The U.S. Department of Education late Monday said it is freezing more than $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard University after its president said earlier in the day it would not comply with President Donald Trump’s demands over antisemitism on campus and diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
“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,” the department’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement, citing the “harassment of Jewish students” that “has plagued campuses in recent years…”
As a result, the task force said it will put “a freeze on $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60M in multi-year contract value to Harvard University.”
Earlier Monday, Harvard said it would not comply with a set of demands from the Trump administration in order to receive federal funding, The Center Square reported. Those demands including ending DEI programs as well as reforming programs that fuel antisemitism.
“We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the school’s community.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote.
The agreement the Trump administration proposed to Harvard involved discontinuing DEI practices and programs, implementing merit-based hiring and admissions policies, and reforming programs with “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias,” as outlined in an April 11 letter. “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the letter stated.
After the Department of Education – in the effort to eliminate antisemitism – announced in late March a review of the nearly $9 billion in federal funding Harvard received, Garber wrote in a message that the school would “engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism.”
The university “fully embrace[s] the important goal of combatting antisemitism,” Garber wrote, while outlining Harvard’s various reforms that were made to combat antisemitism.
When it was announced in March that $400 million in federal funding would be revoked from Columbia due to antisemitism, the school soon complied with preconditions laid out by the Trump administration, according to the Department of Education.
Columbia’s preconditions were mainly related to antisemitism and certain policies that concern protests, according to the letter it received.
