What happened
Harvard University Monday rejected the Trump administration’s sweeping demands for oversight and internal policy changes, calling the effort an unlawful and unconstitutional overreach. Hours later, the administration said it was immediately freezing $2.3 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard and its affiliated hospitals and research institutions.
Who said what
Harvard was the first of several top universities to defy funding threats from a Trump administration task force of “little-known bureaucrats” ostensibly focused on rooting out “antisemitic harassment” on campus but also “taking on university culture more broadly in ways that echo the MAGA dreams for remaking higher education,” The Wall Street Journal said.
Harvard has undertaken extensive reforms to address antisemitism, but “the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in an open letter. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over” by a federal government that seeks to dictate what they can teach, “whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The federal antisemitism task force said Harvard’s defiance “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset” in universities that “federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.”
What next
It was not “immediately clear” which grants and contracts were frozen, The Boston Globe said, but the task force’s listed targets included grants to “fund biomedical research on topics including tuberculosis, traumatic brain injuries and HIV.”