Tag: Harvard University

Harvard Explores New Center for Conservative Scholarship Amid Trump Attacks
Harvard University is considering launching a major Center for Conservative Scholarship, a move many see as a strategic effort to counter escalating pressure from the Trump administration over allegations of liberal bias and campus antisemitism. The proposal, under discussion among top university leadership and potential donors, aims to bolster “viewpoint diversity” without becoming overtly partisan.
What’s Being Proposed
The envisioned center, modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, could cost between $500 million and $1 billion. Harvard officials—including President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning—have discussed the initiative with major donors, emphasizing that it would prioritize evidence-based, rigorous debate and showcase a spectrum of perspectives. The center is intended to address growing concerns that students and faculty are self-censoring; a 2024 Harvard survey revealed just one-third of graduates felt comfortable engaging controversial topics, and a separate poll showed only 3% of professors identified as conservative.
The move comes amid rising tensions with the Trump administration, which has frozen over $2.2 billion in federal research grants and threatened to revoke tax-exempt status, citing alleged antisemitism and discriminatory institutional practices. Harvard is suing the government to contest funding freezes; a court hearing is set for later this month. White House officials contend that a conservative center represents little more than symbolic appeasement and not a solution to deeper ideological concerns .
The dispute has drawn national attention to academic stewardship and ideological balance in elite institutions.
While there’s no direct market reaction, the freeze on federal funding may affect Harvard’s capacity to finance research and student aid.
If established, Harvard’s center would mark a notable expansion in conservative academic infrastructure, potentially influencing curricula and hiring patterns—not unlike Stanford’s Hoover Institution, but distinct in its explicitly nonpartisan intent .
Policy analysts and scholars view Harvard’s effort as part of a broader movement to institutionalize intellectual pluralism on campuses:
“This is a national reform movement,” noted Paul Carrese of Arizona State University, speaking on similar programs at public universities.
However, critics warn that such initiatives risk tokenism, unless they’re accompanied by measurable shifts in faculty diversity and academic culture .
Harvard’s exploration of a Conservative Scholarship Center reflects mounting pressures at the intersection of education, politics, and funding. As it braces for federal scrutiny and internal debate, the university may redefine how academic openness is operationalized—not through compliance alone, but via concrete institutional commitments to viewpoint diversity.
July 11, 2025
Judge Halts Trump Administration’s Attempt to End Harvard’s Enrollment of Foreign Students
A federal judge on Friday granted Harvard University’s emergency motion to block the Trump administration from revoking its ability to enroll international students, as litigation on the matter continues.
In her order, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said Harvard showed “it will sustain immediate and irreparable injury” if the Trump administration is allowed to implement its revocation notice before “there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.”
The order allows Harvard to maintain its “status quo” in enrolling international students for now. Burroughs has scheduled another hearing for May 27.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem notified Harvard a day earlier that the government would be terminating its student visa program, marking a major escalation in the administration’s pressure campaign against the Ivy League university.
This development is extraordinary, but it does not appear out of the blue: In mid-April, while canceling nearly $3 million in DHS grants to Harvard, Noem simultaneously demanded that the university turn over records on foreign students alleged to have engaged in “illegal and violent activities.” Failure to cooperate would jeopardize Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification — which allows schools to admit international students. Evidently, Noem has now followed through on that threat.
Harvard sued the Trump administration less than 24 hours after Noem’s revocation notice was issued.
“The government’s action is unlawful,” the university said in a statement on Thursday, adding: “This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”
Roughly 7,000 students across Harvard’s 13 schools are student visa holders, according to the university.
May 23, 2025
The Trump Administration extended its dispute with Harvard to include the university’s hiring practices
In a dramatic expansion of its long-running conflict with elite academic institutions, the Trump administration—through ongoing legal proxies and influence networks—has extended its scrutiny of Harvard University, moving beyond affirmative action in admissions to now challenge the university’s faculty hiring practices. The escalation signals a broader campaign to reshape how elite schools approach diversity, equity, and institutional autonomy.
