Trump administration cuts off further $450m in grants to Harvard

Boston — The Trump administration said on Tuesday that eight federal agencies will terminate another $450m in grants to Harvard University, on top of $2.2bn in federal funding it cancelled last week.

An administration anti-Semitism task force cited what it described as a failure by the elite university, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to confront what it called “pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus”.

“There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritising appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support,” the task force said in a joint statement.

Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is already suing over the administration’s decision to cut off grant funding after it refused to cede to what the university’s president has said are illegal demands from the administration “to control whom we hire and what we teach”.

Those demands included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints and terminate certain academic programmes.

The US department of education informed Harvard last week that it was freezing billions of dollars in future research grants and other aid until the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college concedes to the administration’s demands.

Reuters