Ex-Harvard president says US rule of law at risk under Trump

A former president of Harvard University has urged Americans to speak out against "foundational threats" to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy, invoking the US civil war as the country yesterday remembered those who died in battle on its annual Memorial Day.

- Olivia Empson

As Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university, Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, warned yesterday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being "at risk" under the current administration.

"We are being asked not to charge into... artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they [the civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?" she wrote in the New York Times.

Faust, a historian raised in the US south, highlighted the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers and the roles played by the assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and prominent black civil rights leader of the 19th century.