The development stems from a complaint filed in late April with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which alleges that Harvard’s faculty recruitment and hiring decisions discriminate against white and Asian-American applicants in favor of candidates from underrepresented racial groups. The complaint is backed by conservative legal advocacy group America First Legal, co-founded by former Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller.
The Trump administration first took aim at Harvard in 2018, when the Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), accusing the university of discriminating against Asian-American students in its undergraduate admissions process. That case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2023 that race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unconstitutional.
Now, conservative legal forces are leveraging that precedent to argue that similar race-based considerations are influencing faculty selection—an area traditionally shielded by broader academic freedom protections.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that racial balancing has no place in American institutions,” said Gene Hamilton, general counsel at America First Legal. “That includes who teaches our students—not just who gets admitted.”
According to internal documents reviewed by New York Budget, the complaint singles out hiring patterns in Harvard’s humanities and social science departments, where over the past five years, approximately 60% of tenure-track hires were individuals identifying as Black, Hispanic, or Native American—groups that represent less than 15% of PhD graduates nationally in those fields.
In a statement, Harvard strongly rejected the allegations, stating its hiring practices are “guided by academic excellence, scholarly potential, and a commitment to advancing knowledge and pedagogy—not by racial quotas.”
“We are proud of our faculty’s diversity, which enhances the quality of teaching, learning, and research,” said university spokesperson Jonathan Swain. “Harvard follows all applicable laws in its employment practices and will vigorously defend itself against any unfounded legal claims.”
University officials also noted that faculty search committees conduct holistic evaluations and often include external peer reviewers, with final decisions approved by a faculty council and the president’s office.
While President Biden’s Department of Justice has officially distanced itself from the latest probe, legal experts say the infrastructure built under Trump—particularly within OCR and other regulatory bodies—continues to influence investigations under conservative pressure.
“This is a textbook example of regulatory capture through the courts and complaints process,” said Professor Lorraine Feldman, a constitutional law scholar at NYU. “It’s not technically the Trump administration anymore, but the ecosystem it built is alive and well.”
Several Republican-led states—including Florida, Texas, and Missouri—have joined the legal pressure campaign, with their attorneys general filing amici curiae briefs supporting a formal investigation into Harvard’s faculty diversity programs.
The hiring probe is part of a larger effort by conservative groups to challenge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across sectors. Since 2023, more than 25 states have proposed or passed legislation banning DEI offices in public universities, and private institutions are increasingly targeted through litigation.
In a public appearance on Newsmax, former President Donald Trump praised the latest development, calling it a “patriotic effort to save American education from the radical left.”
“It’s not about race—it’s about merit,” Trump said. “Harvard should be hiring the best people, not the most ‘woke’ candidates.”
Higher education advocates worry that the probe could have a chilling effect on university hiring and threaten the principle of institutional autonomy.
“This isn’t just about Harvard,” warned Irene Bautista, director of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “It’s about whether colleges and universities can make independent decisions to build faculties that reflect the world we live in.”
Others note that the increased legal scrutiny may discourage qualified scholars of color from entering the academic job market, further narrowing pipelines that are already under strain.
As Harvard braces for another protracted legal fight, the battle over race in higher education is shifting from lecture halls to hiring committees. For conservative activists, it’s an extension of a broader cultural war. For universities, it’s an existential challenge to their autonomy, values, and ability to define excellence on their own terms.
The Department of Education has not confirmed whether it has formally opened an investigation, but internal sources suggest preliminary inquiries are underway.
Whether this new front will result in significant legal action—or a Supreme Court ruling on faculty hiring—remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that in the post-affirmative action era, the conflict over diversity in higher education is far from over.
May 13, 2025
Trump has disputes with all of academia, but the Ivy League is his main focus
There it was for all to see, President Trump’s tangled relationship with the Ivy League, delivered in a burst at his rally in Michigan on Tuesday night.
“He’s the top,” the president said of Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity doctor he chose to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. “I mean, he went to Harvard.” But then: “I shouldn’t even mention that anymore because that used to be a good thing. Today it doesn’t mean much.”
