Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR.

When President Trump campaigned for the 2024 election, he didn't just promise to overhaul the federal government.

He said he would go after another sector, too.

The time has come to reclaim our once-grade educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.

Now, in his first year of office, President Trump has, of course, made good on that promise

and targeted universities. Probably his biggest target has been Harvard, the country's oldest

and richest university. The new season of a podcast series called The Harvard Plan looks at the pressure the president has put on Harvard and what it means for scientific research and free speech.

The series was produced by our friends at WNYC's on the media and the Boston Globe, and we are going to share it today.

Ilya Merritt's the host.

Here's Ilya.

Ryan looked forward to election night, 2024.

He expected a pleasant return to form, the way election nights used to be.

This is going to be elections being fun again.

We're going to sit, we're going to drink beer, we're going to watch election turns come in and play like games. I say return to form because the 2016 election hit Ryan like

a sucker punch. Not because he doesn't like Trump, although he definitely does not like Trump,

but because the models failed so badly. Ryan Enos is a political scientist at Harvard, and specifically, he's a numbers guy.

It seemed like this kind of tragedy for quantitative political science because it defied a lot

of people's predictions.

Then came 2020, the COVID election, and after that, the false claims of a stolen election.

Still, going into the first Tuesday of November 24, Ryan felt good

about the models. That evening, he made his way over to Memorial Hall, which is the most

Hogwartsy building on Harvard's campus. They throw a big election watch party there every four years.

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