different reasons, was barred from Harvard for three decades in the 1830s. When he said “things are in the saddle, and [they] ride mankind”, he suggested that instead of mastering the material world, we’ve become mastered by it. Have US universities become prisoners of their endowments, making them more vulnerable than they should be to the turn of events?

Several months before the current crisis erupted, Prof. Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished Palestinian-American historian at Columbia, put it in these words: “For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register — essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum.”

Trump and his friends might agree, as they gather under the label of Trumpism to declare what is, in effect, a war on the education system in America. An amalgam of MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) politics — marked by conspiracy theorists, anti-globalists and extreme-right conservatives, wrapped in the braggadocio that has become the staple of US officialdom — demands that universities follow federal diktats on all manner of functions and operations.

It is true that some like Harvard are boldly fighting it out, while others like Columbia have caved in. Harvard, too, was quiet in the first two weeks of April this year when a list of demands arrived from the White House. The silence was broken only when additional demands were added to the original list — crossing, in the words of university president Alan M. Garber, “a bridge too far”. Trump aimed to humiliate, leaving Harvard no choice but to fight back.

Today most universities are backed into a corner, straining to defend their freedoms without resorting to all-out conflict; holding their ground only when the administration’s demands become so egregious, meeting them seems nigh impossible.

The larger picture reveals universities looking for ways out. When the war began, one magazine described it as ‘the muted or mostly non-existent response ‘ of college presidents. This may be changing gradually as the full extent of the Trump administration’s crackdown becomes clear.

While some universities have issued statements of support, they have not presented a united front against Trump. Many are either unwilling or unable to take the issue directly to the public, and some have even conceded to certain demands, showing up once-powerful institutions as weak, easily trampled on, lacking the fire in the belly to stand firm.

Consider the mighty Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The 164-year-old institution runs a rather popular game called ‘The Moral Machine’ to understand how humans might want autonomous vehicles to respond to unavoidable accident scenarios in the real world.

According to a research paper, ‘The Moral Machine’ has collected 39.61 million decisions in 233 countries, dependencies or territories. For all its efforts to understand the moral dilemmas posed by modern technologies, it took just one student and a brief four-minute speech to hold up a moral mirror to MIT, and shame the university worldwide.

Taking the stage at pre-convocation festivities, Megha Vemuri, the elected Indian-American president of MIT’s Class of 2025, torched her college with her words: “The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with; this means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it.”

She added: “We will carry with us the stamp of the MIT name, the same name that is directly complicit with the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and so we carry with us the obligation to do everything we can to stop it. Class of 2025 — you are MIT. Pressure is nothing to you.”

MIT is one of several universities in America that have research ties, funding or contracts with the Israeli military that runs what is, beyond any shadow of doubt, a genocidal operation in Palestinian territories. According to the May/ June 2024 issue of The MIT Faculty Newsletter — an independent forum for faculty views — MIT has received over $11 million in research funding from the Israeli ministry of defense.

While Vemuri’s bold protest speaks highly of the merits of a US campus, where students find ways to engage in issues beyond the classroom, with all the passion, energy and devil-may-care attitude of youth, MIT’s statement in favour of free speech that followed rang hollow. Megha Vemuri was barred from attending her own graduate commencement ceremony on Friday, 6 June.

All the experiments with moral machines cannot reclaim the moral high ground that Vemuri and her classmates staked, as they punched holes in the edifice of their alma mater, and shared a lesson that America, and the world, could learn from.

Jagdish Rattanani is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR. More of his writings can be

Article courtesy: The Billion Press