Harvard University just gave us all a lesson in how to answer a bully with one powerful word: “No.”

The Trump administration tried to intimidate Harvard — as it has so many government agencies, corporate executives, law firms and other universities — by threatening to cut off government money. In Harvard’s case, that meant a “review” of $8.7 billion in multiyear grants. The administration last week demanded a humiliating settlement that would have imposed an outside “audit” of faculty hiring, student admissions and other internal matters.

Harvard refused to capitulate. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” wrote Harvard President Alan M. Garber on Monday. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

President Donald Trump doesn’t like “no” for an answer. So, on Monday night, the administration quickly followed through on its threats by freezing $2.2 billion in grants to the university. Harvard will suffer a world of pain as this First Amendment drama plays out. But in this graduate’s eyes, at least, the university has saved its everlasting soul.

Harvard and many other great universities had seemed to be wandering in a wilderness of uncertainty and equivocation until Monday’s stand on principle. Free speech on campuses was imperiled from the left and right, especially after the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Jewish students felt threatened, and so did pro-Palestinian protesters. When university presidents tied to explain campus rules, they seemed incoherent.

“Will Harvard Bend or Break?” was the title of a lengthy New Yorker article published last month. It explained how the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, had suffered the embarrassment of appointing Claudine Gay as Harvard’s first Black president in July 2023, only to fire her six months later amid criticism of Harvard’s failure to curb antisemitism on campus and her alleged plagiarism.

Harvard’s crisis deepened on March 31, when the White House announced its review of $8.7 billion in grants and then, on April 3, sent its first draft of settlement demands. To restore $400 million in threatened cuts, Columbia University had already caved to Trump’s demands.

Penny Pritzker, a former Commerce secretary who’s the senior fellow of the corporation, struggled with her colleagues this month for consensus about Harvard’s values, its fears about the future and its red lines, a Harvard official told me. Through these discussions, one participant said, the corporation reflected on the meaning of Harvard’s Latin motto: Veritas, or “truth.”

The Trump administration’s diktat last Friday crossed that red line. Federal “investment” in Harvard through the billions in research grants wasn’t an “entitlement,” the April 11 letter warned. To “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government,” it must alter its governance, reduce the power of students and faculty, cease any racial or other preferences, and screen international students who are “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”

It got worse: The government’s letter demanded that Harvard accept an outside audit of its students, faculty, staff and leadership to ensure “viewpoint diversity” — code for installing more pro-Trump voices. Whatever you think of Harvard’s skewed ideological mix (in a 2022 poll by the Harvard Crimson, more than 80% of the faculty described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal”), this isn’t a problem the government should fix.

The corporation bravely rejected the deal, and within hours the administration froze the $2.2 billion in grants.

Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes. Harvard will now begin to pay what officials recognize is a very painful price for its independence. The university had a whopping $53.2 billion in its endowment as of last October, but much of that money is tied up in thousands of separate bequests and can’t be easily tapped.

Harvard said last week that it plans to borrow $750 million to deal with its financial needs. But university officials told me private money won’t be able to make up the government shortfall — and Garber is already reckoning with the need for layoffs and budget cuts that will erode Harvard’s research mission, perhaps for years to come.

What’s really going on in this battle for Harvard’s soul? Martin Wolf of the Financial Times argued recently that Trump, like Mao Zedong in China more than 50 years ago, has embarked on a “cultural revolution” that seeks “to overthrow the bureaucratic and cultural elites” that are anchored in the nation’s great universities.

Liberal professors aren’t yet forced to wear dunce caps or work in “reeducation camps” in farms and factories. Maybe that’s next. For the moment, a salute to “Fair Harvard,” and how it’s living the motto, veritas.