Harvard president says top university not to yield to federal demands over student rights

The president of Harvard University has refrained from complying with a new list of demands from the US administration to maintain access to federal funding as part of Washington’s crackdown on pro-Palestine academic protests.

Alan Garber announced in a message to the Harvard community on Monday that the university officials would not yield to US President Donald Trump’s administration’s litany of “unprecedented” demands and pressure campaign over the funding.

Garber said the federal government had overstepped its authority by issuing an ultimatum after the Trump administration said it would review $9 bn of federal grants and contracts, including Harvard’s research hospitals, as part of its proclaimed effort to “root out antisemitism.”

In one case, the US government had demanded that a third party audit the viewpoints of students, faculty and staff and that Harvard curtail the power of certain instructors and administrators involved in activism.

The Trump administration had also demanded that Harvard ban face masks and close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it claims teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes.”

The administration also called for Harvard’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities to reform its admissions process for international students.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote in the community message.

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

The Harvard president's rejection would escalate the row between the Ivy League institution and the Trump administration, which threatened the university with the loss of $9 billion in federal funding over what it claimed was a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

‘Gun to the head’: Harvard professors sue Trump admin over funding threat tied to pro-Palestine activism

Harvard University professors have filed a lawsuit against the Donald Trump administration in an attempt to block its review of nearly $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the Ivy League school.

Universities and academic institutions across the United States and Europe have been the scene of widespread pretests against Israel's atrocious onslaught on the Gaza Strip over the past year after the regime started ravaging the besieged Palestinian territory on October 7, 2023.

The Trump administration has begun following through on a threat to deport all non-citizen university activists with ties to the pro-Palestine protests, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently saying that Washington had revoked at least 300 foreign students’ visas.

Trump officials have accused these students of being “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the US over their condemnation of Israel’s months-long genocidal war on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, at least 50,983 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 116,274 other individuals have been injured in the brutal Israeli military onslaught on Gaza since October 7, 2023.

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