Harvard’s Maintained Its Reputation Amid Trump-Fueled Surge of Attention

Harvard University has seen a surge of attention during President Donald Trump’s second term in office, but it’s done little to shake the institution’s reputation with the American people as it wages a costly and high-profile legal fight with his administration.

According to Morning Consult Intelligence tracking, Americans have increasingly developed opinions about Harvard since Trump took office in January, leading to equivalent upticks in the shares with favorable and unfavorable views of the institution.

As of last week, 49% of Americans viewed Harvard favorably, compared with 17% who held unfavorable views. Both of those figures increased 4 percentage points since Trump took office as fewer respondents said they didn’t know or had no opinion.

While Trump’s attacks on Harvard have done little to shake overall public sentiment, the trendlines do reveal some political polarization taking place.

Even as overall sentiment stayed mostly flat since January, Democrats have become more favorable toward the institution, which has made up for declines among independents and Republicans who nevertheless are both more likely to view Harvard positively than negatively. (Our latest figures here show Republicans are twice as likely to hold favorable views than unfavorable ones, 41% to 21%, while independents are more than three times as likely, 39% to 11%.)

This shift in sentiment comes at a time when Harvard is grabbing more public attention than it ever has in our tracking of public opinion that dates back to October 2021, and is facing its most negative news environment since last summer amid the national uproar over campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

According to our data last week, 49% of Americans have recently heard something about Harvard, with 27% reporting having heard something positive and 23% reporting something negative. Awareness surged among Americans of all stripes since Trump took office, though Republicans are consistently more likely than Democrats to report hearing something negative about the college.

The bottom line

Trump has spent a great deal of energy attacking Harvard and other elite educational institutions for a range of reasons, from their handling of protests to diversity initiatives and curriculum he’s described as too woke. While Trump may be able to hurt Harvard financially, these data points suggest his attacks alone may have limits in tarnishing the institution’s reputation. 

That isn’t to minimize Trump’s impact financially, given how he’s unleashing what The New York Times called “a complete severance of the government’s longstanding business relationship with Harvard” — something that should spark fear into other, less prominent higher educational institutions with less wealthy donor bases.

As for America’s oldest college itself, the increasingly partisan nature of its public image may be hard to reverse, especially if educational polarization continues to reorient the GOP around a more working-class voter base. But if the Ivy can’t at least maintain a somewhat positive brand among conservatives, it should prepare to navigate a very on-and-off relationship with Washington for the foreseeable future.