The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it is cutting an additional $450 million in grants to Harvard University after freezing $2.2 billion last week.
“Harvard University has repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus,” the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement.
“This is just the latest chapter in Harvard’s long-standing policy and practice of discriminating on the basis of race as recognized by the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, where the Court rebuked Harvard for its unlawful race discrimination in admissions,” the task force continued. “That shameful legacy has continued on as recognized by Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which lays bare an appalling reality: Jewish students were subjected to pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation, with no meaningful response from Harvard’s leadership.”
The task force further called the nation’s oldest and richest school “a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination.” It pointed to recent reporting alleging Harvard Law Review’s (HLR) “pattern of endemic race discrimination when evaluating articles for inclusion in its journal,” as well as HLR awarding a $65,000 fellowship to a student who faced criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student on campus.
“This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement. There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support,” the taskforce said. “As a result, eight federal agencies across the government are announcing the termination of approximately $450 million in grants to Harvard, which is in addition to the $2.2 billion that was terminated last week.”
The Trump administration first began freezing funds to Harvard after school leadership said in April that it would not agree to several changes requested by the government, CNN reported. Some of those requested changes included “governance and leadership reforms” and an audit of the “viewpoint diversity” of staff and students.
Harvard subsequently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, accusing the government of trying to use federal funding “as leverage to gain control of academic decision making at Harvard.”
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” university president Alan Garber said at the time. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
The case is scheduled for oral arguments in July, so funding is likely to stay frozen until then, according to the report.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton
