By Douglas Belkin and Liz Essley Whyte
The Trump administration has grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of escalating fireworks between the two sides that it is planning to pull an additional $1 billion of the school’s funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump administration officials, the people said, thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.
They were surprised on Monday when Harvard released the letter to the public. Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than Columbia University, but now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation’s most prominent university, according to the people.
People familiar with Harvard’s response say there was no agreement to keep the letter private, and that its contents—including requirements that Harvard allow federal-government oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff—were a nonstarter.
The letters to Harvard and other schools are coming from a new Trump panel called the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.
In an open letter to the community, Harvard President Alan Garber said the list of demands made clear that “the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner.” And, he added, “we have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement.”
People close to Harvard say the task force is now escalating the fight to protect its own reputation. The government’s demand letter to Harvard received blowback after the university released it, including from some on the right who publicly said it was overreach.
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