President Donald Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, and the US Joint Task Force to combat antisemitism froze $2.2 billion in grants, in response to the Ivy League school’s Monday rejection of the federal government’s antisemitism policy demands as an unprecedented surrender of control to Washington.
Harvard University President Alan Garber announced in a Monday statement that the institution had rejected a series of demands in a Friday antisemitism task force letter that conditioned continued financial relationships with the government, replacing an earlier April 3 proposal.
“We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement,” said Garber. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
The degree of intervention would violate Harvard’s First Amendment rights as a private institution, he argued, which the university’s attorneys, in a Monday letter to the antisemitism task force, noted were freedom of speech rights long recognized by the Supreme Court for academic institutions.
“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 Garber.
'No government should dictate what private universities can teach'
Harvard’s president and attorneys argued that the administration’s proposal had gone beyond the powers of the federal government, including the statutory limits under the Title VI discrimination prohibitions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The attorneys told the task force that the government’s terms “circumvented the statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms” unproven by mandatory processes.
The attorneys’ letter also charged that the federal government had made the demands in disregard of Harvard’s reforms over the last 15 months to address antisemitic discrimination, including new disciplinary and security measures. Garber said that Harvard did “not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism” and planned to adopt new policies to ensure that protests will be held in a time, place, and manner that don’t disrupt studies.
Taking action against campus discrimination would “not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” said Garber, who argued that while some of the Trump administration’s demands sought to combat antisemitism, most represented a desire for governmental control of the university.
According to the April 11 letter, 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.
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 to immediately intervene 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, 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 that discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited the student body to violate Harvard rules since October 2023. Harvard 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 same external report.
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.
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 $60 million 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.”
Garber detailed in his statement that the contracts and grants that paid for work that led to innovations in medical, engineering, and scientific fields have made the country safer and healthier.
“Treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility,” were at risk because the government decided to retreat from these partnerships, Garber warned.
Trump lay on new threats against Harvard in a Tuesday Truth Social post, suggesting that the Ivy League university should be taxed as a political entity for allegedly pushing politics, ideology, and support for terrorist groups.
“Remember, tax exempt status is totally contingent on acting in the public interest,” said Trump.
The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, along with other groups named in the Friday task force letter calling for the ban of student groups, issued a statement on Instagram in which they said that Garber rightly rejected the Trump administration’s “fascist” terms, but complained that Harvard hadn’t rolled “back its repression of Palestine Studies and solidarity” groups.
The committee had been put on probation on April 2 in response to an April 1 protest with unrecognized groups against the firing of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies leadership in mid-March.
Harvard Alum Shabbos Kestenbaum, who is embroiled in a lawsuit against the university over discrimination against Jewish students, said on X/Twitter that the government’s decision was not different than when funds were withheld to schools that refused racial desegregation and integration. He contended that Harvard had no constitutional rights to federal funding, but students did have a right against discrimination.
“This entire showdown boils down to Harvard insisting on violating civil rights law and the Trump administration refusing to allow Americans to fund said violations of civil rights law anymore,” Kestenbaum said Monday. “Jewish American students should not be facing discrimination in class. Due to their university refusing to fix that problem, there is no other solution than for the federal government to intervene.”
Harvard Law School alum and former US president Barack Obama said on X that Harvard had set an example for other academic institutions by “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect.”
The dispute between Harvard and the federal government comes amid a crackdown against antisemitism and radicalism at American universities, with foreign activist students having their visas revoked and the grants and funding of institutions including Columbia, Cornell, and Northwestern also put under review. Student visas have been canceled across the US, with some pertaining to radical activism and others to unrelated criminal violations. Harvard announced Thursday that seven students and five recent graduates had their visas canceled during the wave.
Columbia accepted similar terms from the Trump administration on March 21, which preceded the March 28 installation of its new acting president, Claire Shipman.
Shipman said in a Monday statement that Harvard’s rejection of the government’s terms “that would strike at the very heart of that university’s venerable mission” were important amid “a continued public conversation about the value and principles of higher education.” She also responded to reports that the Trump administration would seek federal oversight of Columbia, which “would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.”