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      Harvard sues Trump administration over efforts to ‘gain control of academic decision-making’

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      Harvard University has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging it is trying to “gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard”.The university is fighting back against the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding after Harvard officials refused to comply with a list of demands that included appointing an outside overseer to ensure that the viewpoints being taught at the university were “diverse”. Harvard is specifically looking to halt a freeze on $2.2bn in grants.The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration has sought to force changes at multiple Ivy League institutions after months of student activism centered around the war in Gaza. The administration has painted the campus protests as anti-American, and the institutions as liberal and antisemitic, which Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, refuted.White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement that the “gravy train of federal assistance” to institutions like Harvard was coming to an end.“Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege,” Fields said.In a letter announcing the university’s decision to reject Trump’s demands, Garber wrote: “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, in a statement published on Monday, reiterated that the Trump administration had doubled down on its response to the university’s refusal to comply with the administration’s demands, despite claims that the letter indicating Harvard’s federal research funding was at risk was sent by mistake.“The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2bn in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status,” Garber wrote.“These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.”Harvard is the first university to file a lawsuit in response to Trump’s crackdown on top US universities that is says mishandled last year’s pro-Palestinian protests and allowed antisemitism to fester on campuses. But protesters, including some Jewish groups, say their criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza is wrongly conflated with antisemitism.Earlier this month, the Trump administration had sent a letter to Harvard with the list of demands, which included changes to its admissions policies, removing recognition of some student clubs, and hiring some new faculty.Last Tuesday, Trump had called for Harvard, the US’s oldest and wealthiest university and one of the most prestigious in the world, to lose its tax-exempt status, CNN first reported.“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” the US president said in a post on his Truth Social platform. More

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      in US Politics

      Massachusetts governor calls Trump’s attacks on Harvard ‘bad for science’

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      Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges.During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”In the past week, the US president cut off billions of dollars to Harvard in federal funds, after the university refused to concede to a number of the administration’s demands. Trump also called for its tax-exempt status to be revoked, a potentially illegal move, against the world-famous college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Of the moves against colleges, Healey said: “It’s bad for patients, it’s bad for science, and it’s really bad for American competitiveness. There’s no way a state can make up for the cuts from federal funding.”She added: “I was in a hospital recently, Boston Children’s, where some of the sickest kids in the country receive care. Cuts to Boston Children’s and other hospitals are a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions, as these are part of a teaching hospital system.“These cuts to universities have significant ripple effects, resulting in layoffs of scientists and doctors, and clinical trials for cancer treatments have been shut down.“As governor, I want Massachusetts and America to soar. What Donald Trump is doing is essentially inviting other countries, like China, to take our scientists and researchers. This is terrible, especially considering what he has done to the economy. I am working hard every day to lower costs in my state, cut taxes, and build more housing, while Donald Trump is making life more expensive and harder for all of us.”Since Trump took office, his administration has deployed an “antisemitism taskforce” to demand various policy changes at different universities around the country.Columbia University, one of the first institutions targeted by the taskforce, quickly caved to the Trump administration’s demands to restore $400m in federal funding. Some of the measures that Columbia conceded to included banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to arrest people, and placing control of the Middle Eastern department under a new senior vice-provost.Former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s attacks on academic institutions represent a significant attack on first amendment rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” Bolinger said on CNN, adding that it “seems like a campaign of intimidation”.“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” he said.Earlier this month, the federal government sent Harvard two separate letters with specific demands. After the university publicly rejected those demands, the administration quickly froze nearly $2.3bn in federal funding.The conflict between the administration and the elite university took a strange turn on Friday, with the New York Times reporting that an 11 April letter from the administration with additional demands – which escalated the showdown – was “unauthorized”. The university disputed that the letter was “unauthorized,” claiming the federal government has “doubled down” on its offensive. More

