Harvard University has rejected demands from United States President Donald Trump’s administration that would see the university cede control to what it described as a conservative government that portrays universities as dangerously leftist.
Within hours of Harvard taking its stand on Monday, the Trump administration announced it was freezing $2.3bn in federal funding to the Ivy League school.
On Tuesday, Trump also floated that Harvard could lose its tax exempt status, under which most US higher education institutions are relieved of paying income tax.
In a post on Truth Social, he warned Harvard could “be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness'”.
In March, the Trump administration had said it was reviewing $9bn in federal contracts and grants to Harvard as part of a crackdown on what it calls anti-Semitism.
Since taking office for a second term, Trump has pushed to have student protesters involved in pro-Palestinian and anti-Gaza war protests disciplined, expelled or even deported, on the basis that their criticisms of Israel were anti-Semitic. Critics, however, argue that Trump’s actions are aimed at dampening free speech.
The Trump administration ultimately released a list of demands it expected Harvard to comply with, including reporting foreign students for code violations, reforming its governance and leadership, and discontinuing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.
But this week, Harvard President Alan Garber dismissed those demands as “unprecedented” and “beyond the power of the federal government”.
He issued a public letter, calling the requirements an attempt “to control the Harvard community” and threaten the school’s “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production and dissemination of knowledge”.
“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,” Garber’s letter continued.
The US Department of Education’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, in a written statement, said Garber’s letter “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”.
Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Washington, DC, Patty Culhane, pointed out that while Harvard is not the first institution to be targeted, it has been “the first to sound defiant”, and even indicate “that they might be willing to fight it in court”.
“So, a very big shift from what we’ve seen from other universities, but if anyone could do it, it’s Harvard,” Culhane said.
The Trump administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous universities, pressing the institutions to make policy changes and citing what it says is a failure to fight anti-Semitism on campus.
Columbia University was stripped of $400m in grants and contracts on March 7 for what the Trump administration alleged was allowing “relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment” on its campus.
Deportation proceedings have begun against several detained foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while visas for hundreds of other students have been cancelled.
