On April 14, 2025, just hours after Harvard’s representative lawyers rejected a list of demands from the Trump administration, which included changes to its governance, admissions, and hiring practices, the administration announced it would freeze $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University. This move marked just one of the many aggressive steps the administration had taken to pressure Harvard into compliance. 

The attack on Harvard by the Trump administration is extensive and complex. The endeavor, which began as a task group purportedly established to investigate campus antisemitism, has grown into at least eight ongoing investigations involving six federal agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services. Since April 14, these agencies have launched investigations and frozen funding on multiple fronts: 

April 22: Freezing of approximately 500 NIH grants totaling $1 billion to Harvard’s affiliated institutions.

May 5: Notification that Harvard was disqualified from all future federal grants, citing broad grievances unrelated specifically to antisemitism or transgender issues.

May 13: Termination of $450 million in grants from eight federal agencies, accusing Harvard of fostering “virtue signaling and discrimination.”

May 19: Withdrawal of $60 million in grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over alleged failures to address antisemitism and racial discrimination.

Donald Trump has also repeatedly threatened to "take away Harvard's tax-exempt status.” Harvard "signed it would challenge this too," claiming there is no legal justification for such a move; as a result, this strategy hasn't worked.

The pressure has not stopped at finances. With Harvard refusing the back down, the administration has gone far enough to start targeting Harvard’s international student population. Due to claimed dangerous campus conditions and discriminatory diversity practices, the Department of Homeland Security moved to remove Harvard's certification to admit overseas students. About 6,800 international students, or roughly 27% of Harvard's student body, had their legal status in jeopardy as a result of this action. In response, Harvard filed a lawsuit, claiming that the regulation violated federal law and free expression and was a retaliatory step against the university for protecting its academic independence. After that, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, which permits the university to keep accepting overseas students while the case is pending.

Underlying the heavy assault on Harvard is a broader conservative campaign to reshape America’s higher education. Indeed, it is not a singular episode; rather, it is the most recent development in a conservative effort that has been aimed at undermining and controlling American higher education for decades. This conflict, which has its roots in strategies from the McCarthy era and Ronald Reagan's attempts to control faculty appointments, demonstrates a calculated technique "part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism" meant to undermine establishments that support critical thinking and independent thought. Harvard has taken a rare and vital step against authoritarian encroachment by refusing to abide by the Trump administration's demands, which include government-appointed audits of "viewpoint diversity" and the immediate termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs

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According to experts, this attack on universities is an attack on democracy as a whole, not just on education. These initiatives "represent a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country’s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe," according to Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors. The Trump administration is imitating totalitarian governments that aim to destroy independent institutions that develop an informed populace that can oppose authoritarianism by trying to restrict what universities can teach, who they can admit and hire, and what programs they can offer.

Although the administration claims that this crackdown is in response to college antisemitism or civil rights violations, many people believe that this reason is deceptive. The true objective is unmistakable: to suppress unsettling facts about history, institutional racism, and inequality—topics that contradict conservative doctrine and the sanitized narratives they opt for. The consequences for smaller public universities and the larger picture of American higher education are severe if Harvard, with its enormous resources and longstanding reputation, can be so viciously assailed.

This circumstance emphasizes how critical it is to safeguard academic institutions' autonomy from political interference.