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      in US Politics

      The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

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      The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.Trump reacted furiously this week after the president of Harvard University, the US’s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.“It’s as dangerous as anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors.“They’re attempting to undermine and destabilize and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it’s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy. So I think this is a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country’s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe at this moment.”The government said on Monday it planned to freeze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard, hours after Alan Garber, the university president, said Harvard would not accept a series of demands made by the Trump administration. The demands included appointing a White House-approved external body to “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity”, and that Harvard “immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs”.Garber said the government’s edicts “represent direct governmental regulation” of the school’s independence and constitutional rights.“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 an open letter, which was hailed by the left and by college professors concerned at the capitulation of other schools.Yet, as evidenced by Trump’s emotional post on Wednesday, the government’s assault on universities is unlikely to stop anytime soon, particularly if he is to emulate the kind of strongman leaders, such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, he has praised in the past.“[People in the Trump administration] have read their history, and they know that authoritarian regimes often target higher education as an independent sector and society, and aim to undermine it because of its role in creating an educated populace that could stand up to all forms of authoritarian rule,” Wolfson said.“And so this is part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism: to attack and to attempt to control or destroy higher education.”The move against universities has echoes of the efforts by the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the middle of the 20th century to root out people he accused of being communists and Marxists. And like McCarthy, Trump’s efforts – led by a group of loyalists including the White House deputy chief of staff and head of policy, Stephen Miller – go beyond just universities. Trump has targeted some of the biggest law firms in the US with executive orders, prompting many to cave and pledge hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work to causes backed by the Trump administration.“The Trump administration is following the playbook of totalitarian dictatorships elsewhere in the world. It is trying to use the force of law to intimidate independent civic society organizations, so that opposition to its policies is impossible,” said Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and co-chair of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom.“This new incarnation of the American right wing, with complete fealty to a single man, and an unprecedented attempt to disable civic society institutions like law firms and universities, is quite extraordinary.”The Trump administration has framed its move on Harvard and other colleges as an effort to crackdown on antisemitism, following protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and as a move against alleged civil rights violations on campus. Few outside of the rightwing sphere see that as a good faith argument.“As a Jewish faculty member, I’m sensitive to antisemitism on campus, and it does exist and it should be combated. But the claim that Harvard is a bastion of antisemitism is just wild hyperbole. Three of our last four presidents who’ve served longer than a year have been Jewish. The fourth was married to a Jewish professor,” Pinker said.Harvard has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs because of its status as the best known of America’s universities, one of the eight esteemed Ivy League schools. Thousands of influential figures across politics, media and business attended Harvard’s grand campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of those who didn’t go to Harvard still tend to take an interest in its affairs.“We’ve got between 4,000 and 5,000 higher education institutions in the US. The Ivys always make headlines. The major cultural commentators in this country are obsessed with the Ivys, and have been for a long time. These are things that sell papers, they get a lot of clicks and a lot of attention,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of US colleges and universities and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.“The other thing, too, is what happens at your regional state public flagship university often follows from the trends that are set at the Ivys. Not only do they generate a lot of headlines, they are influential in that way.”Just as Harvard’s existence predates the founding of the US, rightwing antipathy towards universities has been brewing for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California in 1966, he used anger towards anti-Vietnam student protesters for political gain: one of his main campaign strands was a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” – the state’s flagship university.Reagan’s tactics bear echoes of Trump’s. Ray Colvig, UC Berkeley’s chief public information officer at the time, told the university’s news service years later that Reagan “wanted to establish a special process to select faculty in several disciplines”.“In other words, he wanted to set a political standard for appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed, and it went away,” Colvig said.Reagan wasn’t the first to take on the universities. Shepherd said efforts to set up rival, conservative universities, date back to the 1920s, while McCarthy’s war on higher education came later. Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, wrote in the Nation recently that the Trump administration’s efforts were “worse than McCarthy”, and Shepherd said Trump’s attacks were “much more accelerated” than the communist-paranoid senator’s tactics.“McCarthyism, in the 1940s and 50s, the idea was to identify specific professors, hardly ever students, always faculty, and have them fired. Today, we’re seeing much worse than that. These are attacks on entire programs and departments. So entire departments like Black studies or DEI initiatives. It’s also not just relegated to the professors. We’re seeing students with their visas revoked being literally plucked off the streets,” Shepherd said.Trump hasn’t just targeted Harvard. Columbia University caved to a series of demands from the Trump administration in March, as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding, while the White House has announced funding freezes to other schools including Brown, Northwestern, Princeton and Cornell.Harvard taking a stand is one of the first signs of a fight back – even if it came after it was reported in March that the leaders of the university’s center for Middle Eastern studies were forced out, a move seen by critics as an attempt to appease Trump – and academics and others hope it could begin a resistance. It is likely to require a group effort to avoid the right wing’s goal for higher education in the US: universities that are in effect government-controlled, and where freedom of speech and thought is restricted.“The right don’t want students to hear about the legacy to slavery. They don’t want them to hear about structural inequalities,” Shepherd said.“They don’t want to hear why billionaires are bad. They don’t want to hear, from the sciences, about climate change. They want a nice, friendly experience where the most students ever get to debate is the differences in Aristotle and Plato.“They don’t want the actual debates that we see unfolding on campuses today.” More

