Deciphering the Trump Administration’s Latest Letter to Harvard

Time and time again over the last three months, the Trump administration has sent forceful letters to America’s colleges and universities, demanding sweeping changes and threatening to cut off federal funds in a way that has set off alarms for higher education leaders across the country. The government’s latest missive has only ramped up those concerns.

In a three-page letter sent to Harvard University on Monday evening, the Department of Education said federal agencies will no longer provide the wealthy institution with any grant funding, alleging that Harvard has engaged in a “systemic pattern of violating federal law” and calling it a “mockery of this country’s higher education system.”

A university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the Trump administration’s actions “would impose unprecedented and improper control” and could lead to “chilling implications for higher education.” But conservative experts praised the letter as a forceful and necessary message. For others still, the document serves as a reminder that the Trump administration is seeking to impose a conservative ideological agenda on higher ed.

“Nothing changes from letter to letter,” said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware. “The No. 1 takeaway from all of these communications with institutions is that the administration is interested in threatening, blackmailing and using whatever power it has in order to force institutions to adhere to what the administration wants.”

The letter, first posted on X by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, came just three weeks after Harvard announced it would not capitulate to the demands it had received from Trump in yet another jarring letter. Just a few hours later, the president and his cabinet members froze $2.2 billion in existing funds. Harvard then sued about week later.

Now, McMahon says the highly selective private institution can kiss any chance at future funding goodbye.

“In every way, Harvard has failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties, its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of academic rigor,” McMahon wrote. “If Harvard prefers not to change, then Harvard should have no problem using its overflowing endowment to fund its bloated bureaucracy.”

‘Politically Motivated Attack’

Some conservative policy experts see Monday’s move as an aggressive step to break Harvard’s silo from accountability.

“When the secretary says, ‘Don’t come to us for grants anymore,’ she means that, and she can enforce it,” said Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. “The tone suggests that Harvard really needs to wake up and understand the dire nature of its situation.”

But Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, described Monday’s letter as a “particularly disturbing” and “unwarranted escalation of threats.”

What the Trump administration has done since day one, Pasquerella said, is launch a “politically motivated attack, not only against Harvard, but higher education as a whole,” and it’s all part of a long-standing Republican playbook.

“This is not accidental,” she said. “It’s not in response to Hamas’s attacks on Israel or the reactions of people at Harvard. This is part of the playbook outlined in Project 2025.”

Multiple Inside Higher Ed sources have described the Trump administration’s approach to higher education as “fascist” or “authoritarian,” and Pasquerella even noted that the White House has positioned Viktor Orbán—Hungary’s right-wing prime minister who has long been known for his assault on academic freedom—as someone to emulate.

In a 2021 speech, then-Senate candidate JD Vance described higher ed as “the enemy” that he wanted to “honestly and aggressively attack.” Then, in a February 2024 interview, he called Orbán’s strategy “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities.”

“Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made [or] the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture,” Vance said.

‘So Over-the-Top’

Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said that since so much of what the Trump administration has told universities so far is performative, it makes it hard to know what to make of this latest letter.

“The president is so bombastic and so over-the-top that it’s hard for me to see gradations,” Hess said. “So, sure, the secretary sending a letter that declared ‘don’t bother applying for anything’ is an extraordinary declaration. And in other circumstances, I would have been like, holy cow. But given what the administration has done over the past three and a half months, it’s not clear to me that it changes the administration’s posture.”

Both Hess and Pasquerella questioned whether McMahon even has the authority to halt funding to Harvard from all federal agencies, saying it would be an unprecedented violation of due process and flout legal precedent. (Many of the administration’s actions toward universities, such as freezing federal funding, haven’t followed any typical legal process for pulling funding.)

But Baker believes the legality of the situation doesn’t matter to Trump and suggested the freeze on new funding for Harvard was already in place well before Monday’s letter.

“What changed from Friday to today? You can look at reporting from other outlets. You can talk to people off the record at agencies. They were already told they’re not allowed to give grants to Harvard,” she said. “Even if the letter got retracted tomorrow, I don’t think the policy would change.”

As a result, Baker hopes that college and university leaders will learn that negotiating with Trump is “a fool’s errand.” But some institutions, she predicted, will still sacrifice their ideals in order to try and keep their heads down.

“There are still boards of institutions that believe that if they just give the administration something, it will leave them alone,” she said. “[But] generally, I find that those people are not scholars of history who understand what happens when you capitulate or collaborate with authoritarian takeovers of countries.”