The Trump administration acted quickly on Monday to punish Harvard University after it refused to comply with a list of demands from the federal government that the school said were unlawful.
On Monday afternoon, Harvard became the first university to refuse to comply with the administration’s requirements, setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university. By the evening, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard, along with a $60 million contract.
Other universities have pushed back against the administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure.
A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse,” among other steps. The administration did not define what it meant by viewpoint diversity, but it has generally referred to seeking a range of political views, including conservative perspectives.
Read the Trump Administration’s Letter to Harvard
A letter sent to Harvard on Friday by the Trump administration demanded that the university make a series of policy changes in order to continue to receive federal funding.
“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,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a statement to the university on Monday.
Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has aggressively targeted universities, saying it is investigating dozens of schools as it moves to eradicate diversity efforts and what it says is rampant antisemitism on campus. Officials have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds for research at universities across the country.
The administration has taken a particular interest in a short list of the nation’s most prominent schools. Officials have discussed toppling a high-profile university as part of their campaign to remake higher education. They took aim first at Columbia University, then at other members of the Ivy League, including Harvard. The announcement of the funding freeze was issued by members of a federal antisemitism task force that has been behind much of the effort to target schools.
“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” said a statement from the task force, posted by the General Services Administration.
Harvard, for its part, has been under intense pressure from its own students and faculty to be more forceful in resisting the Trump administration’s encroachment on the university and on higher education more broadly.
The Trump administration said in March that it was examining about $256 million in federal contracts for Harvard, and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.” The announcement went on to suggest that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus. At the time, it was vague about what the university could do to satisfy Trump administration concerns.
Last month, more than 800 faculty members at Harvard signed a letter urging the university to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”
The university appeared to take a step in that direction on Monday. In his letter rejecting the administration’s demands, Dr. Garber suggested that Harvard had little alternative.
Read Harvard’s Response to the Trump Administration
Harvard University’s lawyers responded on Monday to the Trump administration’s letter demanding a series of policy changes, saying the demands were unlawful and that Harvard would not comply.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he wrote. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
The government’s letter to Harvard on Friday demanded an extraordinary set of changes that would have reshaped the university and ceded an unprecedented degree of control over Harvard’s operations to the federal government. The changes would have violated principles that are held dear on colleges campuses, including academic freedom.
Some of the actions that the Trump administration demanded of Harvard were:
- Conducting plagiarism checks on all current and prospective faculty members.
- Sharing all its hiring data with the Trump administration, and subjecting itself to audits of its hiring while “reforms are being implemented,” at least through 2028.
- Providing all admissions data to the federal government, including information on both rejected and admitted applicants, sorted by race, national origin, grade-point average and performance on standardized tests.
- Immediately shutting down any programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
- Overhauling academic programs that the Trump administration says have “egregious records on antisemitism,” including placing certain departments and programs under an external audit. The list includes the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Public Health and the Medical School, among many others.
The demands suggested that the federal government wanted to intrude on processes that universities prefer to have control over, like how they admit their incoming classes. It also touched on issues that conservative activists have used as cudgels against academics. Plagiarism accusations, for example, are part of the reasons that Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign.
“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the Trump administration letter said.
Last month, after the Trump administration stripped $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University, Columbia agreed to major concessions demanded by the federal government. It agreed to place its Middle Eastern studies department under different oversight and to create a new security force of 36 “special officers” empowered to arrest and remove people from campus.
The demands on Harvard were different, and much more expansive, touching on many aspects of the university’s basic operations.
Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who had questioned university leaders, including Dr. Gay, over allegations that they had tolerated antisemitism on campus, said that the Trump administration should “defund Harvard” for defying the federal government.
“It is time to totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution,” she wrote in a social media post on Monday.
In Harvard’s response on Monday, it said it had already made major changes over the last 15 months to improve its campus climate and counter antisemitism, including disciplining students who violate university policies, devoting resources to programs that promote ideological diversity, and improving security.
Harvard said it was unfortunate that the administration had ignored the university’s efforts and moved instead to infringe on the school’s freedom in unlawful ways.
The forceful posture taken by Harvard on Monday was applauded across higher education, after universities had drawn widespread criticism for failing to resist Mr. Trump’s attacks more aggressively.
Harvard itself had been under fire for a series of moves in recent months that faculty members said were taken to placate Mr. Trump, including hiring a lobbying firm with close ties to the president and pushing out the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
A Harvard faculty group filed a lawsuit last week, seeking to block the administration from carrying out its threat to withdraw federal funding from the university. Nikolas Bowie, a law professor and secretary-treasurer of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the group that filed the suit, applauded Harvard’s rejection of the Trump administration’s demands.
“I’m grateful for President Garber’s courage and leadership,” said Dr. Bowie. “His response recognizes that there’s no negotiating with extortion.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents many colleges and universities in Washington, said Harvard’s approach could embolden other campus leaders, whom he said were “breathing a sigh of relief.”
“This gives more room for others to stand up, in part because if Harvard hadn’t, it would have said to everyone else, ‘You don’t stand a chance,’” said Dr. Mitchell, a former president of Occidental College. “This gives people a sense of the possible.”
He described Harvard’s response as “a road map for how institutions could oppose the administration on this incursion into institutional decision-making.” He added, “Whether it’s antisemitism or doing merit-based hiring or merit-based admissions, the basic texture of the academic enterprise needs to be decided by the university, not by the government.”
Ethan Kelly, 22, a senior at Harvard from Maryland, said that Monday’s message from Dr. Garber was a relief. He said that he and many of his classmates have been concerned that their school would cave to the Trump administration’s demands.
“There’s been so much concern that Harvard would fold under political pressure, especially with how aggressive the Trump administration has been in trying to control higher education,” Mr. Kelly said. Seeing Dr. Garber draw a clear line, he added, was something “that matters.”
In a related development, nine major research universities and three university associations sued the Trump administration on Monday to restore $400 million in funding that the Energy Department said it was slashing last week.
In a statement, Michael I. Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell University, one of the schools that joined the lawsuit, said the research at stake was “vital to national security, American manufacturing, economic competitiveness and progress toward energy independence.”
Other schools listed as plaintiffs were Brown University, Caltech, the University of Illinois, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Princeton and the University of Rochester. The Energy Department said it would dramatically reduce overhead or “indirect” costs associated with the grants.
