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The Trump administration has issued a set of sweeping demands that Harvard University must accept in order to maintain its financial relationship with the federal government.
The asks came as more than $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to the university were put under review earlier this week.
The demands, communicated in a letter on Thursday, are the latest step in Donald Trump’s unprecedented campaign to potentially cut billions from Ivy League universities in response to their alleged failure to combat antisemitism.
The letter, obtained by Harvard’s Crimson student paper, demands that Harvard cooperate with federal law enforcement, end diversity-based hiring and admissions practices, ban face masks, which were common among campus pro-Palestine protesters, and cooperate with federal law enforcement like the Department of Homeland Security, which has carried out arrests of immigrant activists on campus.
Officials from the General Services Administration and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services also alleged in the letter that Harvard had “failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” and called for direct changes to the elite university’s academic culture.
“Programs and departments that fuel antisemitic harassment must be reviewed and necessary changes made to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture,” the message reads.
“Harvard received the letter from the federal task force Thursday afternoon,” a university spokesperson told The Independent.
In a letter to the Harvard community this week, university president Alan Garber insisted Harvard was committed to combating antisemitism and warned that cutting off funds would “halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation.”
The threat from the Trump administration, which mirrors similar demands on Columbia, Brown, and Princeton, was met with mixed responses and protests on campus.
Kirsten Weld, a Harvard history professor and president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told the Associated Press the demands were a “dominance test.”
“If Harvard, the wealthiest university on the planet, accedes to these demands, the task force won’t go away — it will simply return with additional demands, just like a schoolyard bully,” Weld said. “Harvard must contest this patently unlawful attack in the courts.”
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a Harvard student suing the school for antisemitism, said the changes wouldn’t be necessary if the university took antisemitism seriously during widespread campus encampment protests that followed the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
“Given that the expenditure of American taxpayer funds is an expression of values, we are brought to the inevitable conclusion that if Harvard insists on discriminating against a student group on campus, then they have forfeited their right to the privilege of receiving American taxpayer money,” he wrote in a Crimson opinion piece.
Jacob Miller, former president of the campus’s Hillel group in 2023, argued in a separate piece in the paper that the threats were not genuinely about stopping antisemitism.
“The expansive nature of these billion-dollar cuts suggest Trump’s interest is not narrowly fighting antisemitism on campus, but rather neutering universities and their ability to conduct research,” he wrote. “Institutions of higher learning are cornerstones of liberal democracies and act as bulwarks against authoritarianism. It is telling that Trump’s team wants them demolished.”
The letter comes at a time of heightened pressure on elite U.S. universities from the Trump administration, which has warned at least 60 colleges and universities they could face repercussions as the Department of Education investigates antisemitism.
Last week, Columbia interim president Katina Armstrong stepped down, after the school agreed to a similar list of Trump demands in order to win back potential access to $400 million in federal funding.
At the same time as the administration has frozen university finances, it has conducted multiple controversial immigration arrests of students and recent graduates involved in various degrees of pro-Palestine activism, including Mahmoud Khalil, who led negotiations between faculty and protesters at Columbia, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who wrote an op-ed criticizing Israel.
Others, like Cornell PhD Momodou Taal, who was suing the Trump administration over its executive orders on non-citizens and antisemitism, have chosen to self-deport rather than face arrest.
