By SUSAN JONES
Harvard University again took the lead in advocating for higher education during the past two weeks, when it filed suit on April 21 against the Trump administration, which has threatened to end billions of dollars in research funding if it doesn’t meet the government’s demands, according to the New York Times.
The administration has cast its campaign as a fight against antisemitism, but has also targeted programs and teaching related to racial diversity and gender issues. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, said that “as a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism.” But he said that the government was legally required to engage with the university about the ways it was fighting antisemitism. Instead, he said, the government has sought to control “whom we hire and what we teach.”
Two internal reports released this week by Harvard paint a picture of a hostile campus climate for Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab and Palestinian community members, and highlight perceptions that the university’s administration failed to support and protect students, faculty, and staff members from those backgrounds, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The reports are the work of two task forces that examined antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias during the 2023-24 academic year, as the campus was roiled by student encampments and protests surrounding the war in Gaza.
The fight between Harvard and the White House escalated this week as the Trump administration said it would investigate whether Harvard and the student-run journal, the Harvard Law Review, violated civil rights law when editors fast-tracked consideration of an article written by someone of a racial minority, according to The Guardian.
News of the investigation April 28 came hours after a federal judge agreed to expedite Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the administration’s freeze of $2.3 billion in federal funding. Garber said in a statement that the government is trying to wield “unprecedented and improper control,” and the consequences would be “severe and long lasting.”
In what could be another huge financial blow, President Trump said today that the government will be rescinding the Harvard’s tax-exempt status. "It’s what they deserve,” he said in a Truth Social post. The decision is likely to face legal challenges. Garber has said revoking the university’s tax-exempt status would be unlawful and endanger "our ability to carry out our educational mission.”
In related news, at least 84 senior faculty members at Harvard have pledged to donate 10% of their salary this year "as our contribution to the university’s financial resources while it legally contests these attacks," organizers said in a statement.
Here’s what else is happening in higher education:
April 17: Northwestern University, with approval from its board, committed to using its own resources to fund any research that is subjected to a stop-work order or impacted by a federal funding freeze, according to Higher Ed Dive. The institution had received stop-work orders on some 100 federal grants as of April 17 — “money that fuels important scientific breakthroughs,” they said.
April 18
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The National Science Foundation announced it had begun “terminating awards that are not aligned with agency priorities.” The grants being canceled include those focused on diversity, equity and inclusion and misinformation and disinformation. The New York Times reported that as of April 21, 400 grants had been canceled. A public database by Noam Ross, executive director of a nonprofit called rOpenSci, and Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, lists seven canceled projects at Pitt, including one on “Source Credibility, Political Identity, and Factual Belief Revision.”
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The New York Times reported that the April 11 letter sent by the Trump administration to Harvard University with a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” according to two people familiar with the matter. The letter prompted Harvard to say it would not comply with the demands and set off a battle between the White House and the Ivy League school.
April 20: The Education Department announced it will begin next month collecting on federal student loans that are in default from roughly 5.3 million borrowers. This marks an end to a period of leniency that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. No federal student loans have been referred for collection since March 2020, including those in default.
April 21: The NIH announced a new policy that if colleges and universities want to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, they’ll have to certify that they don’t operate any diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility programs that violate federal antidiscrimination laws, according to Inside Higher Education.
April 22: The American Association of Colleges & Universities published an open letter signed then by more than 130 higher education leaders (now it’s grown to more than 500), called “A Call for Constructive Engagement.” It addresses “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” See related story.
April 23
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Trump signed an executive order calling on the Office for Civil Rights and other federal agencies to end the use of disparate-impact liability — a legal concept that allows individuals to claim race-neutral and sex-neutral policies as discriminatory if they disproportionately harm certain groups or result in significant disparities. This will make it significantly more difficult for college students and employees to file complaints about systemic sexism and racism.
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One order signed by Trump called for harder enforcement of a federal law requiring colleges to disclose their financial ties with foreign sources, while another called for a shakeup of the accrediting bodies that decide whether colleges can accept federal financial aid awarded to students.
April 23: Faculty members of Columbia University and Columbia-affiliated Barnard College received text messages from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asking them to complete a survey inquiring about whether they are Jewish or Israeli, multiple news outlets reported April 23. Read more at Higher Ed Dive.
April 24
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The Education Department won’t be able to enforce its guidance that declared all race-based programming and activities illegal following two court orders, according to Inside Higher Education. Federal judges in New Hampshire and Maryland handed down the rulings after finding plaintiffs in the two separate lawsuits were likely to succeed in proving that the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter violated procedural standards and the First Amendment. Prior to the orders, colleges and K-12 schools that failed to comply with the letter risked their federal funding.
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The director of the National Science Foundation announced his resignation, 16 months before his 6-year term ends, in a letter to staff obtained by Diverse Issues in Higher Education. Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist, was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. Panchanathan didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, although NSF has been ordered by the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1,700-person staff.
April 25
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The Trump administration abruptly moved to restore thousands of international students’ ability to study in the United States legally, amid a wave of legal challenges. The administration characterized it as only a temporary reprieve.
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The Education Department opened an investigation into whether the University of California, Berkeley, is violating laws that require disclosure of foreign contributions and contracts worth more than $250,000.
April 29
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The University of Virginia Board of Visitors voted unanimously to rescind goals it set in 2021to double the number of underrepresented faculty by 2030 and to develop a plan for building a student population that better reflected the state’s racial and socioeconomic diversity, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Trump administration had warned university officials, only the day before, that it had received complaints that the university wasn’t acting fast enough to carry through on its promise to “dismantle DEI apparatuses.”
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The House Committee on Education and Workforce voted to advance a wide-ranging higher education bill that would reduce eligibility for Pell Grants, roll back Biden-era regulations, and put colleges on the hook for loans their former students don’t pay off. Committee Republicans say the plan would shave over $330 billion from the federal budget.
April 30
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Mohsen Mahdawi, an organizer of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia University who was detained when he went to a Vermont immigration office to finalize his U.S. citizenship, was freed from federal custody after immigration officials sought to rescind his green card, according to the New York Times. Federal Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford found that Mahdawi he did not pose a danger to the public and that he was not a flight risk. The judge referenced cases from the 1950s and the specter of McCarthyism, saying this was “not our proudest moment.”
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Duke University announced it is offering voluntary buyouts for employees and has frozen hiring as it braces for more federal funding cuts, according to Higher Ed Dive. Duke also signaled that layoffs were likely in the coming months, but said it is “pursuing several employment actions now in hopes of reducing the scale of involuntary separations later this summer.” The university, which has also frozen capital spending, said “a study is also under way to assess how certain changes to the university’s benefits may generate savings while protecting the program’s strong competitive position.”
May 1: The U.S. Department of Education unveiled guidance intended to make it easier for colleges to change accreditors and lifted a pause on its review of applications for new accrediting agencies.
May 2
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A federal budget plan released by President Trump would end funding for TRIO, federal work study and other grant programs that support students on campus, as well as cut nearly $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health, $12 billion from the Education Department, and nearly $5 billion from the National Science Foundation. It also eliminates funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, AmeriCorps, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities. The plan would need approval from Congress to move forward.
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The NSF announced it was cutting its indirect costs rate to 15% for all new grants.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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