The Banishment Playbook: From Anne Hutchinson to Harvard
In April 2025, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University, demanding the school hire new faculty for "viewpoint diversity," submit to government audits of their ideological balance, and restructure their governance. The ultimatum: comply or face banishment from federal support, restrictions on foreign students, and potential loss of non-profit status. This assault on academic independence follows a distinctly American pattern of silencing dissent.
In the crowded confines of a wooden meeting house on a chilly day in November 1637, the general court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony banished respected teacher and midwife Anne Hutchinson for the crime of sedition against the orthodox divines. The trial marked a turning point for the nascent colony of 5,000. When the Hutchinson family left for Rhode Island in March of 1638, 60 prominent families went with them, a significant drain of intellectual capital, resources, and alternative perspectives. In their wake, the magistrates and clergy consolidated institutional control, instituted stricter church membership requirements and formalized punishment for dissent. Post Hutchinson, the colony became a darker, more authoritarian place and John Winthrop's exemplary Christian community based on biblical principles, the vaunted city on the hill, receded from sight.
Just two weeks after Hutchinson's trial, the general court ordered the first building for Harvard College be erected in Newtown, shortly to be renamed Cambridge. As Reverend Peter Gomes wrote, Harvard was largely founded to "secure New England's civil and theological peace against future seditious Mrs. Hutchinsons 'when our present ministers shall lie in the dust' as the inscription on the (college's) Johnson Gate puts it." The Puritan tradition, in the mold of the orthodox, must persist for future generations. Harvard was central to this goal.
Nearly four centuries after Anne Hutchinson's banishment, a new blueprint for a conservative Christian society has emerged in America, Project 2025. This 990-page strategy from the Heritage Foundation aims to reshape the federal government by dramatically expanding presidential power, dismantling federal agencies and regulations, and implementing conservative Christian, biblically based principals regarding family, marriage, sex and gender. The project calls for stripping DEI requirements and references to sexual orientation and gender identity, among other terms, from "every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." In a clear echo of our Puritan predecessors, Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist agenda comes peppered with a healthy dose of alarmist eschatology. Heritage president Kevin Roberts writes in his foreword. "This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost."
When the drafters of Project 2025's education chapter gathered in conference rooms and over email and zoom, they were, in a very real sense, hoping to roll Harvard back to its earliest iteration. But Harvard, like all institutions of American higher education, has evolved significantly in 400 years. What has not evolved are the political, intellectual and religious impulses that form a through line between these two historical moments. The banishment of Anne Hutchinson and the current attack on Harvard University by the Trump administration reveal the American essence of the age-old struggle between intellectual orthodoxy and those who challenge it.
The Original Heretic
When Anne Hutchinson and her family arrived in Boston in 1634 from Alford, Lincolnshire, they found a hotbed of religious fervor, enlivened by the persistent anxiety surrounding salvation that animated Puritan life. True salvation, the apex of their earthly purpose, was a promise of peace everlasting in this world not just the next. It was a high bar and for most, assurance of salvation proved fleeting at best. The vagaries of this holy state led to excruciating personal turmoil that, in one infamous story, caused a woman to throw her baby in a well, preferring the certainty of damnation to the fickleness of her relationship with God.
In the Christian society of Massachusetts Bay, salvation was more than personal. It was an important form of political and social currency. Social standing and political rights (for men) were limited to church members, a privilege granted to those who could prove they were saved, not an easy process. The difficulty of gaining church membership created a fundamental tension—the colony desperately needed church members to build their society yet couldn't afford to cheapen the process.
Successfully converting souls fell to the ministers—highly literate, primarily Cambridge-educated men who had been forced underground in England. Scattered across various regions, they developed different approaches to tending their flocks. Some emphasized long pathways of humility and deprivation, others the primacy of prayer and holy duties. For some, salvation arrived in a single, overwhelming moment; others embraced a gradual approach. Their debates can sound hair-splitting to our ears, but they formed the fulcrum around which the community revolved.
