The Trump government has said it’s freezing more than $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts that were destined for Harvard University. This follows a decision by Harvard to decline fulfilling some of the government’s conditions that were directed at limiting campus activism.
In a letter to Harvard, the administration called for radical overhauls. These were to include embracing so-called “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies, auditing the campus community’s attitudes toward diversity, prohibiting face masks (which appeared to target pro-Palestinian demonstrators), and reducing funding for any student organizations that supposedly advocate illegal behavior or harassment.
Harvard President Alan Garber took issue, responding that these were impermissible overreaches into the university’s rights under the First Amendment and beyond what Congress may do under Title VI — a race- and color-and national-origin-basing anti-discrimination law.
Garber underscored that no political party government should dictate what private universities educate, whom they admit or recruit, or on what they do research. He reiterated that Harvard was already doing its part in countering antisemitism and that true progress must be initiated within the university community, not through political coercion.
The measure against Harvard forms a larger push by the Trump government to wield federal funds to enforce political interference upon elite schools. Other Ivy League institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Princeton are all in the pipeline to be issued the same spending restraints.
In response, a coalition of Harvard alumni called on the university to fight back legally, upholding academic freedom and autonomy. One alumna, Anurima Bhargava, commended Harvard’s action, calling it standing up to political bullying.
The action has set off protests in Cambridge and a lawsuit from a professors’ group, which contends that the administration bypassed legal protocols and is employing political means to muzzle free speech and advance its agenda.
