The Trump administration on Monday accused Harvard of violating the civil rights of its Jewish and Israeli students and threatened to cut off all federal funding if the university does not take urgent action.
Harvard has been at the forefront of Donald Trump’s campaign against top US universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”
Trump and his allies claim that Harvard and other prestigious universities are unaccountable bastions of liberal, anti-conservative bias and anti-Semitism.
In a letter sent to the president of Harvard, a federal task force accused it of failing to protect the students during campus protests against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Following an investigation, the task force concluded that “Harvard has been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” according to the letter.
The letter went on to say that the majority of Jewish students at Harvard felt they suffer discrimination on campus, while a quarter felt physically unsafe.
“Jewish and Israeli students were assaulted and spit on; they hid their kippahs for fear of being harassed and concealed their Jewish identity from classmates for fear of ostracization,” the letter said.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Harvard was in violation of civil rights legislation and “if you break federal law, you should not be receiving federal tax dollars.”
The school said it strongly disagreed with the government’s findings as it “has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism in its community.”
The Trump administration has also sought to remove Harvard from an electronic student immigration registry and instructed US embassies around the world to deny visas to international students hoping to attend the Massachusetts-based university.
Harvard has sued the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to block the efforts, arguing that they were illegal and unconstitutional and the courts have put those moves on hold for now.
International students accounted for 27 percent of total enrollment at Harvard in the 2024-2025 academic year and are a major source of income.
gl/bgs/md
© Agence France-Presse
