Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by Andrew Crespo, Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, to discuss a recent court case that found the Trump Administration’s freeze of over $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard illegal.
On Wednesday, September 3rd, a federal judge in Boston found the Trump Administration’s freeze of over $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard illegal, ruling that the government violated the University’s First Amendment rights. The Trump Administration originally withheld the funds over allegations that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus. In response to the ruling, the administration said it would continue to appeal.
This week, Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by Andrew Crespo, Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and General Counsel of the Harvard Faculty Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, to discuss the ruling and what might come next in this ongoing conflict.
Andrew Manuel Crespo is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches criminal law and procedure and serves as the Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. Professor Crespo’s research and scholarly expertise center on the institutional design, legal frameworks, and power structures of the American penal system, and on the relationship between lawyers, organizers, and social movement actors in effecting transformational change.
Professor Crespo is the General Counsel of the Harvard Faculty Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the nation’s leading association of faculty members dedicated to safeguarding academic freedom and independence, promoting shared faculty governance of institutions of higher learning, and protecting the economic security of the profession.
The Trump Lawsuit You Haven’t Heard of Is the Real Game Changer, Harvard Crimson, by Andrew M. Crespo and Kirsten A. Weld
Archon Fung: Thank you for watching. You’re listening to Terms of Engagement. I’m Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and faculty director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer, former elected Maricopa County recorder and now a senior practice fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School. So today we’re gonna be talking about Harvard because we have to, because last week we got a big ruling from US District Court Judge Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts. And of course, this involves one of the two major battlegrounds between the Trump administration and Harvard University. Specifically, this one involved the freezing of federal grants and federal funding to the tune of, depending on the day, it was somewhere between two point eight billion and maybe upwards of nine billion. Certain projects were frozen, certain projects were stopped. And immediately following that, Harvard sued the administration and said that this freezing of the funding violates both the First Amendment and Title VI, it violates the Administrative Procedures Act. And last week, Harvard got a very positive ruling from District Court Judge Alison Burroughs that granted harvard’s motion for summary judgment on all three of those arguments and so the judge has ruled that all of that should be undone the funding should be turned back on and we’re now waiting to see what happens but to bring in to help us out and to bring in a real expert I’m going to allow archon to introduce our guest.
Archon Fung: First of all, we should tell you that this conversation is coming from the past. We’re actually recording on Monday and you’re seeing this on Tuesday at noon. We recorded a little early so that we could accommodate everybody’s schedules and in particular get. Andrew on the show, but please type in your comments and we will respond to them as we can, as we usually do.
For a little introduction, Andrew Manuel Crespo is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at the Harvard Kennedy School. One of my colleagues and friends, he teaches criminal law and procedure and serves as the executive faculty director to the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. Andrew’s research and scholarly expertise deal with power structures, institutional design, and legal frameworks. He’s a nationally known expert and particularly important to today’s discussion. He is the general counsel of the Harvard faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors, of which I am a fully paid-up, a dues-paying member. And Harvard’s AAUP was a plaintiff along with Harvard University in the suit that Stephen was talking about last week.
Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew Crespo: So great to be here with both of you. Thanks so much for having me.
Stephen Richer: How much are the dues? Thanks for having us. It scales depending on how much you make, but I’ve been around for a while, so I’m on the upper end of that.
Archon Fung: I don’t know. I forget. It’s like a couple hundred bucks a year maybe.
Stephen Richer: Andrew, I hope you give them the friends and family discount and actually turn it up and charge them a bit more. Stephen, we’ve got to get you to be a member. Yeah.
Stephen Richer: Well, I appreciate learning more about the organization. And of course, you wrote a piece for the Harvard Crimson about the ruling from Judge Burroughs. And you wanted to point out that, yes, the motions for summary judgment that Harvard asked for were granted. But the layer that people didn’t really peel back was that there was actually two lawsuits filed on this topic on the freezing of federal funds. And that’s important. Can you tell us a bit about that article?
