A letter sent to Harvard University by the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism was sent by mistake, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
The April 11 letter from Trump officials, which outlined the administration’s demands regarding Harvard’s curriculum and hiring and admissions practices, was “unauthorized” and was not meant to be sent, multiple people familiar with the matter said.
According to the report, there were disagreements within the White House on what the original plan for the letter was. Some thought the letter had been sent prematurely, and others thought that the letter was meant to be shared with other members of the task force, three anonymous sources told the Times.
Harvard reportedly had been in talks with task force members about revising some of its practices, but the demands outlined in the letter led university officials to believe that there was no way to reach an agreement with the administration.
Harvard rejected the antisemitism task force’s demands on Monday; the Trump administration subsequently froze some $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status.
Trump admin. claims malpractice
Trump administration officials said that the letter to Harvard was justified and blamed the Ivy League university for starting a fight.
“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” White House senior policy strategist May Mailman told NYT. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that President Donald Trump was seeking an apology from Harvard, something that Mailman told the Times could restart discussions.
“He also wants to see Harvard apologize, and Harvard should apologize for the egregious antisemitism that took place on their college campus against Jewish American students,” Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday.
Harvard asserted that it did not need to check in with administration lawyers after receiving the letter, since it “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised,” Harvard said in a Friday statement.
“Recipients of such correspondence from the US government – even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach – do not question its authenticity or seriousness.
“It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say. But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on students and employees and “the standing of American higher education in the world,” the statement read.
The New York Times reported that the back-and-forth between Harvard lawyers and representatives of the Trump administration lacked specifics. The administration’s lawyers told the university that they would send a letter on Friday with more concrete steps that the administration wanted to see.
Instead, Harvard received the letter from Sean Keveney, the acting director general of the Department of Health and Human Services, with a list of demands the university announced it would not agree to.
Trump administration lawyers called Harvard’s representatives after the rebuff and said that the letter had not been authorized to be sent. According to a person with knowledge of the call, one of the lawyers then said that the letter was supposed to be sent at some point, just not while there was constructive dialogue between the two sides.