Harvard refused on Monday to submit to the Trump administration’s quest to command and control America’s higher education system. Its president, Alan Garber, brightly illuminated the profound principle at stake in remaining independent of the government’s edicts.

“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,” he wrote in a public letter that took a stand against government overreach into academic freedom. Doing otherwise, he said, would threaten the values of any private university “devoted to the pursuit, production and dissemination of knowledge.”

With these words, Harvard became the first university to officially resist the administration’s abusive intimidation, and it is urgent that it not be the only one. Its actions, supported in recent weeks in statements by other academic leaders, including the presidents of Princeton and Wesleyan, light the way forward on a vital path to fighting President Trump’s war on the independence of higher education. But its example should also offer encouragement to those states fighting a similarly coercive cutoff of federal aid, to law firms facing a loss of business from the president’s campaign of retribution, to every group challenging unconstitutional actions in court, to the public square and ultimately to voters at the ballot box.

Nearly immediately after Harvard’s lawyers made its refusal public in a letter rejecting the government’s long list of demands, the Trump administration announced it would freeze more than $2.2 billion in Harvard’s federal grants and contracts. Academic leaders around the country might be staggered by the prospect of losing even a fraction of that kind of money, but Harvard made it clear that it wasn’t taking its stand simply because its $53 billion endowment gave it the resources to do so.

Giving in to the unreasonable demands of the Trump administration would shatter an engine of American culture, as many academic leaders are beginning to recognize. Less-wealthy colleges should also follow Harvard’s example, even though it could come at a high cost. They may have to choose between losing their federal grants and losing their souls, and the choice, painful as it may be, is clear.

Wesleyan, a top-tier university with an endowment of $1.55 billion, gets $20 million a year in federal funds, much of which could be at risk if it similarly refuses to bend the knee to the government. But its president, Michael Roth, has made it clear that it will not submit. “If we don’t speak up, it’s going to get worse,” he told The Wesleyan Argus earlier this month. “Much worse, much faster.” Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton recently wrote that the administration’s crusade represents “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”