Andrew Crespo: Sure. I mean, you know, the description you just gave is really capturing one of the main things we were trying to share. This is a piece that I co-wrote with our chapter president, Kirsten Weld, who’s a terrific leader of the AUP chapter here at Harvard. along with so many other colleagues who have been putting in so much work to grow the chapter. You know, the Harvard AAUP chapter in its current form is just about over a year old. The AAUP, for your listeners who might not know, was founded in nineteen fifteen and is the oldest and leading association defending academic freedom, academic independence and shared governance of institutions of higher learning in the United States, and is really one of the central institutions for creating American higher education. You know, a lot of readers, a lot of listeners might not sort of be aware that America wasn’t the global leader in higher education until just about a century and a half ago. German research institutions created the modern university and the AAUP created principles like tenure and academic freedom and the sort of space for these institutions to be independent from outside influence. Kirsten and I, along with a number of colleagues here, helped lead the chapter. The chapter at Harvard grew from six members when it revived itself a year and a half ago to close to three hundred now over the past year given everything that’s been going on on campus. And when the initial funding threats for the Trump administration were heading our way in late March and early April, You know, it’s tricky to remember this now that Harvard has back against the Trump administration. But in the early days, every university that had been targeted caved, most memorably at Columbia. And a lot of indications suggested that Harvard was seriously thinking of doing the same thing. And our chapter was eager to make sure that didn’t happen. And so when the Trump administration sent their first threatening letter on April fourth, we sprang into action and within seven days on April eleventh, we were in court and we filed the first lawsuit to block those funding cuts.
Stephen Richer: Okay, so you guys actually filed before the Harvard Board of Trustees?
Andrew Crespo: Yeah, Harvard didn’t file for another ten days. Harvard filed its suit on April 21st, and when it filed its suit, it asked for its suit to be linked to our suit so that we so they’re two separate suits. So this is maybe just ever so slightly in the weeds, but is a really important point to sort of get to your question about the essay Kirsten and I wrote. Anyone who reads Judge Burroughs opinion will see one opinion. You know, it’s like it’s one document. It’s eighty four pages long. But if you look at the top, there’s these two different case numbers and the opinion is actually in two separate cases. So we filed on April eleventh asking for an order to block all of the funding cuts and to prevent the Trump administration from retaliating against all of our members going forward. And then Harvard filed a little over a week later. And the cases were then put on the same schedule. So they were argued together. They were briefed together. But they’re two separate cases, which means that there’s two separate orders. So Judge Burroughs ruled for us entirely across the board and ruled for Harvard entirely across the board. It was a sweeping victory. Every substantive claim she ruled for us on. I could talk more about what those are if that’s of any interest. But her order is also really, really powerful. Her order says all of the funding cuts that have been put in place need to be reversed. And the Trump administration cannot use these tactics going forward. The reason why the two separate lawsuits piece is important is because even if Harvard were to just decide tomorrow, you know what, we want an important victory, but we want to sort of, you know, sue for peace with the Trump administration. Let’s have a settlement and we will withdraw our lawsuit and tell Judge Burroughs, you should just wipe out that order you put in against the Trump administration. Everything she has ordered the Trump administration to do and stop doing would still be in effect because there’s an independent order in our lawsuit that’s a separate lawsuit.
Archon Fung: That’s great. Andrew, I was talking to a neighbor after the lawsuit, and I think a lot of people think this. It’s pretty basic though, but I want you to explain to people. So some people say Harvard should do what the Trump administration says because it gets government money. And so if you don’t wanna do it, if we don’t wanna do what the administration says, don’t take the money. Judge Burroughs, of course, said that this line of reasoning is wrong. And so briefly, could you say what her reasoning is and Why this idea that, well, if you get government money, then you’re obligated to the government in these ways. And if you want to go your own way on First Amendment or other issues, then just don’t take the money.
Andrew Crepo: Absolutely. I mean, the partnership between the federal government and America’s research institutions goes back to basically right after World War II and was a major component of how America became one of the leading scientific places of discovery in the world. So like this funding is like longstanding. It was appropriated not by the president, but by Congress. Congress decided that it wanted to have this type of investment in this partnership for the benefit of the country and for the benefit of the whole world. All of those diseases that have been cured, the new discoveries made. Just Burroughs said that the effort by the Trump administration to withdraw that funding was illegal for three basic reasons. The first is the first amendment and free speech. in the same way that the Trump administration or Congress could not say, look, there’s federal funding for Medicaid, but it only goes to states that, you know, voted for President Trump in overwhelming degrees or to people. Yeah, or people, right? You know, like the Trump administration could not say, look, yeah, you can get your Medicaid reimbursements as long as you fill out an affidavit saying you believe everything that President Trump says. You’ll never challenge him publicly. You’ll never go to a protest. And if you go to a protest, you can protest. But like, you know, give back the money. You don’t get to have federal support or reimbursements of your health bills if you decide to go protest. The First Amendment doesn’t allow that. The First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to retaliate against people for their speech, whether you call that an unconstitutional condition, which is how the case law sometimes talks about it, or whether you call it unlawful retaliation. The government doesn’t get to say we’re going to punish you because we don’t like what you’re saying. Judge Burroughs made it clear that that’s what has happened here. The Trump administration doesn’t like what’s being taught on American campuses. It wants them to be teaching more to Trump’s liking, teaching from the Trump syllabus as opposed to the syllabi that the experts at our universities put together. So that was her first major reason. The other two were more based on statutes, one’s based on Title Six of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, and the other is based on the Administrative Procedure Act. The Title Six claim was based on the arguments that the Trump administration has been claiming are its reasons for withdrawing the funding. It’s been claiming that this was based on anti-Semitism. said two important things in her ruling. First, she said, look, if you’re actually claiming this is anti-Semitism and you want to withdraw the funds under a statute that allows you to withdraw funds from universities that are discriminating on the basis of race or color or national origin, that statute lays out a whole process by which you have to do that. You have to give the university notice. You have to file charges against them. You have to take them into court and you have to give them a chance to actually contest the evidence. And you have to put forward evidence supporting your claims. The Trump administration has done none of that. It never pretended to do that. It just said we’re unilaterally revoking the funds. So it violated Congress’s statute and it didn’t give any of the processes put in place, which ties to the last reason. She said that, look, part of the reason why she was ordering them to turn back on the funds is their decision itself. Regardless of the fact that they didn’t follow the processes, the decision itself was arbitrary and capricious because it wasn’t actually grounded in any evidence. Her ruling says that all of the assertions of anti-Semitism were pretextual, that that wasn’t the real reason why President Trump was attacking Harvard, that the real reason was actually the ideological stuff that’s protected by the First Amendment. So they didn’t have any evidence that they put forward that was sufficient to support their claims. They didn’t take into account the actual importance of Congress’s decision to have this longstanding relationship and investment. Tracy said the decision didn’t follow the process, unconstitutionally retaliated against us for our speech, and wasn’t grounded in reality. So I think, Archon, to your point about, look, if you don’t want the federal government’s money, then you don’t have to apply for it. But if you’re not going to abide by its rules, then we’re going to take it away. It’s not like a normal ongoing contract between two individuals when it is the federal government involved. And this would reverse years of precedents. And it would really set a terrible method moving forward that the federal government would maybe only do business with those political actors it likes, those states it likes, those individuals it likes, exactly like you said.
Stephen Richer: But Andrew, given that Harvard and your organization won convincingly on all three of those points. I was a little surprised that Judge Burroughs wrote on page seventy nine towards the end of her opinion. This case, of course, raises complicated and important legal issues. Was this a complicated case? To me, this seemed like sort of a no duh slam dunk case. Like I always thought, you know, Harvard’s going to win this and it’s just a matter of time. What was it actually complicated?
Andrew Crepo: There’s one piece of it that is um that I imagine she has in mind there given other things she wrote in her opinion I don’t think this case is complicated at all on the merits of the case all the three things that I just said to archon I think actually are unequivocally true you know you can’t punish people for their speech we have a first amendment you can’t ignore a statute that prescribes the ways that you remove funding and just sort of unilaterally withdraw it And if you’re going to upend decades of important policy, you have to have some sort of reason and some sort of basis in reality that actually has facts behind it. All of that straightforward. There has been over the past five months or so, or however far we are into the Trump administration, a series of orders from the Supreme Court that get really into the weeds on whether or not these types of cases can be filed in federal district courts, which have powers to issue orders and injunctions like what we want in this case, or whether they have to go to a specialized contract resolution court. And that, I think, is something that she wrote a bunch about where she said that, like, you know, there’s if you get kind of into the footnotes, there’s some I wouldn’t quite call them. There are some pointed exchanges that Judge Burroughs and one of her colleagues here on the District of Massachusetts bench have been engaged in with some of the Supreme Court justices who have been writing concurrences or separate opinions where there’s the Supreme Court itself is very split on this question of whether you have to go to the court. to federal claims or to one of these district courts. And the Supreme Court has not been giving extensive clarity on that, which I think is frustrating some lower court judges. But I think the complexities that show up in the opinion are on that kind of Somewhat wonky technocratic issue, not on the merits. Yeah, right. So sorry, go ahead.
