By ANNIE MA, JOCELYN GECKER and COLLIN BINKLEY, Related Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration has escalated its ongoing battle with Harvard, threatening to revoke the college’s capability to host worldwide college students because the president known as for withdrawing Harvard’s tax-exempt standing.
The Division of Homeland Safety ordered Harvard late Tuesday to show over “detailed records” of its overseas scholar visa holders’ “illegal and violent activities” by April 30. Worldwide college students make up 27% of the campus.
The division additionally stated it was canceling two grants to the college totaling $2.7 million.
Guests cease on the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard at Harvard College, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photograph/Charles Krupa)
The strikes deepen the crackdown on Harvard, which on Monday grew to become the primary college to overtly defy the administration’s calls for associated to activism on campus, antisemitism and variety. The federal authorities has already frozen greater than $2 billion in grants and contracts to the Ivy League establishment.
Trump instructed Tuesday on social media that Harvard ought to lose its tax-exempt standing “if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”
The maintain on federal cash for analysis at Harvard marked the seventh time the administration has taken such a step at one of many nation’s most elite schools. The federal government is making an attempt to drive compliance with Trump’s political agenda at faculties he accuses of pushing “woke” insurance policies and permitting antisemitism to fester.
In a letter to Harvard on Friday, Trump’s administration known as for broad authorities and management reforms on the college, plus adjustments to its admissions insurance policies. It additionally demanded that the college audit views of variety on campus and cease recognizing some scholar golf equipment.
Harvard President Alan Garber stated Monday that the college wouldn’t bend to the federal government’s calls for. Later that day, the White Home introduced the freeze of greater than $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in contracts.
Conservative strategist Christopher Rufo stated the federal government ought to reply to Harvard’s defiance by slicing all federal cash and stripping nonprofit standing at Harvard and different Ivies that defy federal orders. Rufo urged the federal government to make use of the identical instruments it used throughout the Civil Rights Motion to drive desegregation.
“Trump needs to follow through on his threat to defund one of the Ivy League universities,” Rufo stated on social media Tuesday. “Cut the funding and watch the university implode.”
Rufo stated Harvard has discriminated towards white and Asian American college students, citing occasions corresponding to commencement celebrations particular to sure ethnic teams, together with a 2021 theater efficiency completely “for Black-identifying audience members.”
For the Trump administration, Harvard presents the primary main hurdle in its try and drive change at universities that Republicans say have turn out to be hotbeds of liberalism and antisemitism.
Trump’s marketing campaign began at Columbia College, which initially agreed to a number of calls for from the Trump administration however took a extra emboldened tone after Harvard’s defiance. Columbia’s performing president, Claire Shipman, stated in a campus message Monday that a number of the calls for “are not subject to negotiation” and that she learn of Harvard’s rejection with “great interest.”
Trump has focused faculties accused of tolerating antisemitism amid a wave of pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses. A few of the authorities’s calls for contact straight on that activism, calling on Harvard to impose more durable self-discipline on protesters and to display screen worldwide college students for individuals who are “hostile to the American values.”
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Initially Revealed: April 17, 2025 at 10:37 AM EDT
