The Trump administration presented Harvard University with a letter Thursday outlining “immediate next steps” the institution must take in order to have a “continued financial relationship with the United States government,” The Boston Globe reported and Inside Higher Ed confirmed.
The ultimatum came just three days after the president’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism notified the university it had been placed under review for its alleged failure to protect Jewish students and faculty from discrimination. If the case follows the precedent set at other universities, Harvard and its affiliate medical institutions could lose up to $9 billion in federal grants and contracts if they do not comply.
Sources say the move is driven less by true concern about antisemitism on campus than by the government’s desire to abolish diversity efforts and hobble higher ed institutions it deems too “woke.” This week alone, the administration has retracted funds from Brown and Princeton Universities. Before that, it targeted the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University and opened dozens of civil rights investigations at other colleges, all of which are ongoing.
Many of the task force’s demands for Harvard mirror those presented to Columbia last month, including mandates to reform antisemitism accountability programs on campus, ban masks for nonmedical purposes, review certain academic departments and reshape admissions policies. The main difference: Columbia’s letter targeted specific departments and programs, while Harvard’s was broader.
For example, while the letter received by Columbia called for one specific Middle Eastern studies department to be placed under receivership, Harvard’s letter called more generally for “oversight and accountability for biased programs [and departments] that fuel antisemitism.”
Inside Higher Ed requested a copy of the letter from Harvard, which declined to send it but confirmed that they had received it. Inside Higher Ed later received a copy from a different source.
Some higher education advocates speculate that the Trump administration’s latest demands were deliberately vague in the hopes that colleges will overcomply.
“What I’ve learned from various experiences with higher ed law is that it’s unusual to be general in legal documents,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement for the American Council on Education. Trump’s “open-ended” letter “starts to look like a fishing expedition,” he added. “‘We want you to throw everything open to us so that we get to determine how you do this.’”
But conservative higher ed analysts believe the demands—even when broadened—are justified.
“Many of these are extremely reasonable—restricting demonstrations inside academic buildings, requiring participants and demonstrations to identify themselves when asked, committing to antidiscrimination policies, intellectual diversity and institutional neutrality,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Still, he raised questions about how certain mandates in the letter will be enforced.
“When you see this in the context of the federal government trying to use funding as a lever to force some of these reforms, that’s where one might raise some legitimate concern,” he said. “For instance, trying to ensure viewpoint diversity is a very laudable goal, but if the federal government is trying to … decide what constitutes viewpoint diversity, there is a case to be made that that is a violation of the First Amendment.”
What Does the Letter Say?
The demands made of Harvard Thursday largely target the same aspects of higher ed that Trump has focused on since taking office in January.
Some center on pro-Palestinian protests, like the requirements to hold allegedly antisemitic programs accountable, reform discipline procedures and review all “antisemitic rule violations” since Oct. 7, 2023.
Others focus on enforcing Trump’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on affirmative action; the university must make “durable” merit-based changes to its admissions and hiring practices and shut down all diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which the administration believes promote making “snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes.”
The letter was signed by the same three task force members who signed Columbia’s demand letter: Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service; Sean Keveney, acting general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services; and Thomas Wheeler, acting general counsel for the Department of Education.
The most notable difference in Harvard’s letter is that the task force is demanding “full cooperation” with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. That department and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have been arresting and revoking visas from international students and scholars who, the government says, are supporting terrorist groups by participating in pro-Palestinian protests.
Will Harvard Capitulate?
Harvard already appears to be taking steps to comply. On Wednesday, the university put a pro-Palestinian student group on probation. The week before, a dean removed two top leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which has been accused of biased teaching about Israel.
A letter to the campus community from university president Alan Garber also suggested capitulation is likely.
“If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation,” Garber wrote following the task force’s review. “We will engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism.”
But Fansmith noted such actions may not be enough to predict whether Harvard will fully acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands.
“If you look at all of these institutions over the last two years, they’ve been making a number of changes in policies, procedures, personnel and everything else,” he said. “And a lot of that was happening and was at pace before this administration took office and started sending letters.”
Harvard was one of the first three universities that the House Committee on Education and the Workforce grilled about antisemitism on campus in December 2023. Shortly after, then-president Claudine Gay—the first Black woman to lead Harvard—resigned. The university has since been working to make changes at the campus level.
Both Fansmith and Cooper pointed to Trump’s mandates regarding curriculum as the most likely to face opposition, as was the case at Columbia.
A little over a week after the Trump administration laid out its ultimatum, Columbia capitulated and agreed to all but one demand: The university refused to put its department of Middle Eastern studies into receivership, a form of academic probation that involves hiring an outside department chair. Instead, it placed the department under internal review and announced it would hire a new senior vice provost to oversee the academic program.
“You need to be making sure that Jewish students are not subject to harassment,” Cooper said. But “where that crosses the line is if the federal government is telling the universities … ‘this is how you have to appoint somebody to put an academic department into receivership,’ as was the original demand made of Columbia.”
Regardless of how Harvard responds, one thing seems likely: There are more funding freezes to come.
“A lot of folks were expecting Columbia to file a legal challenge, and when that didn’t happen, that might have emboldened the administration a bit to go after some of these other institutions,” Cooper said. But sooner than later, “one of these institutions might say, ‘We’re not going to make the reforms.’”
“I don’t have a great guess as to which institution that will be,” he added, “but I would expect we probably will see a lawsuit at some point.”
