The Trump administration is freezing more than $2 billion in funding to Harvard University after its president, Alan M. Garber, announced on Monday the institution would not give in to a new set of demands that would have granted the government remarkable power to shape campus operations.
News of the funding freeze — totaling $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million in multiyear contract value — came in a Monday-evening statement from the White House’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. “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 task force wrote.
Harvard appears to be steeling itself for a fight. Asked for comment late Monday, a university spokesperson referred The Chronicle to excerpts of Garber’s earlier statement refusing Trump’s demands, including this line: “The university will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights.”
Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration has brought down a hammer on major research universities, with federal agencies holding back grant funding over claims of alleged antisemitism and discriminatory diversity programs. Harvard’s defiance contrasts with Columbia University, where administrators made concessions — including changing student disciplinary procedures and placing its Middle East-studies department under a senior vice provost — to try to restore $400 million in canceled federal grants and contracts.
Harvard received a new letter of demands from the Trump administration on Friday, which Garber released publicly on Monday. Much of it, he said in his statement, amounted to “direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’” at the institution.
“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, adding that the Trump administration’s assertions of authority were “unmoored from the law.”
The five-page document told Harvard to, among other things:
- Review “all existing and prospective faculty” for plagiarism.
- Share all hiring and admissions data with the federal government for audit until 2028.
- Reform international admissions “to prevent admitting students” who appear hostile “to American values.”
- Conduct an audit of “viewpoint diversity” among students and employees, and submit it to the government by the end of this year.
- Commission an external review of programs “that most fuel antisemitism harassment or reflect ideological capture,” including the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
- Shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
- Punish students who participated in certain pro-Palestinian protests over the past two years.
Those directives upped the ante of an initial April 3 demand letter that outlined less-specific asks, such as the adoption of “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies, and cooperation with orders from the Department of Homeland Security. Trump’s antisemitism task force announced on March 31 that it was reviewing almost $9 billion in federal contributions to Harvard.
A New Strategy
As some association leaders and higher-ed experts see it, Harvard’s decision to publicly defend itself could mark a turning point in Trump’s sparring match with the sector. Garber’s message differed drastically in tone from the statements of Katrina Armstrong, the former interim president of Columbia.
And Columbia’s conciliatory approach hasn’t yet paid off. All of Columbia’s National Institutes of Health funding was reportedly frozen this month. The Trump administration is now considering pursuing a consent decree, in which the university would agree to a years-long monitoring process overseen by a judge.
The fact that Columbia hasn’t gotten back its funding helps explain “what appears to be a pivot in strategy,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University. Absent “a sign that you can enter into a negotiation or a conversation with the administration with any certainty that the terms of that negotiation or conversation will be upheld,” Cantwell said, “the only possible response is, it seems like, what Harvard is doing, which is to say, ‘No, we won’t do it.’”
Along with Garber’s statement, Harvard on Monday released a letter to the Trump administration from its lawyers arguing that the administration’s demands “invade university freedoms” protected by the First Amendment. The directives also impose “unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law.”
That letter marks “the most direct repudiation of the administration’s approach that we’ve seen,” Cantwell said. “We’re seeing that the most powerful and wealthiest and most prestigious university in the country has drawn a line here.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education (ACE), emphasized that the circumstances faced by Harvard and Columbia were “very different.” The government had already canceled some of Columbia’s funding when it released demands to that institution. Harvard’s funding freeze only came after Garber’s statement, and the university has not yet faced a mass cancellation of grants.
What’s more, the most-recent demands made of Harvard were more concrete than the ones posed to Columbia, Mitchell said. “What they really were proposing was a federal takeover of a private university, which is not just unconscionable, but it’s wrong.”
Still, Mitchell speculated that Harvard’s resistance could create “an opening” for other institutions to take a similar stance if they find themselves subject to such funding rescissions. “The arguments that Harvard makes are the right ones,” he said. “They are arguments that really do stand not just for Harvard, but for all of higher education.”
Cantwell and Mitchell spoke to The Chronicle before the Harvard freeze was announced. In a follow-up email, Cantwell wrote that the Trump administration’s “swift response suspending funds to Harvard demonstrates that it believes the government is entitled to control all aspects of academic life.”
Harvard’s resistance hasn’t come in a vacuum. A handful of institutional leaders have taken public stances in recent weeks criticizing some of the Trump administration’s policies. That small group includes Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of Princeton University: After the federal government froze some of Princeton’s funding, Eisgruber indicated that the university would not make concessions to the federal government.
Also on Monday, a handful of research universities joined the Association of American Universities and ACE in suing the administration over a proposed 15-percent indirect-cost cap on research funded through the U.S. Department of Energy. Last week, dozens of institutions signed on to an amicus brief in a case led by the American Association of University Professors, contesting the revocation of international students’ visas.
Reactions and Donations
Harvard’s response to Trump was met with widespread approval on social media, including from Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president. “Very glad to see President Garber leading Harvard and I hope all universities in resisting extralegal and unreasonable demands from the federal government,” Summers said on X.
Some academics called for supporters to donate to Harvard. “If you’ve never given to Harvard, GIVE NOW!” wrote Laurence H. Tribe, a legal scholar and Harvard professor emeritus, in one widely shared Bluesky post.
Pleas to donate to the nation’s wealthiest institution may have been received much more cynically in the past. In this case, they’re a recognition of the costly legal battle that likely lies ahead of Harvard, said Teresa Valerio Parrot, principal of the higher-education communications firm TVP Communications, who also spoke to The Chronicle before the funding freeze. “It would be cheaper in some ways to capitulate and say, ‘Go ahead and take away our funding,’ than it may be to say, ‘We are going to fight,’” Valerio Parrot said.
“When people are saying, ‘Give to Harvard,’ what they are really saying is, ‘Give to the industry and give to the fight on behalf of all,’ not just give to this institution that we all think of as moneyed,” she added. “The bigger rally cry is on behalf of everyone and the principles that we hold dear, as much as it is on behalf of the institution itself.” (Harvard did not respond to a question about how much it had received in donations on Monday.)
Also notable, Valerio Parrot said, was the fact that Harvard redesigned its home page in conjunction with Monday’s announcement, to emphasize the scope of the research portfolio for which Harvard receives federal funding. Among the projects featured on the home page are new treatments for depression and assistive devices being developed for stroke survivors.
Harvard’s emphasis on research is “bolder than we traditionally see,” and necessarily so, Valerio Parrot said — highlighting a carefully coordinated public-relations campaign surrounding the decision to refuse the government’s demands.
While Harvard’s decision to reject the demands was “an important and noble” one, Mitchell said, “this is not a time for a victory lap” for the institution, or for higher ed writ large. “The ball’s in the administration’s court. We’ll see what they have in store.”
