Harvard University President Alan Garber said Monday that officials there would not yield to the Trump administration’s litany of demands to maintain access to federal funding, arguing the federal government had overstepped its authority by issuing the ultimatum.
Garber said the Trump administration sent an updated list of “unprecedented” demands Friday night, including that a third party audit the viewpoints of students, faculty and staff and that Harvard curtail the power of certain instructors and administrators involved in activism.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote in a community message.
The move tees up a battle between the Ivy League institution and the Trump administration, which threatened the university with the loss of $9 billion in federal funding over what it claimed was a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.
Officials from three agencies sent an initial list of demands to Harvard via a letter in early April, calling for the elimination of all diversity initiatives, increased scrutiny over student groups and the empowerment of employees committed to carrying out the changes called for in the letter.
They said the letter outlined the steps the university needed to take to have a “continued financial relationship” with the U.S. government.
But the revised letter, sent Friday night from the same federal officials, goes much further than the original.
The Trump administration demanded that Harvard hire a third party to audit the campus community and its departments for “viewpoint diversity” and report the findings to the university’s leaders and the federal government. If the third party determined a department lacked viewpoint diversity, Harvard would be required to hire a “critical mass” of faculty and enroll enough new students with certain viewpoints to address the imbalance.
It also directed Harvard to screen out international applicants who are “hostile to the American values and institutions” within the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, "including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism." The Trump administration has already revoked the visas of over 1,000 international students and scholars across various colleges, including some over their involvement in pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the outbreak of the latest Israel-Hamas war, according to a count from Inside Higher Ed.
And the letter orders Harvard to implement a mask ban, with violations carrying a minimum punishment of suspension. While the previous letter carved out exemptions for medical or religious reasons, the updated demands did not contain the same language.
Officials also said Harvard must carry out “meaningful discipline” for students involved in protests on campus this academic year and last.
Additionally, it calls for an external party to audit the departments and programs the Trump administration claims to “most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture,” including Havard’s School of Public Health, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights and Graduate School of Education, among others.
Garber rejected the demands, arguing they violate the university’s First Amendment rights and make “clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner.”
“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,” Garber wrote.
Harvard’s legal counsel informed officials at the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. General Services Administration of its decision on Monday. The three agencies did not immediately respond to Higher Ed Dive’s request for comment.
The Ivy League institution is taking an opposite tack than Columbia University, which was threatened with a similar set of demands after several federal agencies pulled $400 million from the institution over antisemitism allegations.
Columbia largely ceded to the demands in late March, a move panned by some free speech groups but praised by the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism as a “positive first step” to maintaining the university's federal funding.
As of Monday, neither Columbia nor the Trump administration has indicated the university's funding has been restored.
The task force — recently established by President Donald Trump via executive order — plans to pursue a consent decree with Columbia, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. That would put a federal judge in charge of ensuring that Columbia makes changes aligned with the Trump administration’s demands.
Harvard’s own announcement has drawn praise from the left and condemnation from the right.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, cast Harvard’s move as “refusing to relinquish its constitutional rights to Trump’s authoritarianism” and called on other universities to follow its lead.
Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York and Harvard alum, accused the university of embracing antisemitism.
“It is time to totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution that has failed to live up to its founding motto Veritas,” Stefanik said, referencing the Latin word meaning “truth.”
In his community message, Garber said Harvard has taken several steps over the past 15 months to curb antisemitism on campus.
The letter from Harvard’s legal counsel to the Trump administration lists examples, including discipline for those who have violated university policies and heightened security measures on campus.
“Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community,” the letter to the administration said. “But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
