Harvard’s lawsuit offers an opening for ethical renewal

In a matter of weeks, Harvard University has found itself at the centre of two seismic confrontations with the United States federal government. In April 2025, it filed a landmark lawsuit against the Department of Education, challenging what it described as a politically motivated overreach threatening academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

This week, the Department of Homeland Security abruptly revoked Harvard’s certification to enrol international students – casting the legal status of more than 6,800 students into limbo and effectively redefining one of the world’s most prestigious universities as a national security concern.

These back-to-back actions signal something larger than bureaucratic disputes. Together, they mark an inflection point in the role and governance of the university itself. What was once a question of federal oversight has now become a crisis of academic sovereignty.

It is Harvard’s most consequential legal battle since Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, when it defended race-conscious admissions before the US Supreme Court.

But unlike that case, the current challenges are not confined to admissions policy – they interrogate the very conditions under which universities can continue to function as autonomous spaces of ethical inquiry and global engagement.

In a political climate where democratic institutions are increasingly bent towards ideological alignment and nationalistic scrutiny, Harvard’s predicament poses a fundamental question: Can universities still serve as independent moral commons, or are they being reengineered into subcontractors of the state?

State power vs academic autonomy

The lawsuit emerged in response to a sweeping directive by the Department of Education – issued amid mounting political pressure following student protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict and rising concerns about campus antisemitism.

While Title VI of the Civil Rights Act provided the legal foundation, the demands imposed by the Department extended well beyond addressing discrimination.

The government threatened suspension of grants across National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy-funded research projects unless Harvard adopted new policies on university governance structures, speech regulation and disciplinary oversight.

What may appear as a civil rights enforcement issue quickly reveals itself as a structural assertion of state power over academic autonomy.

The government’s use of funding as leverage to coerce institutional reforms reframes the university’s relationship with the state – from a partnership grounded in mutual public interest to a conditional contract governed by compliance.

Rather than resolving the problem of hate, the directives risk bureaucratising morality and instrumentalising inclusion. The lawsuit calls attention to this danger: the replacement of moral responsibility with performative surveillance, where institutions manage optics rather than foster ethical deliberation.

Harvard’s legal action poses three fundamental questions that go beyond technical statutes or campus politics:

• Who determines the moral boundaries of academic life? The lawsuit challenges the growing tendency to allow federal agencies to define what counts as acceptable moral discourse in educational institutions. If moral authority is delegated to external actors, then the university risks becoming a passive vessel of external agendas rather than an active site of ethical formation.

• Can academic freedom survive conditional funding? The use of financial coercion as an instrument of policy enforcement exposes how fragile institutional autonomy can be. This lawsuit forces a reckoning with the extent to which universities, even elite ones, are structurally dependent on federal patronage – and whether such dependence is compatible with academic integrity.

• Is the university still a public trust, or has it become a political battleground?

Harvard’s case illuminates how the university, long viewed as a place of reasoned inquiry and public purpose, has been increasingly politicised by culture wars and electoral pressures. It asks whether the university can still function as a moral and intellectual commons amid growing ideological volatility.

International students

In the immediate aftermath of its legal filing, Harvard faced a new existential challenge: the US Department of Homeland Security revoked its certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), barring it from enrolling new international students for the 2025-2026 academic year.

This decision also jeopardises the legal status of over 6,800 current international students, sparking fears of deportation or forced transfers.

Citing administrative lapses and unsubstantiated claims of ties to foreign governments and campus antisemitism, the federal action signals a deeper shift: from viewing universities as global knowledge hubs to treating them as sites of surveillance and ideological conformity.

The response was swift. A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction to protect students during ongoing litigation. Yet Homeland Security’s demands – including records of protest participation – reveal a chilling logic: Harvard is no longer simply an academic institution but a perceived security risk.

This episode reframes the university’s role in a divided world. Once imagined as bridges across cultures, universities are now ensnared in geopolitical fault lines. In place of academic cosmopolitanism, we are witnessing the rise of nationalistic scrutiny – where loyalty tests threaten to replace the pursuit of knowledge.

The state grows anxious

At the heart of Harvard’s legal challenge lies a deeper philosophical tension between autonomy and compliance, a dilemma that has long haunted democratic societies but now takes on new urgency in the context of education.

