Trump threatens to pull Harvard’s tax exempt status

New York — US President Donald Trump threatened Harvard’s tax exempt status on Tuesday after freezing more than $2bn of funding in a standoff over the university’s refusal to audit “viewpoint diversity” among students.

The Trump administration has threatened universities across the US for their handling of pro-Palestinian protests that roiled campuses last year after the 2023 Hamas-led attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza. The government has said anti-Semitism flared amid the campus protests.

But demonstrators said their criticism of Israel and US foreign policy has been wrongly conflated with anti-Semitism.

In a letter on Monday, Harvard president Alan Garber rejected the Trump administration’s demands that Harvard end diversity efforts and take other steps to secure funding as unprecedented “assertions of power, unmoored from the law” that violated the school’s constitutional free speech rights and the Civil Rights Act.

He wrote that the threatened funding supported medical, engineering, and other scientific research that has led to innovations that “have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer”.

Hours after Garber released his letter, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said it was freezing contracts and grants to Harvard, the country’s oldest and richest university, worth more than $2bn, out of a total of $9bn.

Also on Monday Columbia University said it was holding “good faith” negotiations with the Trump’s administration to regain  its federal funding.

Columbia’s interim president, Claire Shipman, said on Monday night the private New York institution also would not cede ground on its commitment to academic freedom during talks with the administration.

Shipman, a Columbia trustee, said the university would continue with what it viewed as “good faith discussions” and “constructive dialogue” with the justice department’s anti-Semitism task force, which began with the government’s announcement in early March that it was terminating Columbia grants and contracts worth $400m.

“Those discussions have not concluded, and we have not reached any agreement with the government at this point,” Shipman wrote. Some of the things the Trump administration has demanded of universities, including changes to shared governance and addressing “viewpoint diversity”, were “not subject to negotiation”.

“We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire,” she wrote.

She also wrote that Harvard, in Massachusetts, had rejected demands by the government that “strike at the very heart of that university’s venerable mission”.

Shipman did not address the assertions by Harvard and some Columbia professors, who are suing the Trump administration through their labour unions, that the government’s actions are illegal.

No due process

Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by recipients of federal funding based on race or national origin, federal funds can be terminated only after a lengthy investigation and hearings process, which has not happened at Columbia.

Former US president Barack Obama, a Columbia alumni, praised Harvard’s response to an “unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom”.

“Let’s hope other institutions follow suit,” Obama wrote in a Monday night statement.

Trump said in a social media post on Tuesday he was mulling whether to seek to end Harvard’s tax-exempt status if it continued pushing what he called “political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness’?”

The standoff between the Trump administration and universities comes as he faces court challenges to his immigration policies, and pushback from state attorneys-general trying to block his firing of government workers and suspension of trillions of dollars in federal grants, loans and financial support.

Later on Tuesday, one of the immigration cases that has raised questions about whether the administration will respect judges and the constitutional order could come to a head as US District Judge Paula Xinis considers her next steps on what she called Trump’s failure to update her on efforts to return a man illegally deported to El Salvador.

The US Supreme Court last week upheld an order from Xinis that the administration facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, where he is being housed in a high-security prison. The Trump administration has said it is powerless to bring Abrego Garcia back.

Reuters