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      in US Politics

      The showdown between Harvard and the White House – day by day

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      It took Harvard University less than 72 hours to reject a series of demands put forth by the Trump administration, setting up a high-stakes showdown between the US’s wealthiest and oldest university and the White House.The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students and alumni and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington.Harvard was one of the first universities to face national scrutiny following 7 October 2023 and the ensuing campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, as critics accused the school and its leaders of failing to adequately combat antisemitism on its campus.And this February, just weeks into Trump’s presidency, the administration’s new Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced that it would be visiting 10 universities, including Harvard, in an effort to “eradicate antisemitic harassment” in schools.Soon after, the White House went after Columbia University, first launching a review of its federal funding, and then revoking $400m in federal funds from the school, citing the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment amid the campus protests against the war in Gaza.View image in fullscreenIn response, groups of Harvard faculty, alumni and students as well as Cambridge community members began calling on their own university leaders – through protests, letters, op-eds and resolutions – to publicly oppose the administration’s actions and to resist any future demands and pressure from the White House.On 6 March, the day before Columbia’s funding was cut, Harvard professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky penned an op-ed in the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, criticizing the university’s silence, and urging Harvard leaders to set an example by making “a firm public defense of democracy”.Days later, immigration authorities arrested Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, and Trump officials warned 60 universities of potential penalties tied to antiseminism investigations.That week, nearly 200 Harvard affiliates gathered on campus and protested Khalil’s detention, and urged the university to condemn the administration’s actions.Enos and Levitsky followed with another op-ed, this time titled: “First they came for Columbia.”“So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education,” they wrote. “That must change. Harvard must stand up, speak out, and lead a public defense of our freedom to speak and study freely.”The piece resonated widely within the Harvard community, Enos said, even reportedly reaching Harvard’s board of overseers (one of the school’s two governing bodies).Enos decided to write to several members of the board of overseers, sharing arguments from his recent op-eds. He had heard that some board members were sympathetic to their view.In mid-March, universities watched Columbia yield to a series of sweeping demands made by the Trump administration in an effort to restore the halted funding. (The funding remains withheld, and reports now suggest that a possible consent decree is on the table.)Enos and others feared that when the time came, Harvard might follow suit. At that point, Enos said, Harvard’s leadership had shown “no indication” that they were willing to put up a public fight in defense of Harvard or public education more generally.In the weeks prior, the university had appeared to be taking pre-emptive steps to get ahead of the administration’s potential crackdown and funding cuts. They announced a university-wide hiring freeze, and made several decisions that critics viewed as aligning with the administration’s priorities.The university adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism in a legal settlement over complaints brought by Jewish students, ousted two leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and a “religion, conflict and peace initiative” at the Harvard Divinity School amid accusations that it focused “entirely on the Palestinians”, and banned the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee from hosting events on campus.These actions caused concern for some who worried that Harvard was compromising academic freedom to appease the government.“Someone might reasonably think that these changes were in order to accommodate, to demonstrate to the federal government, look, we’re closing down programs that have been accused of imbalanced coverage,” said Kirsten Weld, a professor of history at Harvard, who heads Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).On 24 March, Enos and Levitsky, with help from several others, circulated a letter among faculty, urging Harvard’s two governing boards to publicly condemn the attacks on universities, legally contest and resist unlawful demands, and mount a coordinated opposition.More than 800 faculty members signed, though some non-US citizens refrained due to fear, Enos said.The letter was sent to governing board members before their next scheduled meeting, which was to be on 5 and 6 April.Separately, in another letter, more than 1,000 Harvard alumni urged Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, to defend academic freedom and free speech, and to take a stronger stand.“We cannot appease the Trump administration – it always asks for more,” the letter warned.James Stodder, who drafted and circulated that letter, said that he and a group of other alumni were looking for ways they could make their voices heard.Another alumni letter with more than 1,200 signatures called for courage over capitulation.In late March, Harvard’s chapter of the AUP along with the national chapter and other groups, sued the Trump administration, alleging it had violated members’ first amendment rights by targeting pro-Palestinian speech by noncitizens.Around this time, the Crimson was reporting that Garber had been privately discussing the administration’s pressure campaign with other university leaders.Then, on 31 March, the Trump administration put Harvard directly in its crosshairs, announcing a review of Harvard’s $9bn in federal funding, citing alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus.Garber’s response was seen by some as conceding to the administration’s narrative and suggestions.On 3 April, Trump officials sent Harvard a letter, stating that its federal funding would be conditional on changes such as eliminating diversity and inclusion programs, reviewing its programs “to address bias”, cooperating with law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, installing leaders to implement the president’s demands, and more.