Archon Fung: Maybe just hopping a little bit to the future. And on that point, like, what do you see going forward? So one path, I think, is the money gets turned down on the Trump administration says, oh, the district court rules were good. We’re out. Path one. Path two is maybe Harvard University strikes some sort of deal. And then, as you said, I’d be interested in hearing more about the AUP. And what it might do in that if the Harvard University and the AUP kind of split ways, what does that look like for the whole picture? And then the third, maybe most ordinary way is that it just gets appealed up. And Judge Burroughs is in some of those footnotes, maybe anticipating being overturned by the Supreme Court, because in one of those footnotes, she says, well, I don’t know what the Supreme Court will do. They might they might well not agree. But then she says, yeah, but this court is not Calvin Ball. And for fans of Calvin and Hobbes, what Calvin Ball means is that Calvin gets to change the rules anytime he wants to when he’s playing with Hobbes. And so I think Judge Burroughs was implying that maybe the court was playing the Supreme Court was playing Calvin Ball.
Andrew Crespo: Yeah, so on your last point, Archon, the Trump administration has already said that it plans to appeal this ruling. So, you know, it was, I think, clear from the get-go that Judge Burroughs would be unlikely to be the last word. She was the first word. And that’s important because her, you know, her opinion is powerful and thorough and lays out the sort of terrain and is a really important victory. But there are appellate courts, and they all lead to the Supreme Court. And I think it would be I think that most people are probably thinking at this point correctly that focusing on the Supreme Court’s views of this is the next place to turn attention. I think that on that, again, the sort of technical piece that I was talking about with Steve, I think that’s going to be up to justice barrett I mean it was very clear from the supreme court’s ruling last week that there are four justices who think this case in its entirety and cases like it should absolutely be in front of courts like judge burroughs there are four justices who think pretty clearly that all of these cases about all of the trump funding cuts across you know not just universities but across you know nih more broadly um that all of those should be in that specialized court and justice barrett has a view that’s a sort of bit more, okay, case by case, let’s figure out what particular pieces might go to one of these four or another. But, you know, all of those have come to the court in this very rushed posture. So we haven’t gotten a whole lot of guidance about where that line is. So that’s the piece that Judge Burrow was really getting into back in court.
Stephen Richer: OK, but I want to point out for our listeners that Andrew what Andrew is talking about and where the division lies is on which court is appropriate to hear this case, not on the First Amendment challenge, not on the Title six violation, not on the Administrative Procedures Act question, but simply on the which court should hear this. Because, again, I think those were all slam dunks. And it reminds me of just how difficult it must be on occasion to have President Trump as a client. because during his defamation cases as soon as the judge would rule or as soon as the jury would come in with a verdict he would go out and he would say the exact same things again and then in this case on one hand you have your attorneys arguing that it’s all about anti-semitism and then of course he’s going on true social and writing that a bunch of left-wing lunatics are running Harvard I think he actually uses that phrase left-wing lunatics And he points out the politics of a number of the faculty on Harvard. And so it’s just like that’s as smoking a gun as you want, that this is about viewpoint. This is about politics. This is not about anti-Semitism. And I think Judge Burroughs notes that of the April eleventh letter from the Trump administration, she writes, conditioned funding on agreeing to its ten terms, only one of which related to anti-Semitism. And so she has some pretty strong language about how that was all a smokescreen. But despite it being a smokescreen, I was reading through this order, which will forever be publicly available. And I was thinking, I wouldn’t want this written about me if I were Harvard University. Because she says, and it is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by anti-Semitism in recent years and could and should have done a better job dealing with the issue.” So Archon, as I think the longest tenured faculty on this call, how did that make you feel just about the university?
