Harvard will fight Trump administration demands over funding

(Reuters) -Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a public letter on Monday that Harvard had received demands from the federal Department of Education that threaten "our 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," he added.     

The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump's administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous universities in recent weeks, pressing the institutions to make policy and other changes and citing what it says is a failure to fight antisemitism on campus. The administration' crackdown has raised concerns about speech and academic freedoms.

The issue erupted before Trump took office for his second term, following pro-Palestinian student protests last year that took place at several universities following the 2023 Hamas attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.     

White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement that Trump was "working to Make Higher Education Great Again by ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard's support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence."

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. 

The Trump administration is reportedly considering forcing fellow Ivy League school Columbia into a consent decree, that would legally bind the school to follow federal guidelines in how it combats antisemitism. Some Columbia professors, like those at Harvard, have sued the federal government in response. The government has suspended $400 million in federal funding and grants to Columbia. 

Harvard president Garber said that the federal government's demands that it "audit" the viewpoints of its students, faculty and staff in an attempt to ferret out leftwing thinkers generally opposed to the Trump administration clearly violated the university's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.  

"The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights," Garber wrote.

He added that while Harvard is taking steps to address antisemitism on campus, "these ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate." 

Harvard agreed in January to provide additional protections for Jewish students under a settlement resolving two lawsuits accusing the Ivy League school of becoming a hotbed of antisemitism.

To ease any funding crunch created by any cutoff in federal funding, Harvard is working to borrow $750 million from Wall Street. 

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Stephen Coates)