Democratic governance, at its best, relies on a delicate balance: the state must have enough authority to uphold justice and protect rights, while institutions must retain sufficient autonomy to question, critique and shape the moral direction of society.

Universities – alongside courts, the press and civil society – have historically played this role. They have served as laboratories of dissent, ethical deliberation and counter-hegemonic thinking.

Yet in times of crisis – particularly amid populist movements, polarisation and digital disinformation – this balance erodes. The state grows anxious. It seeks certainty in metrics, control through compliance and unity through regulation.

Universities, rather than being trusted interlocutors in moral discourse, are increasingly treated as ideological battlegrounds or sources of instability.

This is where Harvard’s lawsuit touches something deeper than legality: it questions whether modern democracies can still tolerate autonomous institutions at all.

Philosopher Jürgen Habermas warned of the “colonisation of the lifeworld” – the process by which systems of bureaucratic control displace the organic, communicative spaces of reasoned dialogue.

Education, under such colonisation, ceases to be a space of moral development and becomes a compliance mechanism. What emerges is not public reason but public performance – an endless loop of monitored speech, performative inclusion and institutional risk aversion.

Autonomy, in this sense, is not the absence of oversight but the presence of moral agency. It allows a university to say: we recognise the harm, but we choose how to respond – through education, not regulation; through dialogue, not decree.

As universities adopt compliance frameworks in response to political pressure, they risk substituting ethical formation with institutional risk management. Compliance culture shifts the focus from doing what is just to doing what is defensible – from values to optics.

Policies are crafted not to transform campus culture but to protect the institution from liability. The deeper questions – What kind of citizens are we educating? What kind of discourse should we protect? What does it mean to live with difference? – are quietly sidelined in favour of checklists and protocols.

Global reverberations

Yet the irony is sharp: in trying to mandate moral responsibility from the outside, the state may be eroding the very conditions under which such responsibility can flourish. For virtue cannot be coerced; it must be cultivated. And cultivation, as every educator knows, takes time, freedom and trust.

Although the lawsuit is US-based, its implications reverberate globally. Universities in Hungary, Turkey, Brazil and India have faced mounting political interference in recent years – from curriculum restrictions to threats against faculty autonomy.

In Hungary, the Central European University was effectively expelled after years of regulatory pressure under Viktor Orbán’s government, demonstrating how academic freedom can be dismantled not overnight, but incrementally, through legalistic and financial levers.

This case reminds us that academic freedom is not a static privilege but a fragile, continuously negotiated space. It warns that the erosion of university autonomy, whether through direct state control or indirect financial coercion, can occur even in liberal democracies under the guise of social protection or public order.

What happens at Harvard is not an anomaly; it is a mirror. A warning. And perhaps, if courageously addressed, a turning point.

Harvard’s greater responsibility

Harvard is not a neutral actor in the landscape of higher education. It is the wealthiest university in the world, with an endowment exceeding US$50 billion, larger than the GDP of some developing nations.

Its alumni populate the halls of Congress, occupy leadership in global financial institutions, steer multinational corporations and shape global narratives through media, think tanks and tech platforms. Its institutional footprint reaches into nearly every sphere of global influence.

This power is not accidental. Harvard has meticulously cultivated it over centuries through its proximity to political elites, its role in credentialing prestige and its authority in determining what counts as legitimate knowledge.

For this very reason, it has also become a lightning rod for critique. To its detractors, Harvard embodies the contradictions of American higher education: an elite institution that reproduces privilege while claiming to advance meritocracy; a symbol of academic excellence that often reinforces structural exclusion; a cloistered academy that simultaneously exerts global reach.

Yet this lawsuit reveals something more profound: even the most fortified institutions are vulnerable to the pressures of political instrumentalisation. Harvard’s prestige does not insulate it from becoming a pawn in ideological warfare.

It makes it the stage upon which that warfare is enacted. The centrality of Harvard in American political culture means that its battles are never just about itself; they are proxy wars over the meaning of education, democracy and power.

In this context, Harvard bears a greater responsibility. It cannot frame this lawsuit merely as a legal dispute or a matter of procedural overreach. To do so would reduce the conflict to a defence of institutional interests.

What is required instead is moral leadership – a bold rearticulation of what the university should stand for in a democratic society. Not as a think tank for elite reproduction. Not as a compliance machine serving the state. But as a civic institution committed to hard questions, ethical pluralism and the cultivation of human dignity in a fragmented world.

