The US Joint Task Force to combat antisemitism had issued a series of antisemitism and discrimination reform demands to Harvard University on Friday, which were ultimately rejected by the Ivy League school as an invasive bid for control of the institution.
President Donald Trump's administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million to Harvard on Monday in response to the rejection of the demands, which were an update to a April 3 list of conditions for continuing the financial relationship between the government and the academic institution.
The April 11 letter to Harvard University president Alan Garber proposed policies that would have altered the university's hiring, admissions, and disciplinary procedures, ostensibly to counter discrimination and antisemitism.
Students and faculty would have seen a reform of Harvard's hiring and admissions practices to ensure acceptance of applicants solely on merit and not immutable characteristics like race or religion. The institution would be required to discontinue all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming and policies. Harvard would have been required to remove any admissions or hiring practices that served to prioritize adherents of certain ideologies, in a bid to promote viewpoint diversity that would have also seen an audit of staff and faculty of their viewpoints.
New disciplinary measures
Audits were also demanded for new Harvard admissions and hires to ensure compliance with the merit reforms, with new student data regarding the prior academic standing and heritage of applicants to be made publicly available. Faculty would also have been subject to a plagiarism review, and the government called for Harvard's plagiarism policies to be more consistently enforced – likely a reference to former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned last January amid plagiarism allegations.
International admissions and recruitment would have been screened to prevent the admittance of students "hostile to the American values and institutions" and those supportive of terrorism and antisemitism. Conduct violations would be immediately reported to federal authorities.
New disciplinary measures proposed by the US government included a protest mask ban, a requirement for immediate intervention into disruptions, and full investigation and disciplinary action against violators involved in the protest encampments, building occupations, and alleged October 18 assault of an Israeli student.
A new student group policy would have banned clubs that promote criminal activity, violence, or harassment, invite non-students onto campus to violate rules, or serve as fronts for already banned organizations. The leaders of such organizations would have been prevented from serving as officers in other student groups. The government also called for the end of support and recognition of groups that it saw as responsible for antisemitism at Harvard since the October 7 massacre, including Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduates Students for Palestine, Law Students for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild.
The antisemitism task force had demanded a reform of governance, including the reduction of student and untenured faculty power and reducing the control of activist faculty and administrators.
The university would have been required to comply with an external commission that would have reported on individual faculty members who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited the student body to violate Harvard rules since October 2023. The university would have cooperated with the government to determine appropriate sanctions of the faculty members.
Programs and schools "that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture" would be reviewed by the external report, including the Harvard Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.
The antisemitism task force warned in the April 11 letter that the US had invested in Harvard's operations because of the institution's scholarly achievements, but that an investment was "not an entitlement," referencing the March 31 announcement that the antisemitism task force was reviewing almost $9 billion in grants and over $255 million in contracts over campus discrimination. Garber said the new demands, coupled with the financial threat, made it clear that the government wasn't interested in working cooperatively on the issue of antisemitism.
The US Education Department responded to Garber's rejection in a Monday statement announcing that the task force had frozen $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60M in multi-year contracts with Harvard.
"Harvard’s statement today 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," the antisemitism task force said in the statement. "The disruption of learning that has plagued campuses in recent years is unacceptable. The harassment of Jewish students is intolerable. It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support."