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The Trump administration has frozen approximately $450 million in additional federal grants at Harvard University amid ongoing tensions over how the institution has handled alleged incidents of antisemitism on campus.
“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement,” officials on the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism wrote in a Tuesday statement. “There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support.”
While the federal government previously froze more than $2 billion in federal research funds after university leaders rejected a list of sweeping demands, the latest action follows a war of words between Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Harvard president Alan Garber.
In a May 5 letter to Garber, McMahon accused Harvard of engaging in a “systemic pattern of violating federal law” and making a “mockery of this country’s higher education system.” She also alleged that the university had failed “to abide by its legal obligations,” among other claims.
On Monday, Garber pushed back in his own letter, acknowledging concerns about “antisemitism and other bigotry on campus,” which he said the university is working to address on its own terms.
“Harvard’s efforts to achieve these goals are undermined and threatened by the federal government’s overreach into the constitutional freedoms of private universities and its continuing disregard of Harvard’s compliance with the law. It ignores the many meaningful steps we have taken and will continue to take to live up to our principles and improve the lives of people across the country and throughout the world,” Garber wrote.
He also referenced the university’s ongoing lawsuit with the administration over the funding freeze.
“That is why we have gone to court to address the government’s unlawful attempt to control fundamental aspects of our university’s operations. Consistent with the law and with our own values, we continue to pursue needed reforms, doing so in consultation with our stakeholders and always in compliance with the law. But Harvard will not surrender its core, legally-protected principles out of fear of unfounded retaliation by the federal government,” Garber wrote.
Harvard updated its lawsuit on Tuesday, amending the complaint to include recent statements and actions by the Trump administration, including threats to its tax-exempt status and the letter from the task force sent that same day. University lawyers argued in the amended complaint that the defendants “lack any legal basis to prohibit Harvard from seeking future grand funding.”