There was this about Gen. Mark A. Milley, the president’s first-term choice as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “You know, he went to Princeton,” Mr. Trump said in 2019. “And he went to Columbia.” But then: “I’m not sure, was that a good thing or a bad? Did I like it or not?” The president never answered, although he called General Milley, whom he has since reviled, a “smart cookie.”
And on Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “He was, I believe, No. 1 at Yale,” Mr. Trump said in 2018 of his Supreme Court nominee. “Is that a correct statement?” It was not, since Yale does not calculate class rank.
What is correct is that the president’s war on academia has focused intensely on the Ivy League, the richly endowed collection of eight schools, most founded in the colonial era, that cost $90,000 or more a year, send a disproportionate number of graduates into America’s leadership class and accounted for less than 1 percent of the nation’s undergraduate enrollment in the fall of 2022.
Mr. Trump’s attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — have endeared him to his political base. He is withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars in federal funding from six of the eight schools because, he says, they are citadels of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination. Officials in higher education acknowledge failures, but call the president’s crackdown a perilous threat to academic freedom.
The Trump administration has targeted many other colleges and universities for potential antisemitism, some 60 in all. And yet the eight Ivies are cultural touchstones for Mr. Trump. Beyond the politics is a complex brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never really accepted him.
“They don’t return the love to him,” said Alan Marcus, a business and political consultant who oversaw Mr. Trump’s public relations from 1994 to 2000. After the president’s companies went through multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s, Mr. Marcus said that as part of an attempted comeback for his client he tried to get Mr. Trump to deliver a college commencement address or receive an honorary degree.
“I called a few people I knew on boards,” Mr. Marcus said. “But I got essentially laughed at.”
Timothy L. O’Brien, a biographer of Mr. Trump, said the president’s ire about the upper echelon of academia was not surprising. “He has a long track record of criticizing elites that he desperately wants to be accepted by,” Mr. O’Brien said. As far as the Ivy League, he said, “he could barely wait to get in himself.”
(Mr. O’Brien, a former New York Times reporter and editor, faced a $5 billion defamation lawsuit from Mr. Trump after Mr. O’Brien’s 2005 book, “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald,” put Mr. Trump’s wealth at $150 million to $250 million rather than the billions of dollars claimed by the president. The case was dismissed in 2009.)
On Friday, Mr. Trump renewed his recent threats to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, even though federal law prevents the president from ordering the I.R.S. to conduct tax investigations. White House officials have said the I.R.S. would make its own determination about Harvard. In an interview with The New York Times last week, Harvard’s president, Dr. Alan Garber, said the university had “problems that we needed to address” but added that the Trump administration’s oversight demands had “gone too far.”
Earlier in the week, it was Mr. Trump’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, that was in the cross-hairs. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights ruled on Monday that the school had violated Title IX by allowing a transgender swimmer to compete on the women’s team, and threatened referral to the Justice Department if Penn did not restore all honors to female athletes that had been “misappropriated by male athletes competing in female categories.”
The Trump administration had already suspended $175 million in federal funding to the university over the issue.
University of Pennsylvania officials have not commented.
Mr. Trump’s relationship with his alma mater is complicated. He has never delivered a commencement address there, although former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Hillary Clinton have. Penn has also not awarded Mr. Trump an honorary degree.
Mr. Trump was admitted in 1966 as a transfer student from Fordham University in the Bronx to Penn’s undergraduate Wharton School, where he focused on studying real estate, the family business. James T. Nolan, a close friend of the president’s older brother, interviewed him for admission.
“He answered my questions,” Mr. Nolan, now 86, said in an interview. “He wasn’t particularly outgoing.” Mr. Nolan recalled that Mr. Trump had a “high B average, maybe something of that sort” from Fordham, and that a more senior member of Penn’s admissions staff reviewed Mr. Trump’s transcripts and made the decision to accept him.
“People think of how difficult it is to get into the Ivy League schools now,” Mr. Nolan said. “But this was 1966. It wasn’t that difficult.’’
