Harvard faces funding freeze after rejecting Trump’s demands

Colorado — Harvard on Monday rejected numerous demands from the Trump administration that it said would cede control of the university to a conservative government that portrays universities as dangerously leftist.

Within hours of Harvard taking its stand, the administration of President Donald Trump announced it was freezing $2.3bn in federal funding to the university. The funding freeze comes after the Trump administration said last month it was reviewing $9bn in federal contracts and grants to Harvard as part of a crackdown on what it says is anti-Semitism that erupted on college campuses during pro-Palestinian protests in the past 18 months.

On Monday, an education department task force on combating anti-Semitism accused America’s oldest university of having a “troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges — that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”. The exchange escalates the high-stakes dispute between the Trump administration and some of the world’s richest universities that has raised concerns about speech and academic freedoms.

The administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous universities, pressing the institutions to make policy changes and citing what it says is a failure to fight anti-Semitism on campus.

Deportation proceedings have begun against some detained foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while visas for hundreds of other students have been cancelled. Harvard president Alan Garber wrote in a public letter on Monday that demands made by the education department last week would allow the federal government “to control the Harvard community” and threaten the school’s “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge”.

“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,” Garber wrote.

The issue of anti-Semitism on campus erupted before Trump took office for his second term, after pro-Palestinian student protests last year at several universities after the 2023 Hamas attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.

White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement on Monday that Trump was “working to make higher education great again by ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence”.

In a letter on Friday, the education department stated that Harvard had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.

The department demanded that Harvard work to reduce the influence of faculty, staff and students who were “more committed to activism than scholarship” and had an external panel audit the faculty and students of each department to ensure “viewpoint diversity”.

The letter also stated that Harvard, by this August, must hire only faculty and admit students based on merit and cease all preferences based on race, colour or national origin. The university must also screen international students “to prevent admitting students hostile to American values” and report to federal immigration authorities foreign students who violate conduct rules. Last week, a group of Harvard professors sued to block the Trump administration’s review of nearly $9bn in federal contracts and grants awarded to the school. The Trump administration is reportedly considering forcing fellow Ivy League school Columbia into a consent decree that would legally bind the school to follow federal guidelines in how it combats anti-Semitism. Some Columbia professors, like those at Harvard, have sued the federal government in response. The government has suspended $400m in federal funding and grants to Columbia.

Garber said the federal government’s demands that it “audit” the viewpoints of its students, faculty and staff to ferret out left-wing thinkers generally opposed to the Trump administration clearly violated the university’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote.

He added that while Harvard was taking steps to address anti-Semitism on campus, “these ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate”. Harvard agreed in January to provide additional protections for Jewish students under a settlement resolving two lawsuits accusing the Ivy League school of becoming a hotbed of anti-Semitism. To ease any funding crunch created by any cut-off in federal funding, Harvard is working to borrow $750m from Wall Street. 

Reuters