The Trump administration has explicitly threatened, and in some cases suspended, the funding of universities across the country, citing violations of federal law and policy.
Amid this governmental campaign to fight anti-Semitism on campus, keep men out of women’s sports, maximize viewpoint diversity, eliminate discriminatory DEI practices, and kick divisive critical race theory programming to the curb, Harvard University has emerged as the administration’s white whale.
Democrats and other leftists have, through their overreactions to the administration’s handling of Harvard, given away their own suspicions that the 389-year-old institution’s neutralization as a political entity and restoration to former glory would mark a turning point — perhaps not an end to the left’s long march through the institutions but certainly a landmark arrest of the American campus slide into lawlessness, lunacy, and identitarianism.
This concern appears to ground Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s (N.Y.) statement, “The Trump administration is making unprecedented demands of universities aimed at undermining or even destroying these vital institutions.”
‘Tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences.’
“Universities must do more to fight antisemitism on campus, but the administration should not use it as an excuse for a broad and extra-legal attack on these institutions,” continued Schumer. “Harvard is right to resist.”
The concern similarly lurks in the background of Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop’s assertion that “the assault on Harvard is part of a broader Trumpian assault on elite universities, which is itself part of a yet broader federal assault on progressive institutions and groups deemed enemies of the president.”
Prokop added, “Tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences, forever transforming the relationship between the federal government and academia.”
Despite the alarmist rhetoric peddled by activists and Democratic lawmakers, the Trump administration’s insistence that institutional beneficiaries of federal funding hold up their ends of the bargain — especially in the case of Harvard University — appears to be neither unlawful nor unprecedented.
While the Trump administration is less ambiguous in its language and more confrontational with its actions — which have in a number of cases already borne fruit — it is simply exercising muscles previously flexed by previous governments to ensure federally funded universities comply with federal civil rights law and public policy.
Now
The Trump administration has threatened, frozen, and/or temporarily suspended federal funding to a number of schools in recent months. For example, the administration:
temporarily paused U.S. Department of Agriculture funding to the University of Maine System while ensuring its seven universities and law school were in compliance with Title IX and Title VI, which ban sex and race-based discrimination;
brought Columbia University to heel by announcing the end of $400 million worth of grants and contracts after the institution failed to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic attacks;
froze over $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell University and around $790 million for Northwestern University amid investigations of anti-Semitism and racial discrimination;
threatened to freeze $510 million of Brown University’s federal funding amid investigations into the institution’s DEI initiatives and alleged anti-Semitism;
paused around $210 million in research grants to Princeton University pending an investigation — reportedly opened by the Biden Department of Education in 2024 — into anti-Semitism on campus; and
suspended approximately $175 million in grants and contracts to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies enabling men to compete in women’s sports.
While the Trump administration has taken a similar approach to Harvard, the country’s oldest university has proven a tougher nut to crack.
Blaze News previously reported that the administration notified Harvard University President Alan Garber and Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, on April 11 that billions of dollars in federal funds were at stake unless the institution agreed to implement a number of “critical reforms.”
‘Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions.’
The government specifically asked for Harvard’s cooperation in implementing these reforms:
foster “clear lines of authority and accountability,” empower tenured professors who are devoted to the scholarly mission of the university, reduce the power held by students and untenured faculty, and reduce forms of governance bloat;
adopt merit-based hiring and admissions policies and cease all discriminatory admissions, hiring, promotion, and compensation practices;
“reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism”;
commission an external party to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity;
reform programs with “egregious records of anti-Semitism or other bias”;
eliminate DEI-based policies; and
clamp down on student disruptions and misconduct.
The university, which has an endowment of $53.2 billion, initially responded by suggesting the necessary reforms were already underway and that the Trump administration’s demands were unlawful.
Barack Obama, a Democrat whose administration threatened its fair share of universities’ federal funding, was among the liberals who celebrated Harvard’s defiance, writing, “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect.”
‘That stops under the Trump Administration.’
Evidently not interested in playing Obama-supported games, the Trump administration provided the Massachusetts university with a steady stream of bad news.
For starters,
the administration reportedly launched a review of
around $9 billion in grants and contracts with the university over
possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act;
the Education Department’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced a $2.2 billion freeze in multi-year grants and a $60 million freeze in multi-year contract value to Harvard;
the National Institutes of Health reportedly
told grant managers to halt disbursements to Harvard;
the Department of
Homeland security
announced the cancellation of two six-figure grants
and indicated the university’s ability to enroll foreign students was in jeopardy; and
the administration appeared
poised at the time of writing to pull $1 billion of Harvard’s funding
for health research.
Julie Hartman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, told Blaze News in a statement, “The Department has given Columbia and Harvard every opportunity to come into compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws.”
“On March 10, OCR sent letters to both universities reminding them of their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus,” continued Hartman. “ED has also attempted multiple times to engage in negotiations with both of these universities, and the Department hopes to continue negotiating with them to protect students’ civil rights.”
“In the past, educational entities were allowed to violate Title VI with little to no enforcement action from the federal government,” added the ED spokeswoman. “That stops under the Trump Administration. We will not allow taxpayer funds to sponsor discrimination against American students.”