Mr. Nolan remembered Mr. Trump as something of a loner on campus. “He seemed to me to be rather isolated,” he said. “I don’t recall seeing him with people. I do recall that he went home every weekend to New York to do some work with his dad.”
In the years since his 1968 graduation, Mr. Trump has regularly cited his Penn degree as evidence of his intelligence. “I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” he said in 2015 in typical remarks in Phoenix. “I’m, like, a really smart person.” Mr. Trump has also claimed that he was first in his class, although the program from the 1968 Penn commencement does not list him among those students with academic honors. He has never made his grades public.
Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said in testimony to Congress in 2019 that the president had instructed him to send threatening letters to his alma maters, warning of jail time for anyone who released his transcripts.
“I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” Mr. Cohen told the House Oversight Committee.
Mr. Marcus, Mr. Trump’s former public relations man, recalled a conversation he once had with Mr. Trump. “He said to me, ‘You’re really smart. What’s your IQ?’ Well, who knows what your IQ is? So I made up a number, 190. And he said, ‘That’s pretty good. Mine’s higher.’”
Mr. Trump has fewer Ivy Leaguers in his current cabinet than at the start of his first term, and fewer than other recent presidents. But he does have them — five out of 23, including himself.
Vice President JD Vance, who has degrees from Yale Law School and Ohio State, has attacked elite academia as vigorously as Mr. Trump, notably in a 2021 speech when he was running for Senate in Ohio.
“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” he told the National Conservatism Conference, drawing applause. He concluded with a rallying cry citing former President Richard M. Nixon: “He said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.’”
And yet, Mr. Trump highlighted the academic pedigrees of the Ivy Leaguers in his cabinet in the announcements of their nominations, which is something he did not always do for those who attended less elite schools.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got a shout-out for his degrees from Princeton and Harvard, for example. But there was no mention of Linda McMahon’s degree from East Carolina University or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s diploma from Haverford College.
There are some exceptions to Mr. Trump’s view that an Ivy League diploma is a mark of intelligence.
Consider John R. Bolton, one of Mr. Trump’s ousted first-term national security advisers and a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. Mr. Bolton wrote a book about his time working for Mr. Trump that enraged the president, who retaliated early this year by revoking Mr. Bolton’s Secret Service protection, despite death threats that Mr. Bolton faces from Iran.
Mr. Bolton said his degrees never seemed to impress the president very much.
“He likes to insult me with how dumb I am,” said Mr. Bolton, who pointed out that his 17-month tenure still makes him Mr. Trump’s longest serving national security adviser.
May 5, 2025
Trump held back $2.2 billion from Harvard, but there was no evidence that Harvard messed up
Harvard University stands to lose billions in federal funding, but the government’s actions against one of the world’s top research institutions were applied with vague accusations and no proof of specific legal violations, documents show.
The Trump administration’s decision Monday to freeze $2.2 billion to Harvard after the school announced it would not yield to demands to change admissions, hiring and governance practices did not follow procedures set out in civil rights law, a Post review found.
Trump administration officials have publicly said that Harvard has violated students’ civil rights and mentioned Title VI, which is the federal law that says any school found to violate civil rights is not eligible for federal funding. Harvard, according to the letter the administration sent the school on April 11, was not keeping Jewish and pro-Israel students safe and allowed antisemitism on campus. The letter also said the university had diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs that could not stand.
But the government’s notice did not list or explain the specific violations that occurred at Harvard.
The administration’s action skipped over requirements that say the government must identify and list violations, offer a hearing, notify Congress and then wait 30 days before applying penalties.
The actions against Harvard and several other elite colleges reflect the manner in which the administration is handing out other harsh penalties across the government, such as the growing number of undetailed student visa revocations, as well as how President Donald Trump is applying the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants.
The Trump administration’s alleged disregard for federal procedure is part of the basis for separate lawsuits filed by the faculty unions at Harvard and Columbia University.
“These procedures exist because Congress recognized that allowing federal agencies to hold funding hostage, or to cancel it cavalierly, would give them dangerously broad power in a system in which institutions depend so heavily upon federal funding,” attorneys for the American Association of University Professors wrote in the Harvard faculty union lawsuit.
