Trump Orders Harvard to Be Crushed After University Refuses to End Rampant Racism, Anti-Semitism
In the biggest break between President Donald Trump’s second administration and U.S. higher education thus far, the administration announced Monday that Harvard University would see a freeze of $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts after school officials refused to acquiesce to demands they combat anti-Semitism, stop racist policies, and implement viewpoint diversity on campus.
According to CNN, the move came on Monday evening after Harvard administrators announced publicly that they were rejecting the proposal earlier in the day.
The White House defended the Trump administration’s decision to yank funding from the university after its leaders rejected the proposal out of hand.
“We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber said via a statement.
“President Trump is 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,” a White House spokesperson said, per CNN.
“Harvard or any institution that wishes to violate Title VI is, by law, not eligible for federal funding.”
Garber tried to paint the funding as absolutely necessary for the United States’ success.
“For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation,” he said in the statement.
However, it comes just three days after Garber and the head of the Harvard Corporation received a letter from the Department of Education and the General Services administration outlining steps critical to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.”
“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the letter to Garber and Penny Pritzker read.
“But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise.”
The terms not only included reforming programs with significant histories of anti-Semitism and other bias — including the notorious Center for Middle Eastern Studies — but to implement merit-based hiring and admissions reform, viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring, governance reforms, and accountability for students or on-campus organizations which endorse “criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment; [invite] non-students onto campus who regularly violate campus rules; or [act] as a front for a student club that has been banned from campus.”
It would also require the university to discontinue all diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs.
Furthermore, the agreement would require Harvard to undertake disciplinary reforms that would “include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming, including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption or deplatforming.”
The letter outlined transparency procedures to ensure these guidelines were being followed, as well as whistleblower protections for those who came forward with allegations that the agreement was being breached.
In his statement, Garber insisted the university was doing its part to quash anti-Jewish hatred.
“We have made it abundantly clear that we do not take lightly our moral duty to fight anti-Semitism,” he said.
“Over the past fifteen months, we have taken many steps to address anti-Semitism on our campus.”
However, as CNN noted, the changes Garber rebuffed “are the latest effort of the federal task force to combat anti-Semitism on college campuses after a spate of high-profile incidents around the country in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.”
The university became one of the poster children for elite universities attempting to straddle a left-wing activist base on campus with the risk of running afoul of either the federal government or donors.
In November 2023, Harvard was added to a list of universities being investigated for Title VI bias in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel, particularly after several student groups said that Israel was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the hours after the attack.
In December of that year, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay came under intense scrutiny after she said that “the context” of calls for genocide of Jews would be taken into account when deciding whether those calls constituted bullying or harassment under the university’s speech code.
Gay would eventually resign after the scrutiny uncovered numerous instances of plagiarism in Gay’s academic work.
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