Will we remember what freedom felt like?

The question for the last three months has been, when will it end? The question today is, will there be anything left?

Every day, this country and our freedom suffer another body blow. Tonight, news landed that after Harvard University rejected demands for federal control of its academic life, the Treasury Department is taking steps to end its tax-exempt status. This, after the Trump administration has frozen some $2 billion in grants and cancelled outright $60 million in federal contracts with the university, with threats to cancel the remainder of Harvard’s $9 billion in federal grants.

This is a partial list of Trump’s blackmail demands:

Harvard must agree to “shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name; demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government.”

Harvard must submit to the government auditing “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity” and hiring and admissions so that “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It’s unintelligible gibberish, but their “viewpoint diversity” means the end of free thought at Harvard.

“The University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” as defined by Donald Trump.

“The University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.”

There were other demands rejected by Harvard, including that “governance” of the university be altered so that those in charge must be “committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” That means Harvard leaders must do what Trump demands or else.

A letter posted on the university’s X account put the position of Harvard this way: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”

Other universities such as Columbia and Northwestern have been subject to similar threats and caved into Trump’s demands. The administration is said to have a list of other universities upon which it will make similar demands.

Harvard is such an enormously wealthy institution that they recently announced that students from families making $200 thousand or less yearly would be given free tuition. Harvard is said to have an endowment in excess of $50 billion and doubtlessly has enough billionaires among its alumni to keep the place going – even thriving – for at least the next hundred years.

So why should we worry about Harvard at a time when our country is beset daily by these horrors, among many others:

American citizens as well as undocumented migrants are being snatched off the street and sent to interment camps in Louisiana and El Salvador.

There are new plans to send undocumented arrestees with no criminal records to detention in Guantanamo.

Tens of thousands of federal employees, including those serving in harms way overseas, have been summarily fired without notice on false premises.

Budgets of departments like Health and Human Services are scheduled for cuts of as much as 40 percent and entire federal departments such as USAID have been shut down without Congressional authorization.

The entire weight of the federal government is being wielded daily against organizations such as Planned Parenthood, and individuals from Trump’s first administration he doesn’t like have been threatened with criminal investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice.

The Attorney General of New York State has been referred for criminal prosecution under federal law. Threats to prosecute former President Biden and his family have been made repeatedly by Trump and hang in the balance.

Multiple law firms have been threatened with loss of security clearances and access to federal buildings necessary to represent their clients.

Defiance of court orders by the Trump administration, including those of Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court, are a daily occurrence.

With all of this going on, it seems silly to worry about the wealthiest college in the country, doesn’t it?

No. Harvard is just one more brick in the wall of fascism being constructed around all of us. The demands on Harvard, now spelled out in an official document signed by a deputy commissioner of the General Services Administration, the General Counsel of the Department of Education, and the General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services – all acting on the orders of Donald Trump – are written evidence of the imposition of thought police of a an authoritarian regime. The next step after such demands is arrest on spurious charges; after that is imprisonment; the next step in the dark stairs leading to dictatorship is arrest without charges, already being used against migrants with no criminal record, some with protected immigration status; down at the bottom of the stairs is imprisonment without trial and conviction; we know from reading history that is less than a decade older than I am what is next: torture, disappearance, death.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland flew to El Salvador today and his request to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran migrant renditioned to a prison known for torturing inmates, was denied.

We have no way of knowing whether Garcia is alive or dead. Not even the Supreme Court has been able to compel Donald Trump to return him from imprisonment in El Salvador that the court has ruled is “illegal.”

It starts with people who are poor without proper “papers.” It starts with those who have skin that is not white or those who are not heterosexual or their gender identity is different from the one listed on their birth certificate. It starts with those from another neighborhood or another religion. It starts with them. Then it’s Harvard. Then it’s us.

We are in the terrible place history has recorded so well and that we ignore at our peril.