Harvard Rejects Trump’s Demands, Hit by $2.3bn Freeze in Govt Funding

•Varsity says it won’t surrender its independence, set to borrow $750m from Wall Street

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

The administration of President Donald Trump has announced the freezing of $2.3 billion in federal funding to Harvard, after the school rejected numerous demands from the government, which it said would cede control of the institution to a conservative-led administration that portrays universities as dangerously leftist.

The funding freeze came after the Trump administration said last month it was reviewing $9 billion in federal contracts and grants to Harvard as part of a crackdown on what it said is antisemitism that erupted on college campuses during pro-Palestinian protests in the past 18 months.

On Monday, a Department of Education task force on combating antisemitism accused America’s oldest university of having a “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.”

The exchange escalated the high-stakes dispute between the Trump administration and some of the world’s richest universities that has raised concerns about speech and academic freedoms, Reuters reported.

The 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 antisemitism on campus.

Deportation proceedings have begun against some detained foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while visas for hundreds of other students have been canceled.

Harvard President, Alan Garber, wrote in a public letter that demands made by the Department of Education last week would allow the federal government “to control the Harvard community” and threaten the school’s “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge.”

Garber added: “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.”

The issue of antisemitism on campus erupted before Trump took office for his second term, following pro-Palestinian student protests last year at several universities following the 2023 Hamas attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.

White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said in a statement that Trump was “working to Make Higher Education Great Again by ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence.”

In a letter last Friday, the education department stated that Harvard had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.”

The department demanded that Harvard work to reduce the influence of faculty, staff and students who are “more committed to activism than scholarship” and have an external panel audit the faculty and students of each department to ensure “viewpoint diversity.”

The letter also stated that Harvard, by this August, must only hire faculty and admit students based on merit and cease all preferences based on race, colour or national origin. The university must also screen international students “to prevent admitting students hostile to American values” and report to federal immigration authorities foreign students who violate conduct rules.

Last week, a group of Harvard professors sued to block the Trump administration’s review of nearly $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the school.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering forcing fellow Ivy League school Columbia into a consent decree that would legally bind the school to follow federal guidelines in how it combats antisemitism. Some Columbia professors, like those at Harvard, have sued the federal government in response. The government has suspended $400 million in federal funding and grants to Columbia.

Harvard President, Garber, said the federal government’s demands that it “audit” the viewpoints of its students, faculty and staff to ferret out left-wing thinkers generally opposed to the Trump administration clearly violated the university’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote.

He added that while Harvard is taking steps to address antisemitism on campus, “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.”

Harvard agreed in January to provide additional protections for Jewish students under a settlement resolving two lawsuits accusing the Ivy League school of becoming a hotbed of antisemitism.

To ease any funding crunch created by any cutoff in federal funding, Harvard is working to borrow $750 million from Wall Street.