Into this lively ferment stepped Anne Hutchinson, a woman of charismatic and prophetic gifts, endowed with a formidable intellect. Raised by a renegade Puritan minister, taught to read and question from an early age, she became a skilled midwife, herbalist and healer. When her beloved minister John Cotton fled to Massachusetts, she followed, quickly entering Boston's Puritan elite.
Hutchinson proved quite able in converting souls. She began teaching, first for women in her home and later hosting meetings of men and women. While it wasn't unusual for Puritan women to teach other women or host theological discussions, Hutchinson's approach was different.
Hutchinson taught from a personal understanding that salvation was a profound experience of direct, divine revelation, a gift of grace beyond human control. Once experienced, the radiant light of assurance was forever present. She called her radical interpretation the "covenant of grace." It stood in marked contrast to what she dubbed the "covenant of works" propounded by many of the leading ministers in the colony. Anne's approach proved attractive and her meetings quickly grew. Soon eighty to a hundred participants came twice a week, all crowding to hear her speak of a salvation that came not from ministerial guidance, but through an inner light by the grace of God.
Some leading magistrate and ministers became convinced that Anne was fomenting a controversy that threatened to cleave the young colony. In November 1637, she was tried and found guilty of sedition for undermining ministerial authority and contempt for holding meetings after magistrates ordered her to desist. After a winter of house arrest, she was tried again by the church and excommunicated for heresy. In both trials, she displayed great wit, erudition and competence, often successfully refuting the charges. It didn't matter. Her voice, her gender, and her growing following were too great a challenge and she had to be expelled.
The Modern Parallel
While enforcement methods have evolved over four centuries, the underlying dynamic remains the same: those in power deploying institutional leverage to maintain conformity. Where Winthrop used court and church trials to silence Hutchinson's theological challenge, Project 2025 architects use federal funding, tax status, and regulatory intervention to rein in what they perceive as Harvard's ideological transgressions.
The Trump administration accuses Harvard of indoctrinating students into left-wing ideology and harboring antisemitism. Project 2025 backs up these objections with its core thesis that improper speech and teaching threatens the conservative Christian worldview. They advocate "deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity ('SOGI'), diversity, equity, and inclusion ('DEI'), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." We can hear clear echoes of Governor Winthrop when he wrote of Anne Hutchinson, "But the last and worst of all, which most suddenly diffused the Venom of these Opinions into the very Veins and Vitals of the People in the Country, was Mistress Hutchinsons double weekly lecture . . . .where after she had repeated the Sermon, she would make her comment upon it, vent her mischievous Opinions as she pleased, and wreathed the Scriptures to her own purpose; where the custom was for her Scholars to propound questions, and she (gravely sitting in the chair) did make answers thereunto."
The Project 2025 chapter on education is centered on what it sees as the egregious overreach of a society evolving to empower people of all races, genders and sexual orientations. They write, "The noxious tenets of 'critical race theory' and 'gender ideology' should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country." They propose dismantling the Department of Education, privatizing student loans, ending loan forgiveness, overhauling the accreditation system for higher education, codifying new rules for parental rights, and reforms to codes of school discipline. When it comes to civil rights and rolling back Title IX protections, the chapter states, "Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory." Gender and race become the forever cudgels of the conservative Christian war on "Marxist" academics and "woke" ideologies.
The first volley against higher education came not from this carefully planned blueprint, but from Project Esther, an opportunistic strategy spun up by Heritage after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas. Launched in late 2024, as campus protests over the Israeli invasion of Gaza gathered steam, the project targets left-wing antisemitism and pro-Palestinian organizations, lumping them into what it calls the "Hamas Support Network." They propose using "anti-terrorism and anti-racketeering criminal prosecution; deportations; public firings; removal of tax-exempt status; (and) blocking of funding" against these groups. The project has received support primarily from evangelical Christian organizations, many of them Christian Zionist, who believe that the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel is a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ, a belief that can be traced back to 16th century Puritans including many of the orthodox ministers in Massachusetts Bay, including Anne Hutchinson’s mentor John Cotton, the man who in the end would turn on her.
