Showdown: Trump Takes On Harvard

After refusing to meet demands for reform and losing $8 billion in funding, Harvard faces loss of its tax-exempt status and its authorization to enroll foreign students.

Image via Reality’s Last Stand (Harvard, Trump, and the Battle Over Bias)

The Trump administration continues their campaign of combatting antisemitism and other civil right violations on university campuses. Notable general actions so far include:

• Department of Education Warns 60 Universities: Protect Jewish Students from Antisemitism or Face Enforcement Action

• ED, HHS, and GSA Announce Additional Measures to End Anti-Semitic Harassment on College Campuses

• Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism Announces Visits to 10 College Campuses that Experienced Incidents of Antisemitism

Actions against specific universities include the DOJ investigation of the UC system and the freezing of federal funding for Columbia (see also here) and Harvard.

In response to the Trump administration’s actions, UCLA announced an initiative to combat campus antisemitism. Columbia acquiesced to most of the administration’s demands, including special oversight over mismanaged academic programs, such as various grievance studies departments (see, for example, Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands, Inside Higher Ed, March 21, 2025).

Meanwhile, a power struggle between Harvard and the Trump administration has developed.

Trump versus Harvard

Harvard University on Monday notified the federal government that it will not comply with the administration’s demands to implement a list of wide-ranging reforms related to campus antisemitism and DEI.

In a letter dated April 11, the government had notified Harvard that it has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The letter detailed specific actions that Harvard must undertake to avoid withdrawal of governmental support. The government demanded that by August 25, Harvard must do the following:

• Reform its governance structure to center tenured faculty most committed to scholarship, and reduce the influence of untenured faculty, students, and activist professors and administrators.

• Institute strict merit-based hiring; cease all identity-based preferences in hiring, promotion, and compensation; review all existing and prospective faculty for plagiarism; and apply policies against plagiarism consistently.

• Adopt strict merit-based admissions, and cease all identity-based admissions preferences.

• Reform international admissions to prevent admitting students who are “hostile to … American values and institutions,” including students supportive of terrorism or antisemitism, and report to the federal government any foreign student who commits a conduct violation.

• Improve viewpoint diversity among faculty and students. Audit every department for viewpoint diversity and abolish all ideological preferences and litmus tests in hiring and admissions. Departments found not to be viewpoint diverse must hire a “critical mass” of viewpoint-diverse faculty and admit a “critical mass” of viewpoint-diverse students. Departments unable to comply must have their hiring and teaching responsibilities transferred to other departments.

• Reform specific programs with egregious records of antisemitism and other biases. The departments included the Graduate School of Education, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Language and Cultures, among others. Report and sanction all faculty who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to violate university rules following the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel.

• Completely dismantle DEI. Eliminate all DEI positions, programs, initiatives under any name, and cease all DEI-based disciplinary and speech control practices.

• Reform student discipline. Enforce university rules and apply disciplinary procedures vigorously, consistently, and without ideological favor. Prevent de-platforming and disruption. Enforce time, place, and manner restrictions. Bar student groups that promote illegal violence or harassment, invite non-students to campus who incite disruption, or are a front for a banned student organization. Ban masking to conceal identity. Discipline all students who violated university rules post-October 7.

• Establish whistleblower protections for any member of the university community who reports violations of the reforms in the current letter.

• Make annual reports to the federal government. Through 2028, report annually on progress implementing reforms in the current letter and report sources and uses of foreign funds. In addition, comply with all requests made by the Department of Homeland Security.

In the letter declaring its refusal to comply with the Trump administration’s demands, Harvard (through a law firm hired by the university) claimed that it is committed to fighting antisemitism and that it has already taken, and will continue to take, significant steps to reform. In the lawyers’ words:

Harvard is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in its community. Antisemitism and discrimination of any kind not only are abhorrent and antithetical to Harvard’s values but also threaten its academic mission.

To that end, Harvard has made, and will continue to make, lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes to ensure that the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment for all students and continues to abide in all respects with federal law across its academic programs and operations, while fostering open inquiry in a pluralistic community free from intimidation and open to challenging orthodoxies, whatever their source.

