Harvard University shares the same goals as the Trump government, the President, Alan M. Garber, on Monday, in a respectful but sturdy letter-the last exchange in an extraordinary back and forth between the school and the federal government in recent weeks.
The letter was a week after the Trump administration said it would stop giving Harvard any research fairs.
Last month, the university brought the government to court about what he believed to have been the illegal burglary of the government in its activities.
On Monday Dr. However, Garber is a respectful tone, with the argument that Harvard’s efforts to combat anti -Semitism and other intolerance and to promote an environment for free speech by the infringement of the government in higher education. He said he would otherwise agree with some of the worries of the Trump government about higher education.
Dr. Garber said he embraced the goals to curb anti -Semitism on campus; promoting more intellectual diversity, including the welcome of conservative voices; and limit the use of race in admission decisions.
Those goals “are undermined and threatened by the over -range of the federal government in the constitutional freedoms of private universities and the constant neglect of Harvard’s compliance with the law,” Dr. Garber in the letter to Linda McMahon, the education secretary.
The university’s answer came a week after Mrs. McMahon wrote to Harvard to advise the university against applying for future subsidies, “because no will be provided.” That letter caused new concerns in Harvard about the long-term consequences of his collision with the Trump administration.
“At best, a university has to fulfill the highest ideals of our nation and alleviate the thousands of hopeful students who run through the beautiful gates,” wrote Mrs. McMahon. “But Harvard has betrayed his ideal.”
Mrs. McMahon rolled through a selection of conservative complaints about the school and rumbled about the ‘blown up bureaucracy’ of the university, the admission policy, the international students, the embrace of some Democrats and even the math -curriculum.
Mrs. McMahon referred to Harvard as ‘an institution funded by the government’, although Harvard is private and the vast majority of his income does not come from the government. She suggested that the university was more dependent on its own money, and noted that Harvard’s donation, with a value of more than $ 53 billion, would give it a ‘lead’. (Lots of Harvard Endowment is tied up in limited funds and cannot be reused as will.)
“Today’s letter,” wrote Mrs. McMahon, “marks the end of new subsidies for the university.”
In the letter from Dr. Garber On Monday he said that the university had created a strategy to combat anti -Semitism and other intolerance, and had invested in the academic study of Judaism and related areas. But he said that the university would not “surrender its core, legally protected principles for fear of unfounded retribution by the federal government.”
He denied Mrs. McMahon’s claim that Harvard was political.
“It is neither republican nor democratic,” he said about the university. “It is not an arm of another political party or movement. Neither will it ever be. Harvard is a place to bring people from all backgrounds together to learn in an inclusive environment where ideas bloom, regardless of whether they are considered ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’ or something else. ‘
Although Harvard is by far the richest university in the country, civil servants have warned that federal cutbacks can have devastating consequences for the campus and beyond. During the tax year of Harvard 2024, the university received around $ 687 million from the federal government for research, an amount that was good for around 11 percent of the university’s turnover.
The government can block the flow of federal money through a process called DeMarment. But the procedure is difficult and the outcome can be on appeal. Experts in the field of government contracts said that Mrs. McMahon’s letter indicated that the administration had not followed the normal procedure to put a recipient of federal funds on the black list.
Civil servants of Harvard are aware that even if they successfully challenge the tactics of the administration in court, Mr. Trump’s government could still take other steps to choke money that would be harder to fight.
The federal government often determines priorities for research that form the daily decisions of agencies about how and where federal dollars are issued. Some academics are worried that the government may leave study areas in which Harvard has deep expertise, so that the university researchers are effectively concluded. Or the administration could easily claim that Harvard’s proposals were incompatible with the needs of the government.
Jessica Tillipman, an expert in the field of contract legislation to the government to George Washington University, said it can be difficult to show that the government uses a back door to use a subsidy receiver on the black list.
“You actually have to demonstrate and pointing to concrete evidence, not just a feeling,” she said.
Still, she said, the letter from Mrs. McMahon Harvard could offer an opening to dispute a long -term series of subsidies.
“It’s not that hard to prove,” said Mrs. Tillipman, “if you have a gigantic letter that said, by the way, we won’t give you these things anymore.”
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