Harvard University on Monday, the 14th of April, rejected several demands by the Trump administration that it says would hand control of the school to a conservative government that portrays universities as dangerously left-wing. A few hours later, President Donald Trump’s administration announced it was freezing 2.3 billion US dollars in federal funding for the school, according to Reuters.
This comes after the Trump administration accused the university of allowing anti-Semitism during pro-Palestinian protests.
On Monday, the Department of Education’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism accused America’s oldest university of “a disturbing mindset that is endemic at our country’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment is not tied to a responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”.
The government has frozen hundreds of millions in funding for many universities, saying they have not done enough to stop anti-Semitism. Some foreign students who joined pro-Palestinian protests now face deportation and hundreds have had their visas revoked.
Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a public letter on Monday that the demands made by the Department of Education last week would allow the federal government to “control the Harvard community” and undermine the school’s “values as a private institution dedicated to the pursuit, creation and dissemination of knowledge”.
“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities may teach, whom they may admit and hire, and in what areas of study and research they may operate,” Garber wrote.
The issue of anti-Semitism on campuses came up before Trump took office for his second term, after student protests took place at several universities last year following the 2023 Hamas attack inside Israel and subsequent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement on Monday that Trump is “working to make higher education great again,
ending rampant anti-Semitism and ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support for dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence”.
In Friday’s letter, the Department of Education said Harvard “has failed to meet both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.
The department demanded that Harvard reduce the influence of faculty, staff and students who are “more focused on activism than scholarship” and that an independent commission audit the faculty and students in each department to ensure “diversity of opinion”.
The letter also stated that Harvard has until August this year to recruit faculty and admit students on merit alone and to stop giving any preference based on race, colour or national origin. The university must also screen foreign students “to prevent the admission of students hostile to American values” and report foreign students who violate conduct rules to federal immigration authorities.
Harvard President Garber said that the federal government’s demands to “audit” the views of its students, faculty and staff to identify left-wing thinkers who are generally opposed to the Trump administration clearly violate the university’s First Amendment right to free speech.
He said the university would not give up its independence or constitutional rights.
He added that while Harvard is taking steps to address anti-Semitism at the university, “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.”
In January, Harvard University agreed to provide greater protection for Jewish students as part of a deal to settle two lawsuits alleging that the school had become a centre of anti-Semitism.
To ease any funding crisis caused by the cutoff of federal funding, Harvard plans to borrow 750 million US dollars from Wall Street.