Over the past 15 months, Harvard has undertaken substantial policy and programmatic measures. It has made changes to its campus use policies; adopted new accountability procedures; imposed meaningful discipline for those who violate university policies; enhanced programs designed to address bias and promote ideological diversity and civil discourse; hired staff to support these programs and support students; changed partnerships; dedicated resources to combat hate and bias; and enhanced safety and security measures. As a result, Harvard is in a very different place today from where it was a year ago….

Harvard claims that the government’s demands are unlawful in that they are “in contravention of the First Amendment [and] invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.” The lawyers’ letter continues:

The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law…. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle….

Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.

Upon receipt of the letter, the Trump administration immediately froze over $2 billion of Harvard’s federal funding.

But the administration didn’t stop there. The next day, it asked the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Were this to occur, Harvard would not only have to pay income and property taxes, but donations to the university would no longer be tax deductible. Then, on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security followed suit by cancelling $2,700,000 of its own grants to Harvard and, more importantly, by threatening to revoke Harvard’s authorization to enroll foreign students.

There is little question that America’s elite universities have been ideologically captured and are in dire need of reform. But it is equally clear that the Trump administration’s demands are unprecedented in their scope and intrusiveness. Perhaps the administration had been emboldened after having won concessions to a milder set of demands from Columbia.

Statue of John Harvard, Harvard Campus. Image via i24 News

So, are the administration’s demands of Harvard legal and warranted, or has Trump gone too far? In a pair of articles in The Free Press, Charles Lane (Harvard Had It Coming. That Doesn’t Mean Trump Is Right, April 15, 2025) and Christopher Rufo (The Right Is Winning the Battle over Higher Education, April 15, 2025) debate the question.

Lane writes, “It’s hard to see how Harvard could not have pushed back”:

There was no way, consistent with academic freedom, for Harvard to accept the administration’s demand to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.”

Though Lane concedes:

This is the university that once penalized a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, for serving as legal counsel for Harvey Weinstein, widely reviled as an accused rapist, but constitutionally entitled to a defense. Harvard subsequently promoted another dean to president, Claudine Gay, who gave key verbal support to student protests against Sullivan.

This is a school that once tried to strong-arm a quarter of its students into abolishing their single-sex clubs, fraternities, and sororities, because “their fundamental principles are antithetical to our institutional values.”

And of course, this is a university whose response to antisemitism on its campus includes a high-level task force that has still not published final recommendations more than a year since Garber established it.

Harvard is also the school that destroyed the career of one its star professors, Roland Fryer, for having dared to published a paper that showed that there was actually no anti-Black bias in police shootings. It is the university that forced the retirement of the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven for stating the banal fact that sex is binary. And it is the school ranked dead last in the country in FIRE’s national campus free speech rankings.

But, as much as Harvard might deserve to be defunded, Lane asserts that to cut funding, the government must follow the law:

Under the relevant civil rights statute—Title VI—the government is required to formally document allegations such as those the administration is making against Harvard, and to cut funding only to the specific programs that have been found to discriminate. The Trump administration has yet to do that.

And Lane concludes:

For all of the above reasons, Harvard stands a good chance of winning this struggle in the courts of law, but a not as good one in the court of public opinion.

In contrast, Chris Rufo stands 100 percent behind the administration. He writes:

The important thing for the Trump administration is not to blink. It should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that America’s elite universities adhere to the principle of color-blind equality. If they resist, the president should not hesitate to cut off funding until they comply. Universities are free to operate as independent institutions and reject federal money—but if they choose to accept billions in taxpayer dollars, they must follow the law.

And in threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status and its authorization to enroll foreign students (DHS Cuts Harvard Grants, Threatens Student Visas, The Free Press, April 16, 2025), the Trump administration ain’t exactly blinking.

What Do Champions of Free Inquiry Say about These Actions?

