Harvard University said on Monday that it will not comply with a new list of demands from the Trump administration issued last week that the government says are designed to crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite academic institutions.
In a message to the Harvard community, the university president, Alan Garber, vowed that the school would not yield to the government’s pressure campaign. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said.
The Trump administration said it would review $9bn of federal grants and contracts, including Harvard’s research hospitals, as part of its effort to “root out antisemitism”.
In a letter last week from the government’s antisemitism taskforce, the university was accused of having “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.
The Trump administration has also demanded that Harvard ban face masks and close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”. The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
The administration further asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” – and to report international students to federal authorities if they break university conduct policies.
University faculties are also under the government’s microscope as it has called for “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”.
Harvard’s announced resistance to the administration’s demands comes as Trump’s federal government pits itself against several Ivy League universities over intellectual and political freedoms. The dispute has been playing out in the courts over efforts by the administration to deport several postgraduate students holding provisional citizenship or student visas over pro-Palestinian demonstrations that the government alleges were shows of support for terrorism.
On Friday, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian organizer Mahmoud Khalil, 30, can be deported despite having been granted legal permanent residence in the US. The government contended that Khalil’s presence in the US posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences”, satisfying requirements for deportation, according to the judge.
After that ruling, Khalil’s immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout told the court that his client would appeal.
The letter from Harvard’s president said the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.
“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 in the message.
Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.
“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”
The new approach by the university, which sits on an endowment valued at over $52bn, comes in contrast to Columbia University. Columbia, which holds an endowment of $14bn, largely acceded to the administration demands after it was threatened with $400m in federal funding cuts.
But Jewish advocacy groups are divided on the administration’s efforts. Some say they are an innovative and muscular way to combat what they see as campus antisemitism. Others maintain that the government is weaponizing antisemitism to pursue wider intellectual crackdowns.
“The gun to the head and shutting down all science seems like a counterproductive way to handle the particular problems of antisemitism,” Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, told the Boston Globe earlier in April.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