“We said to ourselves, OK, we’re now in the same position as Columbia,” Weld said. “This is kind of the first shot across the bow.”That same day, Enos and Levitsky published a third op-ed, “Appeasing Trump Damages Harvard and America”, urging the university to resist and take a stand.Enos said he heard from alumni who had begun threatening to withhold donations to the school if Harvard didn’t stand up against Trump.After receiving initial demands from the administration, the Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard leaders were in contact with the administration in pursuit of an agreement. Federal officials reportedly believed that Harvard would eventually concede, as Columbia had. Harvard said that the demands were too vague and requested more details.Harvard’s governing boards met as planned in early April. While no details from those meetings were released, Enos believes their faculty letter was likely discussed, noting that last year he was told that the governing bodies had found a similar letter he organized in support of former Harvard president Claudine Gay to be “very persuasive”.“I would find it shocking if they ignored or at least didn’t consider that kind of outpouring of faculty support,” Enos said.Following the weekend meeting, the Cambridge city council passed a unanimous resolution urging Harvard to reject Trump’s demands, and to “use all measures possible, including the University’s endowment funds, if necessary, to safeguard academic independence, the rule of law, and democracy”.Councilmember Burhan Azeem, who co-sponsored the resolution, said he wanted Harvard to know that they had the support of the city behind them if they chose to stand up to the administration.Azeem said it’s rare for the city council to get involved in internal Harvard affairs, but the stakes were high.“We were trying to convey to Harvard that the city is not the most powerful institution, but we are an institution, we have lawyers and we are willing to take action and we are willing to stand by them,” Azeem said.By this point, despite the Trump administration’s 3 April letter demanding “immediate cooperation”, Harvard had not yet publicly responded.On 11 April, Harvard’s AAUP chapter filed a second lawsuit against the administration, this time challenging the federal review of the university’s federal funding.The next day, hundreds of Harvard affiliates and Cambridge residents rallied in near-freezing temperatures at Cambridge Common, demanding once more that the university resist the federal pressure and also protect its international students and faculty.Unbeknownst to the protesters, behind closed doors that weekend, Harvard leaders were parsing through a new five-page letter from the Trump administration that had been delivered late on Friday.The letter included a list of sweeping demands – the shuttering of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives, restrictions on the acceptance of international students who are “hostile to the American values and institutions”, and federal oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff and more.Harvard officials were stunned by the demands in the letter, the Wall Street Journal reported, viewing them as more extreme than those sent to other schools. A Sunday board meeting ended in unanimous agreement on how to respond.Then, on Monday, 14 April, Harvard released its statement publicly rejecting the demands, and released the administration’s Friday letter.“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”, Harvard’s president wrote.“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. 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.”It was then Harvard became the first major US university to openly defy the administration’s demands.Garber’s office did not respond to a request for comment on how the decision came together. But, Enos believes that the pressure from faculty, alumni, students and others mattered.“I think we did manage to put a tremendous amount of pressure on Harvard to do the right thing,” Enos said. “It came from all circles.”Weld said she was “very glad” when she read the announcement, adding that the demands from the Trump administration were “such an egregious overreach”. Accepting them, she said, would have been “disastrous”.Harvard’s announcement drew support from Democrats, as well as Harvard faculty and alumni, and leaders of other universities.View image in fullscreenThe Crimson reported a surge in donations to Harvard after the announcement, with the school receiving an average of 88 online donations per hour. Between Monday, when the announcement was made, and 9am Wednesday, nearly 4,000 gifts totaling $1.14m had been made, according to a giving update from Harvard alumni affairs and development obtained by the Crimson.But the battle has only just begun. The fight this week has already escalated.Following Harvard’s announcement, federal officials froze more than $2bn in grants to the university. Trump also has threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll international students.On Thursday, the Trump administration accused Harvard – in yet another letter to Garber – of failing to report large foreign donations to the federal government, as is required by law. They demanded that Harvard provide names of foreign donors, including records of communication with all of them from the beginning of 2020, and records pertaining to foreigners who spent time at Harvard; that latter group includes students Harvard expelled or those who had their credentials canceled, going back to 2016.A Harvard spokesperson told the New York Times on Friday: “Harvard has filed Section 117 reports for decades as part of its ongoing compliance with the law.”Layoffs have already been reported at the Harvard School of Public Health, with warnings at Harvard Medical School, too.Though Harvard’s endowment is sure to offer some financial cushion, the New York Times reports that about 80% of it is limited to specific purposes.“It’s going to get more painful before it gets better,” Enos said.Weld said that the AAUP will continue to proceed with their lawsuits against the administration and that concerns remain regarding Harvard’s decisions earlier this year to “shut down spaces of independent critical inquiry related to Palestine on our campus”.Still, she said it was “vitally important” for the whole higher education sector that Harvard was fighting back.“If Harvard had not stood up and rejected the Trump administration’s demands, it would have sent generational chill through higher education in this country,” she said.“If Harvard, the richest university in human history, cannot stand up and fight back to unquestionably illegal demands, then what other institution is going to feel that it’s safe for them to do so?” More

