Trump freezes $2bn in Harvard funds after it rejects demands

The Trump administration has said it is freezing more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard University, hours after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.

The White House sent a list of demands to Harvard last week which it said were designed to fight antisemitism on campus. They included changes to its governance, hiring practices and admissions procedures.

Since Donald Trump was re-elected, his government has tried to reshape elite universities by threatening to withhold federal funds, mostly spent on research.

Harvard became the first major US university to reject the administration’s demands on Monday, accusing the White House of trying to “control” its community.

The sweeping changes demanded by the White House would have transformed its operations and ceded a large amount of control to the government.

Its letter to Harvard on Friday, obtained by the New York Times, said the university had failed to live up to the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” that justify federal investment.

The letter included 10 categories for proposed changes, including:

• reporting students to the federal government who are “hostile” to American values
• ensuring each academic department is “viewpoint diverse”
• hiring an external government-approved party to audit programs and departments “that most fuel antisemitic harassment”
• checking faculty staff for plagiarism

President Trump has accused leading universities of failing to protect Jewish students when college campuses around the country were roiled by protests against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel last year.

The letter orders the university to take disciplinary action for “violations” that happened during protests.

In explaining its rejection of these demands, Harvard President Alan Garber said the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights under the First Amendment protecting free speech.

“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,” he said.

Shortly after his letter of resistance was sent, the education department said it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in contracts to Harvard immediately.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” the Department of Education said in a statement.

The disruption of learning plaguing campuses is unacceptable and the harassment of Jewish students intolerable, the statement said.

A professor of history at Harvard, David Armitage, told the BBC that the school could afford to resist as the richest university in the US and no price was too high to pay for freedom.

“It’s a not unexpected act of entirely groundless and vengeful activity by the Trump administration which wants nothing more than to silence freedom of speech,” he said.

In March, the Trump administration said it was reviewing roughly $256m in federal contracts and grants at Harvard, and an additional $8.7bn in multi-year grant commitments.

Harvard professors filed a lawsuit in response, alleging the government was unlawfully attacking freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Harvard, which has a $53bn endowment, is one of a number of elite universities in the crosshairs of the new presidency.

Columbia University in New York City agreed to a number of demands last month after the White House pulled $400m in federal funding.

Polling by Gallup last summer suggested that confidence in higher education has been falling over time among Americans of all political backgrounds, partly driven by a growing belief that universities push a political agenda. The decline was particularly steep among Republicans.