Harvard, the White House and the three government agencies with representatives who signed the demand letter to Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about the punitive measures.
The funding freeze at Harvard was the biggest salvo in the Trump administration’s actions against elite universities that it sees as bastions of “woke” ideology and anti-Israel sentiment. Trump signed an executive order to combat antisemitism in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests that roiled campuses last year and left some Jewish students complaining of antisemitism.
Trump has shown his willingness to punish, without detailed explanation, institutions for their embrace of social policies with which he disagrees. In March, he announced on social media that he was freezing $175 million meant for the University of Pennsylvania because the institution allowed a transgender athlete to compete on a women’s swim team. The athlete graduated in 2022.
Universities use federal funds to, among other things, produce cutting-edge medical research and technological advancements that make the United States a leader in many lucrative fields.
The five-page letter to Harvard did not specify which DEI initiatives the administration wanted eliminated, only that it must shutter all such programs and “demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government.”
The demands, written by officials at the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration, were relatively vague. The administration wants the school to hire an external auditor to evaluate the “viewpoint diversity” of the university’s students and faculty, make “meaningful governance reform and restructuring,” and allow for “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty,” the letter said.
The letter also demanded admission changes to “prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”
Then, on Monday, the multiagency Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism housed under the Justice Department froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million worth of multiyear contracts to Harvard and its affiliates after the school refused to comply.
Trump in recent weeks has shocked powerful universities by freezing billions of dollars — leaving them to find out through social media or simple emails. Some still have no idea why.
A Harvard spokesperson on Tuesday said the university has only received three letters from the antisemitism task force — on March 31, April 3 and April 11 — none of which listed specific violations. A separate letter on March 10 from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights warned Harvard, and 59 other schools, of potential enforcement actions if they failed to comply with Title VI.
Harvard President Alan Garber wrote Monday in a letter to the campus community that the April 11 demands violate the university’s First Amendment rights and overstep the statutory limits of the government’s authority under federal civil rights law. “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,” he wrote.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon shot back, saying the funding freeze was a reflection of taxpayers not wanting their dollars to support campuses she says allow antisemitism on their grounds.
“Let me be clear,” McMahon said Tuesday on Newsmax. “We’re not talking about First Amendment rights at all. I think that on college campuses, there should be open debate, there should be room for disagreement and all of that. What I’m talking about are civil rights violations and safety for these students who are on campus.”
Harvard says it has taken several steps to try to ensure the safety of Jewish and pro-Israel students: Harvard clarified campus policies regarding discrimination to include Jewish and Israeli identities, strengthened discipline for infractions and expanded Kosher dining options on campus.
Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in March announced he had “appointed a faculty working group to review processes and criteria for appointing and renewing instructors.” He also said he ended the school’s formal collaboration with Birzeit University, located in the West Bank.
But it was not enough.
“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” according to the Trump administration’s April 11 letter. “But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise.”
April 17, 2025
The I.R.S., which deals with taxes, is thinking about whether Harvard should still get to avoid paying taxes
The Internal Revenue Service is weighing whether to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, according to three people familiar with the matter, which would be a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s attempts to choke off federal money and support for the leading research university.
President Trump on Tuesday publicly called for Harvard to pay taxes, continuing a standoff in which the administration has demanded the university revamp its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum.
Some I.R.S. officials have told colleagues that the Treasury Department on Wednesday asked the agency to consider revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, according to two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
An I.R.S. spokeswoman declined to comment. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment. CNN first reported that the I.R.S. was looking at potentially rescinding Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Federal law bars the president from either directly or indirectly requesting the I.R.S. to investigate or audit specific targets. The I.R.S. does at times revoke tax exemptions from organizations for conducting too many political or commercial activities, but those groups can appeal the agency’s decision in court. Any attempt to take away Harvard’s tax exemption would be likely to face a legal challenge, which tax experts expect would be successful.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the I.R.S.’s scrutiny of Harvard began before the president’s social media post.
