The College Crackdown: Harvard Leading the Fight Against Trump Administration Demands
Harvard University announced last Monday that it is suing the Trump administration. Photo by Manu Ros on Unsplash.
The Trump administration continues to go after America’s institutions of higher education. Seen by many conservatives as hotbeds of liberalism and anti-semitism, the administration is threatening to revoke federal funding and research grants if they do not “obey the law.”
In a letter addressed to Harvard University, the Trump administration asserted the school has “fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from anti-semitic violence and harassment.” Attached was a list of demands that the university must meet in order to maintain a “continued financial relationship” with the government. The White House has since claimed they sent this letter by mistake, but the effects have already sparked widespread protests, lawsuits and general animosity from America’s best universities.
The demands in the letter included:
1. Limiting the time, place and manner of protests, increasing disciplinary actions against protestors, banning all face coverings at protests (masks, etc.).
2. Subject academic programs that “fuel anti-semitic harassment” to “viewpoint audits.”
3. The removal of any DEI programs.
4. Unrecognizing certain school clubs.
5. Reducing the influence of professors more focused on activism than scholarship.
6. Fully cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to screen international students for any “hostility to American values.”
Harvard President Alan Garber said the university would not be adhering to those demands. Within a few hours, the government froze $2.2 billion of federal funds and an additional $60 million in contracts, the largest penalty ever imposed on an educational institution.
Furthermore, President Trump plans on pulling an additional $1 billion related to health research and is threatening to take away the university’s tax-exempt status, while the DHS is threatening to block Harvard’s ability to enroll international students if they do not hand over “detailed information about the student body.”
Harvard is not the only school being targeted by the Trump administration. On March 14, the Department of Education announced investigations into race-based admissions and scholarship programs for over 50 universities.
In the same month, $175 million of federal funding to UPenn was frozen, with the administration citing policies that allowed transgender women to compete in women’s sports. $210 million was frozen from Princeton and a combined $1.79 billion from Cornell and Northwestern. Furthermore, Brown could see half a billion in funding lost after a White House official informed the student paper of plans to do just that.
However, Harvard is one of the only schools that is choosing not to cooperate with the Trump Administration. Columbia University is facing pushback for implementing government changes such as banning masks, hiring campus officers with the power to arrest or remove whomever and overhauling its Middle Eastern Studies program. As for now, Harvard is standing its ground, readying itself for a historic legal battle.
The Harvard Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sued the Trump Administration on April 18, and the university followed suit on Monday. Harvard law professor and general counsel for the AAUP-Harvard Chapter, Andrew Manuel Crespo, said “to threaten people with loss of funding or other types of coercive measures from the government to get them to change what they’re saying violates the First Amendment of the United States. It’s plain and it’s simple.”
Others are skeptical that this is only about anti-discrimination and anti-semitism. The lawsuit filed by the AAUP claims the administration “has not — and cannot — identify any rational connection between anti-semitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen.”
President and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote “we are concerned about the extent… and approach taken by the Administration to Harvard… the fight against anti-semitism must be about anti-semitism – nothing more, nothing less.”
In addition to funding cuts, the administration has delivered stop-work orders on research relating to Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, space travel, cybersecurity and national security. Many are saying that universities like Harvard can just reach into their endowment to fund these projects, but often these endowments are grants restricted to particular groups or projects and aren’t for general use.
The precedent that comes out of the legal battle will affect the future relationship between all universities, private or public, and the government.
President Kevin Weinman of Marist University recently signed a statement put out by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, in which the letter states, “[us signees] are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight… but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.”
More than 350 other college presidents and leaders have signed this, and many more continue to add their names amid a fight to preserve America’s academic freedom.