Archon Fung: I have no doubt that uh many jewish students on both sides of the Gaza issue were feeling terrible especially in the wake of October seventh and that I should have done more the university should have done more for inclusion diversity inclusion and belonging as uh we’ve been working on for a long long time with all kinds of different students. And so I do feel like we should have done more there. But I guess I don’t think that the experience of, you know, I’m not a Jewish student, so how can I really say? But in terms of the level of intensity or breadth, it feels to me something like a lot of students who felt very excluded and felt like they don’t belong at Harvard for many kinds of reasons.
Stephen Richer: I was just thinking that if I’m the attorneys from Harvard, I love this order. This is fantastic. She basically took every argument that we made and she stamped it. If I’m the PR team for Harvard, some of that gives me a little bit of pause. I don’t love some of that because it doesn’t suggest that everything was super wonderful, super pleasant for all students involved over the last four years. And so I was just, you know, obviously that has Little bearing on the legal argument, but I was struck by that. What do you think about that, Andrew?
Andrew Crespo: I mean, as AAUP and Harvard University lawyers have to defend the university as it is, not speculating about a better university, but in the court of public opinion, do these considerations that Stephen’s raising, do they strike you as powerful and potent as that we do need to be doing a lot better on a bunch of different dimensions? I think we can always be doing better. I do find that sentence in the order is the one sentence that I am frustrated by. I don’t blame Judge Burroughs for it. Judge Burroughs is echoing what our Harvard leadership has been saying for the past year or so. Most of our communications on these issues that come out of our leadership do open with something along the lines of Harvard is plagued by rampant anti-Semitism and we will do something to address it. Look, I will tell you, I struggle to talk about this because like you, Archon, I’m not Jewish, right? At the same time, the descriptions of our campus as like the center of anti-Semitism in the universe or as being plagued by it or overrun by it strike me as not describing reality. You know, when I think of the rallies and get togethers that I have seen over this past year, when I think of op-eds that I’ve seen written by our colleagues, I can think in every instance of Jewish students, Israeli students, rabbis coming out and speaking alongside everyone else against these types of cuts and against this characterization of campus. Now, to be sure, there have been incidents on our campus that shouldn’t have happened and that we should do something about. But I think as you and I both know, Archon, from our work together over the years on diversity issues at Harvard, there are issues that every institution has to deal with. This is part of American society, right? American society has a history of racism. It has a history of antisemitism. There is a rise of antisemitism across the country. That is a challenge that is a reality. At the same time, when I think back on our antisemitism task force report, which is comprehensive and hundreds of pages long, There is a piece of it that jumps out at me, which is these barcode, color-coded graphs that were survey results of our whole community asking people how they felt about being at Harvard. Do you feel like you belong here? Do you feel physically safe here? Do you feel like you are able to speak your mind here? And as you go through each of those, they’re broken out demographically. There is one group that stands out dramatically as a massive outlier of feeling unwelcome here, physically unsafe, unable to speak their mind. The massive outlier across the board in every single one of these questions is our Muslim and Islamic students and our Arab students.
Stephen Richer: And that’s in the anti-Semitism task force report. Which did pair it with also, I think, anti-Muslim. It was like a joint report, right?
Archon Fung: There were two task forces. There were two task forces to report, but the one part that was united between them is they did a single survey. So they did a survey together of the whole campus, thousands of people. And I wanna be clear, the survey shows that our Jewish students on each of these sort of measures of feeling belonging had responses that were like less good responses than Christian students, atheist agnostic students. Our Jewish students basically had responses that were identical to black students on campus in terms of how much they felt like they belong, identical to Latino students on campus. and then the major outlier was again muslim students uh arab students so you know and no one like none of the communications over the past year have led with like we have a massive problem of you know islamophobia on campus so I guess what I’m basically trying to say is yeah harvard is not a perfect institution look you know I’ve been a latino guy working here or going to school here for twenty years like there are always ways to improve You know, the responses from our Latino students, again, showed areas for improvement. Same thing with our Jewish students and our Black students. But I think that Judge Burroughs, in the rest of her opinion, calling the Trump administration’s attacks that were grounded in anti-Semitism a smokescreen and pretext. is capturing something that’s real. And I frankly wish that our own leadership would speak more fulsomely about and contextualizing the anti-Semitism issues here, both in relationship to the anti-Semitism across the country and in relationship to Harvard as a place that I think does a lot of work to make sure every student here feels welcome and safe. And also, as always is true, has room to grow and improve across multiple dimensions. The idea that anti-Semitism has been like the outlier thing is actually not supported by the data in our own anti-Semitism task force report.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. And then obviously we could talk about that for for, I’m sure, many hours. But it was just sort of an interesting footnote to that. Most of most of the Harvard community will be celebrating this. But if you dig into it, there are a few there are a couple of cringe moments with lines like that. But shifting to the positive for the Harvard community, does this mean the spigots are turned back on? Are federal dollars going to, you know, you’re going to be able to do tuberculosis research again? And I thought Judge Burroughs did a great job of talking about some of the things that are actually being done with these federal grant dollars, which were not the panoply of fears of the right of self-indulgent liberal projects, but instead like determining if space astronauts are subjected to unhealthy levels of radiation. So do those projects get their funding now again?
