Harvard University announced a temporary hiring freeze on Monday due to “substantial financial uncertainties” that it’s now facing under Donald Trump’s administration.
The move comes after Trump pulled $400 million worth of grants and contracts from Columbia University on Friday, accusing the school of antisemitism for its handling of pro-Palestinian protests on campus following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack in Israel.
Harvard said the temporary freeze would “preserve our financial flexibility until we better understand how changes in federal policy will take shape and can assess the scale of their impact,” Politico reported.
Both Columbia and Harvard were attacked by Republican lawmakers for their response to campus protests against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Former Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned last summer amid the turmoil, just four months after being grilled by congressional Republicans during a tense hearing on campus antisemitism.
The Department of Justice last month announced the formation of a federal antisemitism task force, noting in a release that its “first priority will be to root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”
Antisemitic incidents have been on the rise since before the 2023 Hamas attacks, as have incidents of anti-Muslim harassment. It’s unclear, however, what the DOJ under Trump will consider “antisemitic harassment,” as some lawmakers — Democrats included — have broadly interpreted any criticism of Israel or Zionism as an act of antisemitism.
In 2023, the House passed a resolution that effectively equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. New York Representative Jerry Nadler, a Jewish Democrat, opposed the resolution, noting that even some Jewish communities oppose Zionism for religious reasons, and would be branded antisemites under the resolution.
“While most anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitic, the authors, if they were at all familiar with Jewish history and culture, should know about Jewish anti-Zionism that was, and is, expressly not antisemitic,” he said at the time. Zionism supports establishing a Jewish state that includes Palestine.
Trump’s new federal task force appears poised to stomp out any large-scale campus protests against Israel's actions in Gaza, even though a number of human rights advocates have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
On Saturday, federal immigration officers arrested a Palestinian activist and former Columbia graduate student who helped lead a wave of protests on campus last spring. A lawyer for the activist, Mahmoud Khalil, said he is living in the U.S. legally on a green card.
"All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests," Trump wrote on social media last week. "Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested."
Including Harvard and Columbia, at least 10 college campuses will be visited Trump’s federal task force. The other schools include George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California.
All of the universities on the DOJ's list are in states that typically vote for Democratic candidates in presidential elections.
The University of Texas at Austin also had large-scale protests that were met with violent police responses, but that university as well as Ohio State University are in the capitals of red states Texas and Ohio, respectively, and appear to have escaped the task force's eye.
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