Game on.

Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.

Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.

Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.

That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.

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The administration’s fight with Harvard, which had an endowment of $53.2 billion in 2024, is one that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House aide, want to have. In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

Or the engineering school to hire magicians?