These Christian Nationalist and Christian Zionist strategies come into clear focus in the administration’s attacks on Harvard. The charges that DEI programs restrict conservative rights combined with antisemitism accusations form the core attack. The administration's demands would essentially put the university into government receivership: hiring new faculty and admitting students to achieve "viewpoint diversity," ongoing government audits of these viewpoints, governance restructuring, and reducing the power of certain students, faculty, and administrators. The punishment for noncompliance is banishment from federal support, restrictions on foreign students (27% of Harvard's student body), higher taxes on the university endowment, and potentially stripping non-profit status.
The Stakes
Harvard, founded to protect the sanctioned theological interpretations at the heart of Puritan life, is now fighting back. After declaring that the "university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights," Harvard President Alan Garber wrote, "seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened." Harvard filed a lawsuit against the administration’s funding freeze on April 21st that underscores the fundamental case in its opening sentence, "Scientific advancement and the pursuit of knowledge fuel America's innovation, economic success, and global leadership."
Project 2025 uses similar language to mean something quite the opposite. Its authors contend that "Federal postsecondary education investments should bolster economic growth, and recipient institutions should nourish academic freedom and embrace intellectual diversity. That has not, however, been the track record of federal higher education policy or of the many institutions of higher education that are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism."
The irony is profound. American higher education is one of our greatest engines of economic growth and a center of American exceptionalism. Over fifty years, institutions supported by federal research grants have delivered breakthrough advances: transistors, lasers, recombinant DNA, the internet's precursor, MRI, CRISPR, monoclonal antibodies, HIV protease inhibitors, and immunotherapy. Federal R&D funding totaled almost $60 billion in FY 2023, accounting for 55% of university research expenditures and international students alone contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023-2024, creating 378,000 jobs. The loss of academic freedom, non-profit status and federal funding for these institutions would be the largest hit to American exceptionalism in the modern era, not to mention the untold losses in advances to health, science, technology, intellectual discovery and international cooperation and reputation.
The Pattern Repeats
When we look back on Anne Hutchinson's story, the Puritan orthodoxy feared her because she espoused a "woke ideology" contrary to the views of the orthodoxy. Her refusal to comply with their demands clearly echo the battle unfolding before us. But Hutchinson's was not only a dissenting voice, but a female one, generally prohibited from speaking publicly on religious or political matters. In this sense, she represented a minority view, one systemically excluded from political and economic power. She was, as Winthrop later wrote in his journal, "a troublesome woman" whom he sought to discredit by branding her as "this American Jezebel."
Project 2025 manifests similar anxieties about ideological impurity and minority rights. Assaults on critical race theory with its lens of systemic racism and LGBTQ rights are threaded throughout. The document implores accreditors to change their rules, having "presided over a precipitous decline" in academic freedom and free speech over the past decade despite maintaining criteria demanding such policies. This language of decline and corruption echoes the Puritan concern with theological deterioration. Hutchinson and Harvard are both scapegoats for the same fears.
The real heartbreak is that there is a truth to be found on all sides. Reasonable people would agree that many American universities have become too elite, too selective and too intolerant of conservative viewpoints. Project 2025 is correct to point out that we need to find ways for young people to make a decent living without a four-year degree. In the same way, there were good reasons for the governors of Massachusetts Bay to insist on social unity in 1638. Political events in England at this time were a real threat to their future and while Winthrop was right to fear, a debate about the merits of grace versus good works was not the locus of his challenges. What he and the framers of Project 2025 get wrong is that when freedom, tolerance and rights are stripped from educational institutions and governmental structures, the next step is a hierarchical, authoritarian society, which is what unfolded in Massachusetts in the latter part of the 16th century. The city on the hill never truly materialized, undone by its own fear, intolerance and rigidity.
