The Trump administration has most recently set their sights on defunding colleges, including Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Brown, and Princeton. On Monday, April 21, Harvard University became the first of these elite academic institutions to react to the demands of the Trump administration by suing them. The administration threatened to cut billions of dollars of research funding to the university. Trump claims that cutting funding will help to “reclaim” these elite universities. Specifically at Harvard, he says it is a way to fight against antisemitism on the campus, but has simultaneously been targeting programs related to racial diversity and gender ideology at these same schools, which undoubtedly harms the fight against antisemitism.
Harvard refused to comply with the list of demands from the federal government (which included sharing hiring data with the government and bringing in an outside party affiliated with the government to make sure each academic department is “viewpoint diverse”) less than 72 hours after being informed of them. The university did so because they claimed the demands were dangerous and a threat to the university’s independence; the school deemed them unlawful, accusing the administration of using a broad attack as leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.
This is the most obvious form of defiance by any university since Trump has begun to threaten them. In response to Harvard’s refusal, officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion multi-year research grants to the university, as well as a $60 million contract.
Freezing these funds is dangerous because it will put the research conducted at the university into jeopardy, some of which includes studying child cancer survivors; predicting the spread of dangerous disease outbreaks; easing the pain of wounded soldiers; studies on pediatric cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Harvard has stated that the demands and the money freezing violates the 1st Amendment, and followed this claim by suing the government.
While Trump claims he is ordering these funding cuts to fight antisemitism, the efforts he is making to do so have nothing to do with antisemitism at all; it is simply a poor cover-up for taking control of higher education. Harvard’s University president, Alan Garber, is Jewish, and has acknowledged the issues with antisemitism at the school recently, claiming he already has a task force and policies in place to fight it. He said the university would release reports from two task forces that have looked into antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on the campus. In the meantime, a new government antisemitism task force has been identified for review at 60 other universities throughout the states on the Trump administration’s orders.
