President Trump instructed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon Tuesday to extract at least $500 million from Harvard University as a condition of restoring $2.4 billion in federal grants.
“We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard. Don’t negotiate, Linda. They’ve been very bad,” Trump said as press cameras rolled during a Cabinet meeting.
Earlier this year, Trump stripped the Cambridge, Mass. school of its billions of dollars in federal funding because he said the school promoted DEI and that it discriminated against Jewish faculty and students for not providing enough protection from hate.
In July, the president said that Harvard ‘wants to settle’ after seeing Columbia University get all of its grant funding back in exchange for a $200 million fine to resolve civil rights violations.
More than $400 million in grants had been previously stripped away from the Morningside Heights institution.
The Trump-Columbia agreement appointed an independent monitor and demanded semi-annual reports on the Ivy League university’s compliance with Titles VI, VII and IX anti-discrimination laws
It also forced Columbia to pay out more than $20 million to Jewish employees who were discriminated against.
Columbia boasts a $14.8 billion endowment, while Harvard’s is around $53 billion — more than three times the size.
The Education Department has sought various policy changes from Harvard, including stricter rules against antisemitism and the sharing of foreign student information for federal vetting.
“We’re hoping that Harvard will come to the table,” McMahon told NewsNation’s “Morning in America” last month.
“We’re already seeing other universities that are taking these measures before investigation or before our coming in to talk to them.”
Harvard has challenged the grant freeze in federal court, arguing that taking the money violates the university’s First Amendment rights.
Boston US District Judge Allison Burroughs expressed skepticism at the Trump administration’s “ad hoc” decision to yank research dollars, most of which had been approved for scientific and medical work.
But the school is still being hit with complaints, most recently from the conservative group America First Legal (AFL) earlier this month, which alleged ongoing racial and sexual discrimination in a complaint filed with the DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights.
AFL outlined at least $49 million in taxpayer-funded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programming — including grants to “train and diversify” employees who are “underrepresented” and studies on “climate factors, racial/ethnic disparities, and menstrual cycle health”
Earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also upped the pressure by threatening to take over hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded patents and other inventions by Harvard faculty and students.
