Harvard University will no longer be eligible for government grants, a senior White House official said on May 5—a development that could have devastating consequences for the United States’ oldest university.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon will send a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday night to inform the university that it is not eligible for federal grants until it makes significant changes to its management, the official said.
The letter will cite low public confidence in higher education, Harvard’s alleged failure to combat anti-Semitism on campus, and take issue with the virtually untaxed status of Harvard’s significant financial endowment.
President Donald Trump threatened to go after Harvard’s tax-exempt status on Friday.
“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he wrote in a social media post.
Earlier this year, the Department of Education sent Harvard a list of demands—including combating anti-Semitism on campus and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs—that the university needed to fulfill or risk losing billions in federal funding.
In its response, Harvard said it was “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
The Trump administration then froze $2.26 billion from the university, with nearly $9 billion in funding set aside for Harvard put under review.
The administration had also pushed for Harvard to disclose information about potential foreign ties, with the Department of Homeland Security threatening to remove the university’s ability to enroll foreign students.
Weeks later, Harvard released two reports describing how Jewish, Israeli, Zionist, Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students all reported feeling marginalized or targeted over their identities and views after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the campus protests that followed.
“Especially disturbing is the reported willingness of some students to treat each other with disdain rather than sympathy, eager to criticize and ostracize, particularly when afforded the anonymity and distance that social media provides,” Garber wrote in a letter to the campus community.
Trump suggested on April 30 that his administration would no longer give government grants to Harvard if it did not agree to fulfill his demands to eliminate DEI and combat on-campus anti-Semitism.
“A grant is at our discretion, and they are really not behaving well. So it’s too bad,” Trump said.
Harvard has sued the administration to unfreeze its funds, and Garber said on Friday that it would be “highly illegal” for Trump to compel the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status.
“If the government goes through with a plan to revoke our tax-exempt status, it would … be highly illegal unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move,” Garber told The Wall Street Journal.
“The message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one, which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be an existential threat to so many educational institutions.”
If Trump succeeds in revoking its tax-exempt or federal grant eligibility status after legal challenges, the Ivy League school, founded in 1636, could find itself in a very different category of institutions ahead of its 400th birthday.
It could join the University of Phoenix, Hillsdale College, the University of Austin (UATX), and Bob Jones University.
Those institutions are among a few dozen post-secondary schools that, either currently or in the past, have operated without tax-exempt status or federal aid, according to their respective websites.
Unlike Harvard, most of those schools have operated either as a business or as a conservative religious institution, and none is a major research center.
They also lack multibillion-dollar endowments sponsored by wealthy alumni donors.
Many institutions, public and private, are already struggling financially, even with state and federal grants.
Colleges and universities that go it alone without tax breaks or government aid have an even bigger disadvantage.
Of the 99 higher education institutions that closed in 2023, 54 were for-profit, private institutions; 17 were private, four-year schools; 15 were public, two-year schools; seven were private, two-year schools; and two were public, four-year schools.
For Harvard, that elevates this to a matter, potentially, to an extinction-level crisis unless the school can win a reversal on the current course.
—Jacob Burg, Joseph Lord, and Aaron Gifford
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