“Any forthcoming actions by the I.R.S. are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to the President’s TRUTH,” Mr. Fields said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump’s website Truth Social.
In a statement, Harvard said there is no legal basis for rescinding its tax status.
“Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission,” the university said. “It would result in diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programs, and lost opportunities for innovation. The unlawful use of this instrument more broadly would have grave consequences for the future of higher education in America.”
Even an attempt at changing Harvard’s tax status would signify a drastic breach in the independence of the I.R.S. and its historical insulation from political pressure.
The Trump administration has cleared out much of the agency’s senior leadership in the last few months, installing allies to temporarily serve as the commissioner and its top lawyer. Its newest acting commissioner, Gary Shapley, was an I.R.S. agent who has said that the investigation into the taxes of Hunter Biden, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, was not aggressive enough.
Not only does Harvard’s tax-exempt status allow it to forgo paying income and property taxes, but it also means that donations to the university are tax deductible. That helps attract huge donations from ultrawealthy Americans.
The university is already under intense financial pressure. The Trump administration has said it is cutting off $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard after it refused to comply with a list of the government’s demands.
On Wednesday, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, canceled nearly $3 million in agency grants to Harvard, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security.
Ms. Noem also wrote a letter to university officials requesting “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities” by the end of the month, according to the agency statement. Without a response, the university could lose the “privilege of enrolling foreign students,” the statement said.
The intensifying standoff between the Trump administration and Harvard is part of a broad pressure campaign against some of the nation’s most elite universities. Led by top White House aides and senior officials from agencies across the government, the effort is part of a bid by conservatives to realign the liberal tilt of academia.
The strategy has roiled higher education as the Trump administration scrutinizes dozens of schools over their handling of antisemitism allegations, diversity practices and policies on transgender athletes. At stake are billions of dollars in federal funding that the White House is threatening to pull from universities that do not comply.
In recent weeks, Harvard has had to weigh whether to rely on its endowment of $53 billion, the largest in higher education, to withstand backlash from the federal government.
But the bulk of its endowment is “restricted,” or earmarked for causes specified by donors. Universities are loath to use even the free parts of their endowments — about $10 billion in Harvard’s case — viewing them more like retirement accounts they rely on for yearly operating expenses than rainy-day funds.
April 17, 2025
Harvard Saying ‘No’ to Trump Is a Really Big Deal
Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.
Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.
“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”
Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”
Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.
That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.
It was not immediately clear what programs the funding freeze would affect.
Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university, is the most prominent object of the administration’s campaign to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. The administration’s demands include sharing its hiring data with the government and bringing in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse.”
Columbia University, which faced a loss of $400 million in federal funding, last month agreed to major concessions the government demanded, including that it install new oversight of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.
Columbia University faculty at a rally on Monday against federal funding cuts. The university last month agreed to major concessions that the Trump administration demanded. Credit…Graham Dickie/The New York Times
In a letter on Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, refused to stand down. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote.
The administration’s fight with Harvard, which had an endowment of $53.2 billion in 2024, is one that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House aide, want to have. In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.
Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.
“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.
Harvard has not escaped the problems that roiled campuses nationwide after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In his letter, Dr. Garber said the university had taken steps to address antisemitism, support diverse viewpoints and protect free speech and dissent.
Those same points were made in a letter to the administration from two lawyers representing Harvard, William A. Burck and Robert K. Hur.
Mr. Burck is also an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the deal it recently reached with the Trump administration.
Mr. Hur, who worked in the Justice Department in Mr. Trump’s first term, was the special counsel who investigated President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents and termed him “an elderly man with a poor memory,” enraging Mr. Biden.
Both lawyers understand the legal workings of the current administration, an expertise of benefit to Harvard.
“Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community,” Mr. Burck and Mr. Hur wrote in the letter, addressed to the acting general counsels of the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and to a commissioner within the General Services Administration. “But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
April 16, 2025
Trump Administration to Withhold $2 Billion Following Harvard’s Rejection of Demands
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.
Trump Administration’s Letter to Harvard Download
“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.
Harvard’s Response to the Trump Administration Download
“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.
April 15, 2025