This is not a call to absolve Harvard of its contradictions. It is a demand that it confronts them.

Harvard must reckon with how its culture of exclusivity and technocratic governance has helped enable some of the political dynamics now threatening the independence of higher education. And it must use its considerable resources not merely to protect its reputation but to widen the moral horizons of what a university can be.

As economist and public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs has long argued, universities – especially globally influential ones like Harvard – carry not only academic responsibilities but profound ethical obligations in shaping the trajectory of democratic societies.

Sachs would likely see this lawsuit as a symptom of a broader malaise: the erosion of liberal institutions under the combined forces of political polarisation, authoritarian populism and neoliberal capture.

In the 2020 book, The Ages of Globalisation, Sachs calls on elite institutions to become moral anchors amid rising instability, warning that the collapse of public trust and planetary sustainability demands leadership rooted in justice, inclusion and global solidarity.

Viewed through this lens, Harvard’s task is not just to defend its autonomy as a privileged institution, but to reclaim its role as a steward of the global moral commons.

It must stand for equity in an age of widening inequality, for truth in a time of misinformation and for peace in an era of escalating fragmentation.

This means resisting external coercion, yes – but also interrogating the university’s own complicity in systems of hierarchy and exclusion. As Sachs reminds us, true leadership does not emerge from institutional survival but from ethical clarity in moments of democratic peril.

To do less would be to betray its own motto: Veritas – truth. Not truth as possession, but truth as practice: dialogical, fragile and necessary.

Lessons for all universities

The deeper lesson of this lawsuit transcends Harvard’s campus gates. It reveals a critical inflection point for universities worldwide. We now inhabit a moment marked by the convergence of state suspicion, algorithmic disinformation, ideological weaponisation of identity and the steady erosion of public trust.

In this climate, universities face a stark choice: adapt by retreating into bureaucratic neutrality or rise with renewed moral clarity. Compliance culture, once seen as a necessary layer of accountability, is proving insufficient and often counterproductive.

When educational institutions are reduced to risk management and reputation protection, they lose the very trust they seek to preserve. At the same time, silence – whether born of fear, fatigue or false neutrality – only accelerates institutional irrelevance.

A university that does not speak when its mission is under attack ceases to be a university at all.

So what must universities do now?

1. Reclaim public trust not through performative neutrality, but moral courage. This means speaking clearly – even controversially – when fundamental principles are at stake. It means not hiding behind policies when people are harmed, nor using outrage as a substitute for inquiry.

Universities must re-engage the public not as branded institutions but as trusted spaces of deliberation. That requires defending complexity, not managing it out of existence.

2. Develop shared governance models that resist external capture. The corporatisation of higher education has often sidelined the academic community in favour of centralised leadership and legal insulation. But real institutional resilience is not achieved through lawyers and lobbyists.

It is forged through participatory governance where faculty, students and communities help define the mission, policies and values of their institutions. Shared governance is not a luxury – it is a shield against capture, both political and market-driven.

3. Insist that inclusion and free expression are not zero-sum. Too often, public discourse pits diversity and dialogue against each other, as if defending one requires diminishing the other.

But the truth is more profound: genuine inclusion depends on the capacity to hear and respond to disagreement, while meaningful speech cannot flourish in spaces shaped by exclusion or fear. Universities must reject this false binary and model a form of citizenship that holds both values as interdependent and indivisible.

Democratic survival

Ultimately, universities must become not just places where ideas are taught but institutions that embody the values they teach: pluralism, justice, truth-seeking and human dignity. This is not a matter of idealism but of democratic survival.

The Harvard lawsuit offers an opening – not just for legal resolution but for ethical renewal. In choosing to challenge the federal government, Harvard has an opportunity to restate the purpose of the university in an age of moral confusion.

It is not enough to fight for autonomy. We must also fight for relevance, justice and imagination.

In the years to come, this lawsuit may be remembered not for its legal outcome but for whether it sparked a wider effort to reclaim the university – not as an institution of power but as a sanctuary for democratic possibility.

James Yoonil Auh is the chair of computing and communications engineering at KyungHee Cyber University in South Korea. He has worked across the United States, Asia and Latin America on projects linking ethics, technology and education policy.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.