Kevin Stevens writes: I play pickleball several times a week at the YMCA in Central Square, Cambridge, a short walk from Harvard University. A cohort of thirty to forty of us play, and the group is a cross-section of the cosmopolitan Cambridge community. We run in age from fifteen to eighty-five. We are students, working people, researchers, academics, and retirees. And we are natives, by my informal count, of at least seventeen far-flung countries, including Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, South Africa and Israel.
We are a sociable group, and I’ve come to know my fellow players fairly well as we wait our turns in the playing rotation. Though the etiquette discourages talk about politics, even casual details of what the players do and where they work reveal how national politics in general, and the Trump administration’s vendetta against Harvard in particular, have impacted the lives and attitudes of those of us who live in the footprint of the country’s most prestigious university.
One young woman works for the Harvard School of Public Health, on a team that studies the effects of air pollution on children. She expects her whole department to be let go because of cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which funds the research. A Jewish scientist who wears a keffiyeh in sympathy for Gaza tells me that over a hundred of his colleagues at his Harvard-affiliated genomics institute have lost their jobs; he awaits news of his own role. And a gay Harvard teaching fellow and civil rights activist worries how the Trump administration is pushing to reinstitute discriminatory laws targeting people like her.
These views emerge not in overtly political discussion but in conversation about everyday life. Though most of us have nothing to do with Harvard, its influence in the city makes its battle with the administration a community concern we feel in our bones. The impact of the White House’s recent threats and demands – to suspend Harvard’s federal funding, to revoke its certification to host international students, to demand video of any and all student protests, to claim that the university supports ‘pro-terrorist conduct’ – is less a dispute for us than an atmosphere, a tense backdrop to life in a neighbourhood that, for now, conducts itself as normal.
The consequences of this aggression will play out – in the courts, in public opinion, in the responses of other universities nationwide – but in the meantime the struggle is mostly rhetorical. At the end of May I walked through Harvard Square on commencement day. Though outside the campus, the square is a traditional gathering place for both celebrants and protesters from the college, and a vocal but peaceful demonstration against the Trump administration milled around the entrance to the subway. Last year’s graduation was fraught; degrees were withheld from protesters, a commencement speaker was challenged onstage and there was a mass walkout by nearly a thousand students and faculty mid-ceremony. This year was marked by a sense of solidarity: many graduates wore white flowers and printed stickers showing support for their international peers, and Harvard president Alan Garber earned a standing ovation after criticising federal interference and speaking of the importance of global diversity.
Later that day, I met my friend Dan Donoghue for coffee. Dan is Harvard’s director of undergraduate studies and a professor in the English department. He confirmed that last year’s anger at the university administration has been, for the most part, replaced by outrage at the actions of the Trump executive. The last two years have been a period of angst and self-examination at Harvard, and the Garber administration’s response to political and public pressure over DEI-related challenges, ideological divide, antisemitism, and lack of intellectual openness has not been without controversy. However, though many faculty and student grievances remain, on both left and right, the college community, under siege, is more united than it has been in a long time.
A graduate of University College Dublin, Dan is a medievalist and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Old English epic Beowulf. He teaches a popular course on the history of the English language, and he told me how, like many instructors at Harvard, he has used his teaching to register where he stands. Last March, The New York Times published a list of two hundred words and phrases that federal agencies, with guidance from Trump’s executive orders and the direction of his advisers, have flagged as suspect or ‘woke’. The list includes clean energy, feminism, equality, Gulf of Mexico, injustice and underprivileged. Some agencies have ordered the removal of this language from public-facing websites. Others have advised caution in its usage. And the presence of some of these words has been used to trigger review of federal grant proposals and contracts that might conflict with Trump’s aims.
Alarmed at this purge, Dan reproduced a portion of the list, distributed it to his students, and used it as the latest example in the long history of authoritarian efforts to prescribe language for ideological reasons – to police speech, suppress dissent, and sanitise the past. Trying to eliminate words from a free society may be a fool’s errand, but its dangers are obvious. At least to most of us. In his capacity as director of studies, Dan also wrote a public letter of support for the university’s international students, who make up nearly a quarter of the student body.
Is he preaching to the converted? Perhaps. But Dan’s actions are more than gestures. With billions of dollars, the mission of the college and the critical question of academic freedom on the line, Harvard has bravely stood up to an overweening federal government while other universities have caved. From the quiet actions of teachers like Dan to the public activism of Garber and others, Harvard has become an example to colleges, schools, law firms and other institutions throughout the country. And an inspiration to those of us who live beside it.
The Cambridge community has a close and generally positive relationship with Harvard, with strong economic, political and cultural ties. We love the bookstores, theatres, coffee shops and museums that radiate out from the campus. We sometimes bridle at its elitism and lack of ideological diversity, and we object to the occasional instances of erosion of academic independence and suppression of free speech, but we appreciate – if only from the vantage point of our pickleball games – the importance of global diversity and the richness the university and its international students bring to our city, our country and the world. We value the fifty-two Nobel Prize winners on its staff and its world-class scientific, technological and social research. And though we may worry on occasion that, as residents of the most liberal city in the country’s most liberal state, we are distant from mainstream American opinion, we are well aware of the country’s fractured political landscape and the sad reality that a bullying, autocratic, divisive president is not just targeting Harvard and other bastions of free thought but doing all he can to undermine civil discourse, implicit in the idea of a university, which is the only way we can overcome our polarisation.
13/6/2025
Kevin Stevens is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review of Books. His most recent essay was on Percival Everett’s reworking of Huckleberry Finn, James https://drb.ie/articles/my-name-is-james/
He will be writing in the autumn issue on the American novelist and short story writer Joan Silber.
