Henry didn’t abolish Oxford. He appropriated it. And he did so with all the pageantry of a man who knew power needed not just to be enacted, but also performed.
Fast forward 500 years. A different kind of sovereign, wearing a long red tie and clutching grievance like a royal orb, has made a sport of attacking America’s modern Oxfords. For Donald Trump, Harvard isn’t just an Ivy League school. It’s the synecdoche for everything that’s rigged, elitist and dangerously convinced of its own neutrality.
On Wednesday, Trump issued a proclamation suspending, for an initial six months, entry of foreign students seeking to study or participate in exchange programmes at Harvard, citing ‘national security’ concerns and declaring it ‘detrimental’ to US interests to continue allowing foreign students at the institution. This comes after a judge blocked the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from banning international students at Harvard in a ruling late last month.
Harvard says it studies the world. Trump says it controls it. These two men – Henry and Donald – separated by centuries and context, share something deeper than vanity and theatrics. They each stage a revolution of legitimacy. Henry rejected the spiritual authority of the pope. Trump rejects the moral and intellectual authority of institutions like Harvard, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the media. In both cases, the challenge is not about truth. It’s about whose truth, and who gets to decide.
When Henry declared himself supreme head of the Church of England, it was an act of theological violence. But it was also a bureaucratic masterstroke. He didn’t need Oxford to agree in good faith. He just needed it to appear to agree. When Trump demanded loyalty from his cabinet, his party, even the judiciary, the playbook was oddly similar. The point wasn’t consensus. It was submission. And universities, in both eras, became reluctant stages.
Oxford during the Reformation was a religious university. Its scholars were clerics. Its curriculum was bound to Rome. When Henry’s men arrived with their writs and threats, they weren’t just asking for a legal opinion – they were demanding a confession of allegiance. The consequence of refusal wasn’t academic censure; it was ruin. You could be exiled, defunded or worse.
Trump can’t jail tenured professors. But he doesn’t have to. In the populist theatre he presides over, simply calling Harvard ‘woke’ or ‘corrupt’ is enough to delegitimise generations of intellectual authority. Once a symbol of merit, Harvard becomes a symbol of manipulation. Once a beacon, it becomes a cabal.
It’s not that Harvard has always been innocent. The meritocracy it presides over is partial, exclusionary and, at times, deeply complicit in structural injustice. But Trump doesn’t critique Harvard’s failures to live up to its ideals. He denies the value of the ideals themselves: truth, inquiry, deliberation. Like Henry, he wants obedience, not contradiction.
There’s a cruel irony here. Henry VIII actually founded – or re-founded – more universities than most English monarchs. He created Trinity College, Cambridge, and repurposed Thomas Wolsey’s Cardinal College into Christ Church, Oxford. But these were not acts of philanthropy. They were acts of branding. He was placing his seal not only on the institutions but on what kind of thought they were allowed to produce.
Trump, too, has flirted with founding his own institutions. Trump University was a scam. His supporters now talk about ‘alternative academies’ and ‘anti-woke’ colleges as sanctuaries for ‘real’ knowledge. The language is different but the logic is the same: if the institutions don’t validate me, I’ll build new ones that will.
And here’s that strange, eternal thing: in both Henry’s time and our own, these tactics work.
After Henry, England never returned to papal authority. His church – blunt, politically expedient, theologically patchy – endured. It became tradition. In a similar vein, Trump’s antagonism toward the academy is not a passing phase. It has seeded a cultural rejection of expertise, a suspicion of intellectuals, a preference for instinct over analysis. And it’s not going away.
What should universities do in the face of such assaults?
Oxford survived Henry by adapting, accommodating and, in some cases, capitulating. The danger today is that universities like Harvard might do the same: water down their mission in the name of neutrality, shy away from hard truths to avoid political attack, or rebrand themselves into obsolescence.
But the alternative isn’t easy either. To speak truth clearly, even when it’s unpopular, requires not just institutional will but moral courage, a quality rarely taught in seminars or strategic plans. What Trump has shown us – and what Henry knew centuries ago – is that narrative power can beat institutional power. And if the university loses the confidence to defend its narrative, its gates will not be stormed. They will be laughed at. Or ignored.
The future of American higher education won’t be decided by who builds the better lab. It will be decided by who tells the better story about what knowledge is for. And who gets to wield it.