Andrew Crespo: So I wish I could say that the funding was immediately turned back on. You know, Judge Burroughs ruled for our chapter and for Harvard comprehensively in her summary judgment order. But as I mentioned, and as Archon brought up, this is the first step, right? There will be an appeal. The appeal will have to get litigated. And I think the practical reality is that Judge Burroughs’ order will become something that gets enforced as we get sort of final resolution on this going forward. It’s an important victory. It’s an important sort of framing up of the case. It was a major milestone to get through, not just for Harvard, but for our chapter. And there’s work ahead. But I also wanna just make sure to make clear to everyone that even a sweeping victory in a case like this, if that’s what this becomes, if this becomes sort of fully upheld, Lawsuits by themselves are not enough to withstand authoritarian power moves. Lawsuits are important ways to try to slow down what the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy are doing. They’re important ways to try to insist on due process and the rule of law. But at the end of the day, courts have pens, they have computers. The president has the entire federal government, which he has massively, massively mobilized. in my view, towards some really dangerous authoritarian power grabs. And courts can help make clear to people how dangerous that is. That’s why that order was so powerful, I think. But it comes to all of us. It comes to organizing on our campuses, in our neighborhoods, in our communities to make clear that this is not OK. This is not the way that we want to see our country go. That even a president who is legitimately elected and wins the country has to be accountable to the norms and laws and constitutional principles of our society. Otherwise, we stop being a constitutional democracy. So it’s going to it’s going to take everyone to be able to make sure that we actually get through this.
Stephen Richer: Archon, is this a shift in the battlefield? Do you feel better after this, or do you feel like the fight continues much the same? The fight definitely continues, but it’s a really important move. And to Andrew’s last point, I think Judge Burroughs’ decision as a legal decision is in advance, but as a contribution to the public discussion, as we’re doing here.
Archon Fung: I know not very many people are gonna read the whole eighty-four page decision. But it’s very much worth reading. It’s an education for a bunch of reasons. And then also, you know, to Andrew and the AAUP effort, a big part of the evidentiary work that you did, I find extremely important, is just gathering the experiences of people who work at Harvard and how their speech has been chilled and how they’ve already been harmed. in many, many ways by the administration’s actions is also part of that organizing and education that you’ve been talking about. So thank you very much.
Andrew Crespo: It’s so true, Archon. Organizations like these are only as strong as their members. And Judge Burroughs cited dozens of declarations from folks who work here at Harvard. And this was a win for our members. It was a win for our whole community. And I really appreciate you underscoring that point. Yeah, absolutely.
Stephen Richer: And that was honestly one of my favorite parts about the order was that I’m somebody who’s somewhat skeptical of government funding and just for a lot of different things. And you might roll your eyes when you hear about the billions of dollars that lots of universities get in order to administer federal research, federally desired research. But then being able to look at those, being able to read those individual stories, being able to look at those research projects, it was very educational for me and I thought very powerful in terms of maybe this broader PR fight that is going on in like, why does this matter? Why isn’t this just a bunch of rich Tasha’s who we don’t like getting getting money that from taxpayers?
Archon Fung: Great. Thank you very much, Andrew. This has been a fantastically illuminating conversation. As promised to the viewers and listeners, we’ll never talk for more than thirty minutes. And it’s about that. As a reminder, please send suggestions to info at ash.harvard.edu. And a big thanks to everybody who made this show possible, including Sarah Grucza and Colette Anton. Courtney, Courtney. Thank you, Courtney.
Stephen Richer: Thank you very much. Appreciate it, Andrew.
Archon Fung: Take care. Thank you.