How Harvard became the first university to push back against Trump’s campus crackdown and multi-billion-dollar funding threats
As the Trump administration cracked down for months on what president said was unchecked antisemitism and leftist ideology on campuses, even the nation’s most prestigious and wealthy universities seemed to be on their back foot.
In March, Columbia agreed to a sweeping, unprecedented set of demands: creating a new campus police force to remove student protesters; putting a Middle East studies department under outside control to win back potential access to $400 million in imperiled federal funds, the same month its second president in the span of 12 months stepped down.
At least 60 universities were warned they could soon be the next to potentially lose hundreds of millions or even billions in federal funding if they didn’t fall in line with the president’s vision of campus civil rights, which has categorized all of those who engaged in campus pro-Palestine protests, which included scores of Jewish student leaders, as antisemitic Hamas sympathizers.
By late March, the administration was making its boldest push yet, threatening to cut off some $9 billion in federal funding to Harvard.
To maintain the funding, the administration warned, the university needed to agree to demands like ending diversity programs, cooperating with federal immigration officials, screening international students for their views, de-recognizing pro-Palestine student groups, and subjecting itself to a wide-ranging “viewpoint diversity” audit.
Then, in the last few days, Harvard, the nation’s oldest and richest university, began to push back more forcefully than any of the other five Ivy League schools that have faced administration funding threats.
It began on Friday, when a group Harvard faculty sued the administration over the demands, alleging that Trump was simultaneously “exploiting” and ignoring provisions like the Administrative Procedure Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination at federally funded institutions.
The suit alleged that the administration had failed to follow steps laid out in federal statute that come before a university can be defunded under the civil rights law.
“Threats like these are an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university,” the complaint reads. “They overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the University to punishing disfavored speech.”
Over the weekend, hundreds joined protests near campus against the Trump demands.
Then, on Monday, the university issued its starkest response yet to Trump, with messages from the university’s lawyers and Harvard president Alan Garber that the school wouldn’t agree to the demands.
“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 wrote.
Attorneys for the university argued in a letter on Monday to Trump administration officials that the White House had ignored the university’s work to combat antisemitism and “instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.”
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the lawyers added.