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      in Elections

      In Trump Attack on Harvard, Punishment Before Proof

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      The legal underpinnings of the administration’s broadsides against universities and schools stretch precedents and cut corners.In the White House’s campaign against Harvard University, the punishment came swiftly.The Trump administration has frozen $2.2 billion in grants to the school, while seeking to exert unprecedented control over hiring, impose unspecified reforms to its medical and divinity schools, block certain foreign students from enrolling and, potentially, revoke its tax-exempt status.It is a broadside with little precedent. And, as with the White House’s other attacks on universities, colleges and even K-12 schools, the legal justifications have been muddled, stretched and, in some instances, impossible to determine.“It’s punishment before a trial, punishment before evidence, punishment before an actual accusation that could be responded to,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and the U.S. Department of Education’s third-ranking official during the Obama administration. “People talk about why higher ed hasn’t responded. Well, how can you fight a shadow in this way?​”The legality of each threat varies. In more typical times, some of the individual punishments might be validated by lengthy investigations in which a university would have a right to defend itself.But taken together, law professors and education experts said, the immediacy of the sanctions and threats conveyed an unmistakable hostility toward Harvard and other schools in the president’s sights. The broad vendetta, they said, could weaken the legal argument for each individual action.“You can’t make decisions — even if you have the power to do so — on the basis of animus,” said Brian Galle, a Georgetown University law professor who teaches about taxation policy and nonprofit organizations. “Those aren’t permissible reasons that the government can act. And so what’s interesting about the fact that it’s doing all of these things to Harvard at the same time, is that undermines the legitimacy of each of them individually.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard

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      An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force told the university that a letter of demands had been sent without authorization.Harvard University received an emailed letter from the Trump administration last Friday that included a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum so onerous that school officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.The university announced its intentions on Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      What would it mean for Trump to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status?

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      Harvard University is in a standoff with Donald Trump after rejecting a series of demands from the president’s administration, which critics view as an attack on the elite college for its reputation among conservatives as a bastion of liberal thought.After cutting off its funding, Trump has reportedly given the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a potentially illegal order to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. Such a decision would mark an escalation in the Republican president’s weaponization of federal government agencies against the people and institutions that defy it.Here’s more about the battle between Trump and Harvard and how the president might try to use the IRS:How did the standoff begin?The Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce this month sent the university a letter saying it had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”. It listed demands, including banning face masks, closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and cooperating with immigration authorities.How did Harvard react?Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, refused to yield, saying: “[T]he university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” It has retained attorneys William Burck and Robert Hur, both veterans of Republican administrations, who say Trump’s demands are “in contravention of the first amendment”. Harvard’s stand is in contrast to the situation at Columbia University, which acceded to similar demands from the Trump administration in exchange for the restoration of $400m in federal funding that was revoked.How did Trump retaliate?The Trump administration quickly froze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multiyear contracts to Harvard. A member of the president’s antisemitism taskforce attacked the school’s stance, saying it “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”. Trump then called for Harvard to lose its tax-exempt status, and the Washington Post reported that the administration had asked the IRS’s top attorney to revoke it.What is tax-exempt status?If the IRS grants an organization tax-exempt status, they can avoid paying federal income tax, but must follow certain rules. These include refraining from campaign activity or attempting to influence legislation, while no individuals or shareholders are allowed to receive their earnings. According to the IRS, the status is available to charitable, religious, scientific and literary organizations, as well as those involved in preventing cruelty to children or animals, organizing amateur sports competitions or conducting testing for public safety reasons.Can Trump legally ask the IRS to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status?Federal law prohibits the president from directing the IRS to conduct an investigation or audit, and no evidence has yet emerged that the university has done anything to lose its tax-exempt status. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told US media “any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to” Trump’s public call for the status to be revoked.Has something like this happened under Trump before?In 2022, after Trump’s first term concluded, the New York Times reported that the former FBI director James Comey and his ex-deputy, Andrew McCabe, had been selected in 2019 for the IRS’s most invasive form of random tax audit. Trump had fired both Comey and McCabe during his term, and tax experts said both of them being selected for the audits was unusual. Trump, who had attacked Comey and McCabe by name even after their dismissals, denied any involvement. More

