 "Demonstrators rally on Cambridge Common in a protest organised by the City of Cambridge calling on Harvard leadership to resist interference at the university by the federal government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. On Monday, the Trump administration announced a federal funding freeze in response to the university not adhering to the government's demands. Reuters")
A new battle is looming in the United States and this time, it’s President Trump vs Harvard University. The elite US university is facing Trump’s wrath — the US administration is freezing $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts — after the Ivy League school rejected the Trump administration’s demands.
The battle with Harvard University is part of Trump’s ongoing war with Ivy League schools — his administration has already cut or paused billions in funding to Brown University, Columbia University, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.
But what exactly is going on? We take a closer look at Trump’s battle against America’s elite universities and who exactly is winning.
Trump pauses Harvard funding
On Monday (April 14), the Trump government announced that it would be pausing federal funding worth $2.2 billion and another $60 million in multi-year contracts to Harvard after the school said it would not follow policy demands from the administration.
The move comes after the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard last Friday calling for broad government and leadership reforms at the university, as well as changes to its admissions policies. It also demanded the university audit views of diversity on campus, and stop recognising some student clubs.
The federal government said almost $9 billion in grants and contracts in total were at risk if Harvard did not comply.
The letter sent by the Trump administration outlined the changes it wanted to be implemented at Harvard — this included banning face masks, closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and even reforming 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.
However, Harvard University president, Alan Garber, vowed that he wouldn’t adhere to the Trump administration’s demands, insisting that the school would not “negotiate over its independence or its constitutional rights”.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said in a letter to the Harvard community. “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.”
Harvard attorneys also wrote a letter to the Trump administration, “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.”
This prompted Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to announce a $2.2 billion hold in grants in addition to a $60 million freeze in government contracts. “Harvard’s statement today 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,” it said.
“The disruption of learning that has plagued campuses in recent years is unacceptable. The harassment of Jewish students is intolerable. It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support.”
Trump’s White House spokesman Harrison Fields also said in a statement on Monday that Trump was “working to Make Higher Education Great Again by ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence”.
Trump vs US universities
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has set his eyes on the leading universities across the nation, threatening them with funding freezes if they don’t comply with his demands. This includes Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern and Columbia.
The US president has taken a more aggressive stance on anti-semitism on campus, even accusing his predecessor, Joe Biden, of letting them off the hook. As part of his crackdown, Trump has opened new investigations at colleges and detained and deported several foreign students with ties to pro-Palestinian protests.
His battle against ‘woke’ universities began on March 13 when he sent a letter to Columbia University, announcing it was holding $400 million in federal grants hostage until the university complied with his administration’s demands.
To win back their grants, the letter stated that Columbia would have to expel certain students, reform its admissions policies and place its Middle Eastern studies department into “academic receivership”.
Moreover, the Trump administration has also targeted two students of the university: Mahmoud Khalil, whom the government is seeking to deport, and Mohsen Mahdawi, who was arrested on April 14, as he attended an interview to become a US citizen.
The University later complied — and a week later, its president, Katrina Armstrong , resigned.
But Trump didn’t stop at Columbia. He then took aim at Princeton University, leading to its president, Christopher Eisgruber, writing in The Atlantic that the Trump administration’s actions presented “the greatest threat to the American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s”.
In early April, the Trump administration then suspended research grants totalling $210 million to Princeton University.
Trump has also suspended more than $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell University and around $790 million for Northwestern University. In a statement, Cornell said it had received more than 75 stop work orders from the Defence Department related to research “profoundly significant to American national defense, cybersecurity, and health” but that it had not otherwise received any information confirming $1 billion in frozen grants.
Meanwhile, in an email to the Northwestern community, university president Michael Schill said it had not been notified by the federal government of the cuts, according to The Daily Northwestern, the campus newspaper.
Reason behind Trump’s war on universities
But what is the purpose of this war against the elite universities of America? Trump and his allies believe that some schools, especially a handful of elite universities, have become bastions of anti-semitism and ideological indoctrination.
However, the reasoning for the battle against colleges and universities is much deeper. Over the years, many conservatives have been suspicious of higher education and questioned the institutions’ affirmative action admissions programmes as well as high tuition costs. Moreover, the views of liberal professors and the DEI initiatives have bugged conservatives.
Many conservatives have been quoted as telling the New York Times that their views have been marginalised in lecture halls and regard top schools as incubators of “wokeism.” They have said they want universities to emphasise academic programs that will lead students to jobs that are essential to the economy.
Notably, this isn’t the first time that elite universities have earned the disdain of America’s right. In fact, Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 by pledging “to clean up the mess at Berkeley” and clear out the “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” who had “brought such shame” to the flagship state university.
It is left to be seen what comes next in this Trump vs universities battle, but as of now, more than $12 billion have been paused in funding, with more at stake.
With inputs from agencies