Harvard University said it will not comply with demands issued by the Trump administration aimed at curtailing antisemitism on campus, potentially putting billions in federal contracts and grants at risk.
“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,” the Ivy League school’s president, Alan Garber, wrote in a statement Monday.
Among the demands the administration put forth last month included limiting the influence of students and faculty in university affairs, reporting rule-breaking foreign students to the federal government and handing oversight over academic departments to an outside party charged with ensuring diversity of viewpoints, the New York Times reported.
In March, the Trump administration warned it was looking at $256 million in federal contracts for the elite school, as well as $8.7 billion in additional “multiyear grant commitments,” claiming Harvard had failed to take meaningful action to root out antisemitism.
Columbia University was given a similar set of demands last month from Trump’s newly formed Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, to which it largely agreed to adhere to avoid losing around $400 million in federal grants.
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