By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2025-04-04 20:58:40 | Updated at 2025-04-05 00:27:48
3 hours ago
The Trump administration is demanding Harvard University ban face masks on campus, scrap DEI programs and clamp down on disruptive student protests and rampant antisemitism – if it wants to keep $9 billion in federal funding.
Government officials set out the terms in a stern letter Thursday, which accused the Ivy League of “fundamentally failing to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.”
The letter comes just weeks after Trump yanked roughly $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, citing the school’s noncompliance with anti-discrimination laws.
Like Columbia, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus has been a hotbed for student-led, anti-Israel protests and encampments since Hamas’ vicious Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Now, Harvard must limit the time, place and manner of campus speech and protests, and review academic departments that “fuel antisemitic harassment,” according to the letter signed by officials from the federal General Services Administration, the Education and Health and Human Services departments.
Those departments are required to address bias and improve viewpoint diversity.
The letter sent to Harvard President Alan Garber did not specify the departments at Harvard that need review and did not demand a change in leadership, as they did for Columbia’s Middle East studies department.
While Columbia was only given a week to comply with the demands, Harvard was not given a deadline.
The letter also called for firmer enforcement of the university’s existing discipline policies, as well as a report on all actions taken in response to antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on the Jewish state.
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School graduate who’s suing the university over campus antisemitism, supported the Trump administration’s crackdown.
“In the same way that the federal government threatened to withhold funds from racist school districts that refused to integrate, the power of the purse is the last tool available to coerce Harvard to treat all its students with equality and justice,” Kestenbaum wrote in an opinion piece for the school’s student newspaper, The Crimson.
Other demands included the adoption of “merit-based” university admissions and hiring policies and the termination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and compliance with a federal law requiring the disclosure of foreign gifts and contracts.
Federal officials notified Harvard on Monday that the university faces a “comprehensive review” to determine whether it will receive $255 million in contracts and more than $8 billion in grants.
In response, Garber said the school would provide a full accounting to the government.
Harvard had “devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism,” he insisted in a campus message.
Brown University became the latest school to see its federal funding paused as a result of its response to antisemitism on Thursday, when officials halted $510 million in grants and contracts.
With Post wires
