This is an opinion column.

I get the impression from national headlines and so much social media flag-rallying that I’m supposed to be rooting for Harvard now. But I’m having a hard time getting excited about it.

Last week, the White House sent that lodestar of higher education a testy letter declaring war. So far, Trump has frozen more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts with the institution, and he has threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status.

Harvard has responded as Harvard people do when threatened. They’re taking Trump to court. They’re betting the institution’s fortunes that the judiciary is still constitutionally stable enough to give it cover.

“Can Harvard withstand Trump’s financial attack?” the breathless New York Times asked.

Typically, when a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is a hard “NO,” but in this instance, it’s a strong probably.

Harvard is rich.

As of last summer, the university had an endowment of $53 billion. The economic side effects of Trump’s global trade war might be a bigger threat to the institution than the president’s cuts to federal funding.

But I think it’ll be OK. Harvard can take care of itself.

If you smell a trace of resentment on my breath, I’ll cop to it now. You see, my alma mater, Birmingham-Southern College, went belly-up a year ago, and it didn’t need Donald Trump to tank it. A hull-meets-iceberg collision of bad spending decisions and the Great Recession left the school slowly sinking for more than a decade. Like any number of small liberal arts colleges struggling across the country, what it needed was money.

Related: Remember what was lost when BSC closed

Meanwhile, the nation’s Ivy-plus institutions have solicited and accepted billions in donations. One half of one tenth of one percent of Harvard’s endowment could have saved my alma mater from closing, but whatever.

Accepting donations is their right — or as it seems now, their privilege — but not one without consequences.

Since the end of the Great Recession, Harvard’s endowment has doubled. Meanwhile, the number of first-year undergraduates admitted has remained mostly flat and has declined slightly in recent years.

And therein lies my grievance.

What is the mission of higher education but to educate people? And if so, why hasn’t Harvard done more?

As a teacher’s kid, I believe from the bottom of my soul that the utility of education is that it empowers people. It doesn’t only prepare us for jobs (don’t even get me started on that) but it equips us for more fulfilling lives, enfranchises us as citizens, and closes the gaps between our dreams and our potential. Education not only benefits the well-being of students, but also of our country and, heck, the whole human race.

The mission of higher ed should be to educate people, but that mission has gotten lost and in its place is something different.

Instead of bragging about how many people they educate, colleges and universities measure their standing by how many people they turn away. Some pride themselves on it.

Harvard’s acceptance rate is 3.5 percent.

In any other context, the absurdity here would be obvious. Imagine a tech start-up telling 97 percent of its potential customers to bug off. Would you give it your money? Probably not. But that hasn’t stopped donors at Ivy League schools from handing over billions.

Not all colleges and universities have kept their acceptance rates so low, which might be a good thing except for something worse lurking in the bargain.

While schools like Harvard have prided themselves on how many people they turn away, state schools have turned their castaways into a market opportunity. Consider the University of Alabama, where Chancellor Robert Witt thought it would be a cool idea to raise tuition $1,000 a year until they broke the affordability sound barrier.

“We didn’t approach what we’d charge from a particularly sophisticated level,” Witt told writer Josh Mitchell for his book, The Debt Trap. “We increased it $1,000. It was a fairly significant percentage increase. Applications and acceptances continued to go up. We basically systemically started taking it up $1,000 a year. Our thinking was, if we begin to notice a softening in applications, acceptances, and/or matriculation, we’ll know that we need to start backing off a little.”

Over about a decade, Witt had doubled UA’s tuition and swelled enrollment with out-of-state students paying the premium price.

Rather than seeing this as some sort of cautionary tale, universities throughout the country — including rival Auburn University — followed Witt’s lead, effectively turning public universities into private schools for out-of-state students.

Meanwhile, schools that have been struggling — smaller state schools, liberal arts colleges and HBCUs — have been the ones trying to do the Lord’s work, extending educational opportunities at a reasonable cost.

But at least schools such as Auburn and UA were trying to grow enrollment, more than elite institutions such as Harvard could say for themselves.

Obviously, not everyone is going to get into Harvard, nor should Ivy League schools be compelled to expand enrollment to the horizon, but they could do something. And short of that, do what for-profit businesses do — spin off divisions into new autonomous entities that might duplicate and multiply their success.

Instead, they have spent their time and donors’ money burnishing something else — exclusivity. The greatest value of a Harvard education is that not everyone gets to have one.

That’s their selling point — and the gigantic bullseye — the Harvards of the world have painted on themselves.

The easiest way to convince someone to want something is to tell them they can’t have it. Convince someone they want something bad enough, and eventually they’ll kill for it. But when that happens, if you’re the one holding the thing they want, then they’ll kill you.

And Harvard is the one holding the Holy MacGuffin right now.

Donald Trump’s war on higher ed is superficially over anti-Semitism, but don’t be fooled. He’s doing this because his base constituency likes it.

And higher ed needs to ask itself why.

The fuel of Trumpism is resentment, and the cultural exclusivity of elite higher ed is a well gushing crude.

Some will argue that now is not the time to question the endowments or the choices of the Ivies, and they are right. The time was years ago, but people have been making this argument for years and nobody listened then, either.

Now that the rabbit has the gun, maybe somebody will pay attention.

I would defend Harvard because, as with my late alma mater, I think the world is better off with it than without it. But they don’t need my help.

Trump is attacking the university for all the wrong reasons and, if he’s successful, he won’t replace it with something better. I think Trumpism is doomed to fail, and hopefully, the university and others like it will survive.

But we still need to have a talk about America’s higher education mission and what could be done to fix it.

Harvard doesn’t need to die, but a near-death experience might do it some good.

Kyle Whitmire is the Washington watchdog columnist for AL.com and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. You can follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X , Threads and Bluesky.