The debate over the administration’s actions is ongoing, but it is safe to say that they are a mixed bag. Some are overreach (and, as such, will likely be blocked by the courts); however, others are not only defensible, but, in our opinion, necessary (such as consistent enforcement of Title VI and Title IX). Here is a recap of what organizations that promote free speech and academic freedom have been saying.

FIRE

For FIRE’s take on Trump’s threats to revoke university funding, see our coverage of Greg Lukianoff’s comments here as well as this statement from FIRE.

Heterodox Academy (HxA)

At Free the Inquiry blog, Alice Dreger reports on her interview with HxA Policy Director Joe Cohn. Cohn believes that the hotbed for antisemitism that universities have become justifies that the government intervene, but that in doing so it must follow procedures established in law. Additional, he says feels that some of the administration’s demands are so coercive that they will threaten academic freedom.

Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA)

Relatedly, the AFA has issued a Statement on the Deportation of Noncitizen Scholars and Students, in which it opposes deportation merely on free speech grounds:

It is a grave threat to the mission of American universities if international scholars and students fear removal from the United States based on little more than their expression of views disfavored by people holding public office. Academic freedom is a condition of the robust exchange of ideas that drives the pursuit of knowledge in colleges and universities, and everyone in an academic community must be equally protected in their academic freedom.…

We call on American government officials to clearly state that international students and scholars will not be removed from the country simply for engaging in lawful expressive activities, whether personal or professional. We call upon American government officials to clearly state the factual basis and legal rationale when visas are revoked. A climate of uncertainty is itself a threat to the free exchange of ideas on American university campuses. It is imperative that the government not only refrain from removing individuals from the country for exercising First Amendment liberties but also credibly reassure the scholarly community that the immigration laws will not be used to stifle First Amendment protected speech.

Where Does This Leave USC?

Probably not in a place good. By executive orders, Trump has demanded that universities vigorously protect Jewish students from antisemitism and rid their campuses of DEI. USC has done neither. Its response to campus antisemitism has been halfhearted and, rather than dismantle DEI, it has simply rebranded it (see excellent documentation by Heterodox at USC here, here, here, and here). The rebranding, in particular, is likely to infuriate the Trump administration, as it anticipated the tactic and explicitly stated that it would not tolerate it. Thus, we anticipate that USC will be targeted for intervention by the federal government. Indeed, USC has already been notified that it is one of ten universities to be investigated by the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.

USC’s failure to dismantle its DEI bureaucracy seems to be self-immolating. By not dismantling DEI, the university has opened itself up to financial punishment by the federal government. In anticipation, the university has instituted pay and hiring freezes and revoked graduate student offers. Why the university would choose this course of action rather than comply with executive orders to eliminate its costly DEI bureaucracy instead remains a mystery.

Sticking with Our Harvard Theme, Here’s Some Humor Courtesy of the Babylon Bee

Harvard Awards Honorary Degree To Man Who Firebombed Governor Shapiro's House

CAMBRIDGE, MA — In a beautiful ceremony today, Harvard University bestowed an honorary degree to the pro-Hamas activist Cody Balmer, who firebombed Governor Josh Shapiro's home.

Though Balmer was being held without bail due to nearly murdering an entire family for being Jewish, Harvard administrators took it upon themselves to travel to the prison for the ceremony.

“This man represents everything Harvard is about,” said Harvard president Alan Garber. “All of us at Harvard were simply blown away when we read about Cody’s courageous stand against the scourge of Zionism. It’s so inspiring to meet a man who believes so strongly in the Palestinian cause that he will set a governor’s house on fire and try to kill everyone inside. While Balmer did not attend Harvard, he is exactly what we strive to turn every single Harvard student into.”

Balmer’s honorary degree will reportedly also come with a standing offer to become a tenured professor at Harvard University. “When we see the students camped out on the lawn calling for death to the Jews, how many of them have the actual skills to make a firebomb and destroy a home? This is why we need teachers like Cody,” explained Garber. “He will always have a home at Harvard.”

At publishing time, Balmer had received competing offers from Columbia University as well as every college in Europe.