Harvard president Alan Garber has said Trump’s threat to go after endowments ‘keeps me up at night’
Harvard University has hired the former lobbying firm of Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles and Trump attorney general nominee Pam Bondi as the Ivy League school hopes to dampen investigations into campus anti-Semitism and curtail threats to tax its massive $53 billion endowment.
Harvard tapped Ballard Partners to lobby on the broad issue of “advocacy supporting education and educational research,” according to lobbying disclosures filed with Congress.
The hiring comes as Harvard president Alan Garber has signaled the university will take a more diplomatic approach to the second Trump term compared to the first. Garber reportedly told Harvard faculty last month that the school must rethink its messaging strategy in the wake of the decisive GOP wins in November, and that he saw the election results as a repudiation of elitism, according to the Harvard Crimson.
Ballard Partners founder Brian Ballard, who will lobby on behalf of Harvard, forged close ties to Trump during his first presidential term. And many of the firm’s alumni have joined the Trump ranks. Wiles, Trump’s 2024 campaign manager, served as a partner at Ballard until 2019. Bondi, whose confirmation hearings begin this week, joined Ballard as a partner in 2019.
Harvard’s approach is a far cry from the one it embraced after Trump’s first election. Then-president Drew Faust ramped up lobbying efforts to challenge Trump’s immigration policies and his threats to cut funding for research and humanities, which she called an “assault” on the relationship between the federal government and universities.
Faust penned an op-ed criticizing Trump’s plans to cut funding for the National Endowment for Humanities, and Harvard joined lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s executive actions on immigration.
It’s not entirely clear which issues Ballard will help Harvard navigate. But Harvard officials have said they are concerned about ongoing congressional probes into campus anti-Semitism, proposals to increase taxes on university endowments, and threats to cut research funding.
Trump has called for higher taxes on the Harvard endowment, and incoming vice president J.D. Vance proposed a bill in 2023 to increase the highest tax rate on school endowments from 1.4 percent to 35 percent.
Garber has said the Trump threat “keeps me up at night.”
Harvard remains in the crosshairs of several congressional investigations over the rampant anti-Semitic activity at its Massachusetts campus.
Harvard came under heightened scrutiny after Garber’s predecessor, Claudine Gay, testified to Congress in December 2023 that statements that call for the genocide of Jews did not necessarily constitute harassment under the university’s policies. “It depends on the context,” Gay told Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.). She was later found to have plagiarized parts of at least eight of her published academic works, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Harvard and Ballard Partners did not respond to requests for comment.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