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      in US Politics

      Harvard shows resistance is possible. But universities must join forces | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Harvard is refusing the plainly illegal demands by the Trump administration. That sends an important signal: resistance is possible.But universities must realize that the government is adopting a divide-and-rule tactic: they should collaborate on a shared litigation strategy, take a common approach in getting the public on their side, and do everything possible to have Congress push back against Trump treating money allocated by the legislature as if it were a private slush fund to be used for political blackmail. Some faculty have already begun to unite. In principle, not just progressives, but self-respecting conservatives – if any remain – should be responsive to such a three-pronged strategy.It has become abundantly clear that Trump 2.0 is using a moral panic about “woke” and pro-Palestinian protests as pretexts to subjugate institutions posing multiple threats to aspiring autocrats: universities constitute an independent source of information; they encourage critical thinking; they gather in one spot young people easily outraged by injustices. Of course, like all institutions, they have flaws; but, unlike, let’s say, businesses, they give wide latitude to criticism and position-taking (if you think colleges are censoring speech, try some political oratory on the factory floor or in the boardroom).Some academic leaders think they might mollify the Trumpists, or at least get a better deal, if they concede points about allegedly widespread antisemitism, as well as supposed indoctrination and discrimination. Self-criticism should of course be part of university life, but trumpeting on page-one op-eds that there are deep structural problems with higher education is naive at best. For one thing, there are no simple generalizations about the roughly 4,000 colleges and universities in the US; even what are usually called “elite universities” are hardly all the same.Yet far too many academics are uncritically repeating the right’s propaganda about a “free speech crisis” and conservatives feeling marginalized. Is it perhaps relevant that the most popular majors remain business and health sciences – subjects hardly taught by dogmatic lefties hell-bent on silencing dissent? Is it just about possible that some much-cited statistics – that many more professors vote for the Democrats – have more to do with the GOP having turned itself into the anti-science party, rather than professors all wanting to corrupt the youth with socialist nonsense?Even those worried about what the government’s letter to Harvard called “ideological capture” might balk at the proposed remedy: what can only be called totalitarian social engineering in the name of assuring “viewpoint diversity”. The government seeks to subject an entire university to an ideology audit: both faculty and students would have to be tested for “viewpoints” – whatever that means exactly. If an imbalance were to be found, departments would have to bring in what the Trumpist education commissars call a “critical mass” of faculty and students with viewpoints deemed politically correct by the commissars.This is not just an attack on academic freedom; it is a license to investigate individuals’ minds and consciences (could a student be hiding a secret interest in Judith Butler? Only extensive interrogations would reveal the truth!). Might students be encouraged to denounce their professors, in ways already popular on rightwing websites? Might professors in turn be encouraged to tell on their charges (he looks preppy, but he once wrote an essay on gender ideology)?Besides the obvious contradiction of violating freedoms in the name of freedom, there is the rank hypocrisy of demanding “viewpoint diversity” while seeking to outlaw any diversity initiatives not based on political ideology. And the practical enforcement of viewpoint diversity would probably also be a tad uneven: no economics department would be forced to hire Marxists; evangelical colleges are unlikely to be led towards balance by having to bring in a “critical mass” of faculty promoting atheism.Trumpists are trying hard to frame university leaders as feeling “entitled” – one small step from calling them welfare queens and kings parasitic to the taxpayer. Education, they insinuate, is a luxury for spoilt kids, research a pretext for faculty to impose loony personal beliefs. If one accepts this framing, an otherwise inexplicable idea starts to make sense: Christopher Rufo, the much-platformed strategist of the attacks on academic freedom, wants to “reduce the size of the sector itself”.Why would one want to deny opportunities for kids to learn and for research to advance, unless one fears critical thinking? Or unless one has a completely warped view – Musk-style – of how science actually works? Or unless one exhibits willful ignorance of the fact that the government does not just shovel cash to universities so they can organize more pride parades, but that it concludes contracts for research after highly competitive selection processes?Clearly, the Trump administration is in the business of unprecedented national self-harm. Those who think of themselves as “conserving” must ask whether they really want to be part of an orgy of destruction. Those who say they worship the founders must wonder whether they can tolerate daily violations of the constitution, as Trump works to impound funds approved by Congress (for research, among other things).Self-declared free speech defenders must question why they would support an administration inspired more by Mao than by Madison. And those who just want to hold on to basic decency must ask whether they can accept a proposition along the lines of: “We’ll prevent cures for cancer, as long as Harvard doesn’t hire mediocre conservatives.” As my colleague David Bell has recently put it, if this proposition becomes acceptable, it will be the triumph of malignancy in more than one sense.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University. More