Harvard College Monday rejected President Trump’s ultimatum to dismantle variety initiatives and crack down on scholar protesters.
The wealthiest and most prestigious Ivy League college mentioned it wouldn’t bow to the White Home’s calls for even within the face of threats to chop near $9 billion in federal funding, taking a sharply totally different strategy than Columbia College.
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College students stroll via a gate at Harvard College, Thursday, June 29, 2023, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Picture/Michael Casey)
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a press release. “No government … should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Garber denounced the White Home calls for as “assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate.”
Harvard was responding to a laundry checklist of calls for issued by the White Home Friday, together with proscribing admission of overseas college students who disagree with authorities insurance policies, third-party oversight over Harvard departments and new guidelines designed to crack down on scholar protests like those in opposition to the Israeli warfare in Gaza that rocked campuses final spring.
It additionally calls for Harvard finish all packages to advertise variety, fairness and inclusion, together with in hiring and admissions.
“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” warned the letter, which was signed by senior federal officers.
Harvard’s rejection of Trump’s calls for suggests it plans to take a far totally different strategy than Columbia and different Ivy League universities, which have sought lodging in hopes of salvaging billions in U.S. funding.
Harvard professors already filed a lawsuit over the weekend searching for to dam the federal government from any cuts.
The Trump administration has made comparable calls for of different prestigious universities nationwide in what it says is an effort to fight antisemitism and roll again what it calls “woke” ideology.
Final month, Columbia broadly agreed to a listing of 9 calls for from the administration, together with a ban on college students sporting masks at protests, hiring dozens of recent campus safety officers with energy to arrest college students and appointing a brand new officers to supervise its Division of Center East, South Asian and African Research.
The administration had canceled $400 million in federal grants to the varsity in higher Manhattan, accusing it of “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
Initially Revealed: April 14, 2025 at 4:30 PM EDT
