Donald Trump targets Harvard University, issues list of demands

Donald Trump appears to be on a university rampage, and Harvard is the first on his hit list.

US President Donald Trump wants to get what he pays for. And that includes his preferred brand of university graduates and scientists.

To get them, he’s willing to take on the wealthiest independent educational institution in the world.

Harvard University has been issued a list of demands that it must meet – or have $US9 billion in government grants and funding cut.

Existing diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programs must be revoked. New “viewpoint diversity” standards must be imposed on campus admissions, hiring and promotions. Antisemitic activities must be stopped. Activist behaviour must be suppressed.

“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘SICKNESS?’” Trump threatened in a Truth Social post.

“Remember, tax-exempt status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

Harvard has rejected his demands.

“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,” Harvard University President Alan Garber wrote in an open letter to the White House.

Within hours, Trump’s administration responded by freezing $2.2 billion in grants and contracts.

US President Donald Trump has issued Harvard University a list of demands. Picture: Pool via AP

Harvard isn’t his only target.

Over the past month, more than $US11 billion in research funding has been frozen or cancelled at several high-profile US campuses.

Students are being targeted. As are academics.

A kidney transplant researcher from Brown University, Rhode Island, was deported back to Lebanon after returning from a visit. This was despite having a valid visa.

A French astrophysicist travelling to Houston for an international conference had his phone and laptop confiscated by Department of Homeland Security border police. He says he was denied entry based on social media posts critical of Trump’s policies. They say he had “confidential” US research data on his devices.

“American democracy is under threat. Not from the external existential threats it faced over the past century, such as communism and Islamic fundamentalism, but from within its own system,” argues University of Portsmouth international security analyst Dafydd Townley.

Incubators of Terrorism?

The 47th President has long attacked what he calls a “far-left bias” in academia.

”We are going to choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilisation itself,” Trump promised in a 2023 speech. “The days of subsidising communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.”

Since coming to office in February, Trump has proven true to his word.

”The disruption of learning that has plagued campuses in recent years is unacceptable,” Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said in a statement Tuesday. “It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support.”

But the justification for using such heavy-handed tactics goes far beyond disrupted classes.

White House officials have accused universities of supporting terrorist organisations, including Hamas in Palestine and the Houthis in Yemen. But mostly institutionalised antisemitism.

Columbia University has had $US400 million in federal contracts cancelled. The White House says this was because of repeated failures to protect Jewish students from harassment.

“Given how Columbia allowed lawless antisemitism to run riot on its campus, we applauded the result, but warned that the Trump tactics were ominous,” the Wednesday editorial of the conservative National Review insists.

Trump has threatened to slash Harvard’s funding if it doesn’t meet his demands. Picture: Photo by Joseph Prezioso/AFP

“The administration is also right to invoke the federal government’s legitimate interest in preventing hostile foreign states and terrorist groups from infiltrating students into the American educational system, with the sorts of results that we saw at Columbia.”

University students triggered the mass protests against the Vietnam War. They have also been instrumental in opposing authoritarian regimes in Soviet Union, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere.

“Universities have traditionally been bastions of independent thought,” argues Townley.

Now, those same universities “are also seen by many in the administration as a hotbed of “woke” activism,” he adds.

But the serious accusation of antisemitism is problematic. Many of those protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on the Palestinian Gaza Strip are Jews themselves.

”Jewish students at Yale were one of the biggest identity groups participating in the encampments and the protests,” argues Jason Stanley, a philosopher and author of the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

The Jewish academic resigned his post at Yale last month to move to Canada.

“This regime is drawing a distinction between good Jews and bad Jews, and we know the history of that,” he said. “The United States is getting to be a scary place generally … I want my kids to grow up in conditions of freedom.”

Equal and Opposite Reaction

The cuts are “dismantling the very infrastructure that made the United States a scientific superpower,” argues the science journal Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01146-4

“At best, US research is at risk from friendly fire; at worst, it’s political short-sightedness.”

Patents. Products. Cutting-edge technologies.

The steady flow of reliable federal government funding that emerged from the desperate days of World War II has underwritten the long-term scientific and engineering research needed to produce results.

It also means US institutions can afford to snap up promising, but unsupported, research from the likes of Europe and Australia and carry it through to a productive conclusion.

“Collectively, US universities spin off more than 1100 science-based start-up companies each year,” Nature points out.

This includes “countless products that have saved and improved millions of lives, including heart and cancer drugs, and the mRNA-based vaccines that helped to bring the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic”.

This academic-government partnership saw $US201.9 billion injected into research in 2025 alone.

Harvard University has rejected Trump’s demands. Picture: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

“By partnering with universities, the agencies get more value for money and quicker innovation than if they did all the research themselves,” Nature adds.

Until now, US universities have been largely free to manage their own internal affairs.

But most have become heavily reliant on the White House for financial support.

“(Funding) will always come with strings attached, whether or not someone is pulling them as unapologetically as Donald Trump,” the National Review states.

The editors of the journal Nature see things differently.

“Today, this engine is being sabotaged in the Trump administration’s attempt to purge research programs in areas it doesn’t support, such as climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion, and to rein in campus protests,” they state.

Trump’s demands are extensive.

“Most of these are fine goals, and some (such as finally terminating the university’s efforts to evade a Supreme Court – ordered end to its use of race discrimination in admissions) ought to be uncontroversial,” the National Review insists.

But Harvard is uniquely positioned to survive a protracted fight with the White House.

The school to America’s rich and famous has amassed enormous wealth over four centuries of endowments. It’s believed to have cash reserves of some $US50 billion.

And the National Review admits that Trump’s methods are concerning.

“The overall impact of these demands would be pervasive federal monitoring of how the university is governed,” the editorial states. “The federal government simply should not have this power.”

The White House says it has more in store for US campuses.

It appears to be implementing a radical policy of redirection and control proposed by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 guidelines.

“Why is this all so worrying? The legal system, the media and universities are the pillars of US democratic freedoms,” argues Townley

“The Trump administration’s undermining of these institutions is a blatant attempt to impose an authoritarian rule by bypassing any counterbalance to executive power. And the US Supreme Court has ruled that he is almost entirely immune from prosecution while doing it.”

Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @jamieseidel.bsky.social

Originally published as Donald Trump targets Harvard University, issues list of demands