After the administration began derailing the school’s gravy train, Harvard doubled down on its defiance.
When announcing the university’s lawsuit against the administration on April 21, Harvard President Alan Garber suggested that the pause on injections of taxpayer dollars into his wealthy institution were “unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.”
“These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world,” wrote Garber.
Garber is hardly the first in recent weeks to suggest the Trump administration’s handling of Harvard’s defiance was somehow unlawful, harmful, or unprecedented.
Andrew Tyrie, senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told the Harvard Gazette, “This is weakening the United States and imperiling the prosperity and the security of millions of Americans.”
‘This is the first time an administration has tried something like this.’
Joshua Cherniss, an associate political theory professor at Georgetown University, said, “I study, to some extent, authoritarian regimes, and I think that some of what we’re seeing — while it’s not equivalent to fully formed authoritarianism — is starting to approach it in terms of trying to have the government dictate the ideas that are taught, that can be expressed and that can’t be expressed.”
While there has been much of this pearl-clutching about threats to Harvard’s gravy train, there has also been shirt-rending over the Trump administration’s threat to Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Trump recently wrote, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
“To my knowledge, this is the first time an administration has tried something like this,” said R. William Snyder, a professor at the business college of George Mason University, told CNN. “The whole purpose of higher education is to educate the masses. Just because they educate in a way that you don’t like, is that grounds to terminate their tax-exempt status? I’d say no.”
Contrary to these critics’ suggestions, this was not, however, the first time an administration threatened tax-exempt status or funding.
Then
Like Synder, many critics of the president’s proposal to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status appeared to strategically develop long-term memory loss.
Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo and Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett were, however, happy to remind such critics that should Harvard lose its tax-exempt status over alleged noncompliance with federal law or policy, it wouldn’t be the first.
Bob Jones University, a private university in Greenville, South Carolina, had racist policies on its books in the mid-20th century — including prohibitions on interracial dating and marriage. Determining that the school’s discriminatory policies did not serve a public purpose and were contrary to established public policy, the IRS revoked the school’s tax-exempt status in 1975. This decision prompted a heated legal battle.
Ultimately, in Bob Jones University v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in 1983 that the IRS had authority to deny status to Bob Jones University, Goldsboro Christian School, and other institutions with racist policies.
Powerline recently noted that Harvard, like BJU, has already been found by the Supreme Court to engage in illegal race discrimination — meaning the path to status revocation might be an altogether simpler matter, assuming an activist judge isn’t ready to throw more caltrops before the administration.
Just as revoking a misaligned university’s tax-exempt status would be nothing new, the Trump administration’s threats to universities’ federal funding are similarly business as usual.
While the Trump administration has followed through by suspending or freezing funding to a number of universities for their alleged noncompliance with federal law and policy, the Biden administration appeared keen to do something similar — efforts that in a number of cases resulted in agreements and resolutions.
In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, the Biden Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened hundreds of investigations into complaints about anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While such investigations are customarily backed by the implicit threat of suspending noncompliant schools’ federal funding, NPR noted that Biden officials expressly threatened to cut funding to schools that failed to take aggressive remedial action.
The Education Department noted in its 2024 fiscal year annual report that the University of Illinois, Drexel University, and Brown University remedied compliance concerns identified by the OCR, thereby preserving their funding.
While concerns were expressed about the possibility that these investigations could chill free speech on campus, critics were not up in arms as they are now.
There also does not appear to have been leftist apoplexy when years earlier, the first Trump administration’s Education Department OCR took the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to task after concluding on the basis of nearly 400 reports of sexual harassment and sexual violence that the institution was out of compliance with Title IX. The government ultimately secured a resolution agreement with the school in place of fines or denial of funding.
The Obama administration similarly threatened federal funding for schools that fell out of line with federal law and policy without the same volume of uproar seen today.
For instance, the Obama Education Department’s OCR came after Tufts University for Title IX violations, specifically with regard to its handling of sexual harassment and misconduct complaints. It also notified schools that noncompliance with Title IX could result in the OCR initiating “proceedings to withdraw Federal funding by the Department or refer the case to the U.S. Department of Justice for litigation.”
In 2016, the Obama administration circulated guidance stating that so-called gender identity was protected under Title IX.
Politico noted at the time that the advisory included “a threat that the Obama administration has leveled against North Carolina in the standoff over the state’s law blocking legal protections for gay and transgender individuals: If a state fails to comply with the administration’s interpretation of the law, it runs the risk of being sued by the federal government and losing federal funding, particularly for education.”
In April 2011, the Obama ED OCR established mandates requiring universities to reduce students’ due process rights. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicated that failure on the part of universities to heed the regulations, which were announced in a letter from then-Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.
Obama also proposed shifting federal funding away from universities perceived as failing to keep net tuition down.
The previous two Democratic administrations appear to have liberally threatened schools’ funding without the accompaniment of a chorus of doomsdayers warning of the coming peril and civilizational harms. Their threats also paved the way for those issued in recent weeks by the Trump administration.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Politics, Harvard university, Defunding, University, Federal funding, Education department, Department of education, Ocr, Office of civil rights, Title vi, Title ix, Compliance, Donald trump, T3
