Summary
As a general principle, the redemptive benefits and transformative impacts of rigorous intellectual enquiry, robust analysis, enlightened scholarship which cross-examines established orthodoxies, collaborative and ground-breaking research and development, and its corollary, significant knowledge dissemination; creatively identifying and resolving current and future real-life problems, impacting, justice and the rule of law, engineering, healthcare, science, technology, et al; political neutrality, social interaction, and a de facto pedestal for social mobility, and much more, are the hallmarks of leading universities.
The quartet of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, Yale, and Harvard University, amongst other bastions of academic and scientific excellence, are in that hallowed echelon. An essential ingredient of their excellence is academic freedom, ipso facto, freedom of expression.
Paradoxically, Harvard University, established in 1636, is currently enmeshed in the political crosshairs of the Trump Administration’s volatile “America First” doctrines – which, in simple terms, seeks to completely reset domestic and foreign policy with maximalist ideologies, whether on global tariffs, abrasive anti-immigration enforcement, clamping down on diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and redefining freedom of expression.
Harvard confronts a tough dilemma: acquiesce to the Administration’s demands for deeper scrutiny, de facto “micro-management”, a moratorium on federal grants, and grave restrictions on academic freedom; or, robustly challenge what it considers to be flagrant overreach by the executive arm of government, in contravention of the U.S. Constitution. This paper examines the issues from the standpoint of the rule of law and its wider implications on academic freedom.
Discourse
The contest besieging Harvard intersects constitutionalism, foreign policy, jurisprudence, and the rule of law. Inevitably, it raises fundamental questions. First, precisely what are preeminent private universities paid to teach within the confines of the law? Second, should universities act as government spies and de facto immigration enforcement agents of government? Third, should a government determine, and dictate, the academic content and curriculum of a university? Fourth, is it the function of universities to acquiesce to the pontifications of partisan political interests? And fifth, given the rivalling interests of upholding legitimate academic freedom, and the freedom of expression versus and maintaining law and order, just how does the U.S. constitution intermediate?
Enlightened jurisprudential thought establishes that there are exceptions to general principles, which in its Latin etymology, exceptio probat regulam, reinforces the concept that an exception of a rule, tests the general rule, but does not supplant it. Afterall, the “idea that one can find exceptions to a rule without giving up on the rule is central to the practice of common law” according to Richard Holton in the Journal of Political Philosophy Volume 18 Issue 4 (December 2010).
Besides, the common law is the philosophical patrimony of United States jurisprudence and majority of Commonwealth jurisdictions, that is reinforced by the principle of stare decisis or the doctrine of binding judicial precedents of the Supreme Court, and Appellate Courts, on lower courts in respect of similar issues demanding resolution; which do not accommodate legal distinction.
Besides, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution 1789 establishes that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This principle is reinforced in the U.S. Supreme Court 2024 cases Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton; where the Court stressed inter alia: “on the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana”
Of course, these First Amendment rights are not absolute. Noteworthy exceptions pertain to national security, incitement to violence or lawlessness, defamation, obscenity, child pornography, fighting words et al. For example, in Counterman v Colorado (2023), SCOTUS decided that threatening violence was an exception to the First Amendment, just as it decided in Moses v Frederick (2007), that a school head may constrain free speech at a school function where the content was objectively deemed to support unlawful drug taking. In short, each case is analysed on its unique merits as determined in a plethora of SCOTUS cases.
Nevertheless, the debacle between Harvard and the Administration also pertains to U.S. foreign policy goals in the Israel/Palestine (Hamas) war, which reignited on October 7, 2023; with extensive casualties on both sides! U.S. staunchly supports its Israeli ally, which in turn has been accused of genocide against Palestinians at the International Court of Justice.
Extensive protests erupted across U.S. campuses in 2024, which prompted allegations of ideological bias and permitting anti-Semitism on its campuses by the Administration. Harvard vehemently rejects those claims. The Trump administration, then commenced a review of $9bn (£6.7bn) in federal grants for Harvard in March 2025, and demanded the university vet foreign students for those “hostile to the American values” and the cessation of all diversity, equality and inclusion programmes.
Harvard has since challenged the Trump administration contending, inter alia, that threats to the federal grants it receives exceed legitimate executive authority, constrain academic freedom, and contravene First Amendment rights. In a powerful riposte to the Administration, Harvard President Alan Gerber, argues that “no government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue inquire”
In the Nigerian case of Apampa v State (1982) LPELR 523, the Supreme Court established inter alia that the university “Senate controls the teaching side of the University.” Oxford University’s Council is the institution’s principal executive and policy-making body, with responsibility for academic policy and strategic direction.
The General Board, at Cambridge University exercises lead policy responsibilities for academics and educational activities. The critical point here, therefore, is that case law and governance antecedents from some of the world’s leading academic institutions and a common law jurisdiction, patently reinforce university autonomy.
The inescapable inference therefore is that prime universities, as centres of academic excellence, should determine their academic and educational curriculum, ditto research priorities, so long as these do not contravene the law. Ergo, government should neither determine, nor dictate, the academic content at elite universities.
On the specific question of immigration enforcement, universities in progressive societies, are creations of law! Whilst, immigration is clearly not the core function of universities – the very rationale for organisations like Customs and Border Police, Border Patrol, Immigration departments etc-, if the law imposes a positive obligation on universities to establish the immigration status of prospective students to attend courses, that surely must be complied with upon the agency of constitutionalism and societal order.
Doing so, does not make universities spies nor immigration enforcement agents. University autonomy perishes the moment it succumbs to partisan political biases. No self-respecting institution would do that because it is unethical, and would tarnish its reputation, perhaps permanently too.
Conclusion
By its very definition, an elite university does not attain ranking echelon on the basis of group-thinking and herding. Rather, it does so on the well-established foundations of outstanding scholarship, world-leading research, robust inquiry, intense and respectful debates, scientific and technological innovations which directly impact lives and society and Harvard’s raison d’etre is robustly anchored.
Harvard Medical School administered the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, which awarded $500,000 to five scientists – Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman from the University of Pennsylvania, Eric Huang from Moderna, and Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci from BioNTech – who pioneered the development of mRNA vaccines which proved effective in combating COVID-19. It also played a crucial role in the development and widespread adoption of anaesthesia, transforming surgery and pain management.
Harvard’s Chan School’s pivotal endeavours in oral rehydration therapy have saved millions of lives from diarrhoeal diseases. The direct-current defibrillator, a life-saving device for cardiac emergencies, was developed at Harvard, ditto the smallpox vaccine, the electrocardiograph for evaluating heart dynamics; advances in gene editing therapies with huge potential for sickle cell disease patients, proton beam technologies for cancer treatment, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for real-time brain measurement of brain activity, a boon for neurosciences, amongst others.
These are transformative outcomes which positively impact American and non-American lives, underpinned by some of the finest brains from across the world. These groundbreaking accomplishments are evident at leading institutions too and anchor the enduring philosophy of the Magna Charta Universitatum 1988: “Intellectual and moral autonomy is the hallmark of any university and a precondition for the fulfilment of its responsibilities to society” Res ipsa loquitur!
Ojumu is the Principal Partner at Balliol Myers LP, a firm of legal practitioners and strategy consultants in Lagos, Nigeria, author of The Dynamic Intersections of Economics, Foreign Relations, Jurisprudence and National Development (2023).
