I have no brief for Harvard University; my institutional loyalties lean toward Princeton, where I did my graduate studies, to Columbia and Dartmouth, the two schools that employed me for the past four decades, and to Yale for several delightful years as a visiting professor. But it appears that Harvard understands the cardinal rule of the playground: It’s impossible to appease a bully. The only acceptable response is to stand tall and, if necessary, fight back.

Other schools, including Columbia, Dartmouth and institutions of higher education across the nation, should take notice, along with law firms and other targets of Donald Trump’s bullying.

When the Trump administration threatened to withhold about $400 million in federal funding unless Columbia University met a set of demands, the school administrators quickly acceded to those demands. Did that mollify Trump, who apparently nurses a grudge against the university over a failed real estate transaction decades ago that would have bailed him out of a financial mess?

Not at all. Even though Columbia agreed to the initial set of demands, which included placing an entire department into receivership, the Trump administration simply issued further ultimatums.

That’s how bullies behave. Most of us remember the bullies from our childhood — in the school cafeteria, the locker room or on the playground. The administrators at Columbia apparently failed to recall those lessons. Give the bully what he asks, and he’ll only demand more.

Bullies seldom act alone. They’re too cowardly. They gather around them a Greek chorus of powerful proxies who join the taunting and who revel in watching their targets tremble and cower in fear. It’s theater, pure and simple, and in Trump’s case, it’s entertainment for his sycophants and the downstream media.

Standing up to a bully is not easy. It takes courage and it involves risks. Following his apparent success with Columbia, Trump began targeting other schools, including Harvard, Brown, Northwestern, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, with the threat to withhold federal research grants.

Harvard initially was willing to play along, according to published reports, but when the demands escalated to federal oversight of admissions and the hiring of faculty, the administrators at Harvard began to have second thoughts.

The Trump administration raised the stakes by threatening Harvard’s tax-exempt status. The White House also struck at a vulnerability. The Trump administration demanded that both prospective and existing faculty at Harvard be reviewed for plagiarism, a not-so-subtle jab at the school’s previous president, Claudine Gay, who was forced to resign in part because of alleged plagiarism in her scholarship.

Harvard’s resistance, fortified by the defiance of Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, has served to galvanize institutions of higher education across the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, leaders of some of the nation’s most prestigious schools are forming a private collective to counter the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom and independence. Sadly, Dartmouth is not among them.

Another rule of the playground: safety in numbers.

The importance of this coalition should not be discounted. The last time the Internal Revenue Service rescinded the tax exemption of a university, it touched off a political revolution, the beginnings of white evangelical activism known as the Religious Right.

The recission of Bob Jones University’s tax exemption on Jan. 19, 1976, because of its racial policies led to the mobilization of white evangelical voters in the late 1970s. Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders blamed the IRS action on their fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter — unfairly, as it turned out; Carter was still a candidate for the Democratic nomination when Bob Jones University lost its tax exemption.

Nevertheless, the university’s loss of tax-exempt status sparked a political movement that reshaped the American political landscape over the last half century.

The IRS challenge to Harvard’s tax status and the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education more broadly could have the same energizing effect for those who believe in freedom of speech and academic freedom.

The coalition of those defending academic freedom, especially if combined with law firms and other institutions under attack, might have the effect of galvanizing a political movement that could point the nation in a different direction.

Randall Balmer teaches at Dartmouth College. He is the author of “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right” and “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.”