Harvard University’s ugly showdown with the Trump administration is the inevitable outcome of a half-century of academia’s Leftward consolidation of power. The clashes reveal that Harvard and other leading institutions are committed to social justice advocacy, not as window dressing but as a core mission. As a result, these universities will yield to outside pressure only when subjected to intimidation and legal force.

Like dozens of other institutions, Harvard is purging its public-facing websites, rebranding DEI bureaucracies, and renaming job titles in response to federal defunding threats. In one discreet defensive manoeuvre, Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo said this week on X that Harvard removed a faculty hiring guide from its website that promoted a DEI policy of “sending white men to the back of the reading list”.

Just this week, The New York Times tallied at least eight federal investigations and actions aimed at Harvard, including the feds’ freezing more than $2 billion in research grants over alleged antisemitism, racial discrimination against white job applicants, and ideologically-tainted research advancing intersectional identity politics.

Harvard’s resistance to Donald Trump’s demands for ideological rebalancing and ending identity-based hiring and scholarship indicates that something larger is at work than the recalcitrance of any single Ivy League college. When it comes to the sacrosanct trinity of race, sexual orientation and gender identity, higher education looks to Harvard for inspiration, counting on court delays and other setbacks to outlast Trump’s second term so that they can resume the social justice programming that was so rudely interrupted.

These universities have every reason to think in terms of the long game. Battles over affirmative action, a core plank of progressive advocacy for the disempowered, have been dragging on for more than half a century. The ideological controversies embroiling academia can be traced back to the social upheavals of the Sixties, which gave rise to scholarly activism in the proliferation of black studies, gender studies and ethnic studies. Their critical theories of exclusion, oppression and domination provide the intellectual foundations for the diversity, equity and inclusion practices which govern so much of moden academic life and corporate management.

Strategic workarounds are now on full display everywhere in the wake of Trump’s election, with corporations and universities renaming DEI offices and rebranding positions — using euphemisms such as “climate” and “community” — or taking down web pages when virtue-signalling becomes a political liability. DEI programmes, which operate on the assumption that Western social norms are inherently chauvinistic and oppressive, are in retreat in red states, but notably only in response to legislative muscle.

Such adaptation strategies were touted by DEI experts as a way of outsmarting the Right-wing naysayers. In the past year or so, these intentions of unwavering commitment were unequivocally expressed in a spate of articles about renaming and rebranding politicised institutional practices. “Don’t be fooled by the noise. DEI isn’t going anywhere,” one consultant wrote this year. “Companies Are Avoiding the ‘DEI’ Acronym – Even If They’re Not Pulling Back on Diversity Initiatives,” a headline proclaimed. “Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term,” CNBC reported, “companies aren’t necessarily ending their efforts. They’re rebranding them.”

These ideological divides have come to define America’s two major political parties, and are now so ingrained as immutable identities that they resemble the religious wars of Europe. Which, as has been remarked upon more than once, signifies a return to academia’s puritanical origins as religious institutions created to forge the moral character of the nation.