The US administration of President Donald Trump announced it was freezing $2.3 billion in federal funding to the school after Harvard had rejected numerous demands from the Trump administration that it said would cede control of the school to a conservative government that portrays universities as dangerously leftist.
The funding freeze comes after the Trump administration said last month it was reviewing $9 billion in federal contracts and grants to Harvard as part of a crackdown on what it says is antisemitism that erupted on college campuses during pro-Palestinian protests in the past 18 months.
The administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous universities, pressing the institutions to make policy changes and citing what it says is a failure to fight antisemitism on campus.
Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a public letter on Monday that demands made by the Department of Education last week would allow the federal government “to control the Harvard community” and threaten the school’s “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge.”
“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,” Garber wrote.
The issue of antisemitism on campus erupted before Trump took office for his second term, following pro-Palestinian student protests last year at several universities following the 2023 Hamas attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Last week, a group of Harvard professors sued to block the Trump administration’s review of nearly $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the school.
