President Trump says his administration will probably settle with Harvard University over its defiant stance toward the White House over its concerns about campus antisemitism and merit-based hiring and admissions.
“They want to settle very badly. There’s no rush,” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “How much? A lot of money.”
Harvard could lose up to $ 1 billion in annual revenue by not cooperating with the Trump administration if the president decides to cut off all federal grants and research funding.
The Ivy League school is reaching out to some of its most affluent donors to help the university in its time of financial need to support its $6.4 billion annual operating costs, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, as its $53 billion endowment may not be enough to pull the school out of the hole.
However, donors have imposed limitations on over 80% of these contributions, so Harvard can’t access those funds without putting the school at legal jeopardy.
Mr. Trump’s push to revoke additional, if not all, federal contracts with Harvard has ramped up pressure on the nation’s oldest and wealthiest institution of higher learning.
In a matter of months, the Trump administration has frozen billions of federal grants to the school, threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status and sought to stop the university from enrolling foreign students.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s critics question why the school needs federal funding when it has a $50 billion endowment.
Harvard President Alan Garber has acknowledged that the university has problems to address but said the administration’s steps are “perplexing.”
“Why cut off research funding?” he recently said on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”
Sure, it hurts Harvard, he said, but it hurts the country because the research funding is not a gift to the school.
“The research funding is given to the university and other research institutions to carry out research work that the federal government designates as high-priority work,” Mr. Garber said. “It is work that they want done. … Shutting off that work does not help the country, even as it punishes Harvard, and it is hard to see the link between that and, say, antisemitism.”
Mr. Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism warned Mr. Garber in a letter recently that Harvard is in danger of losing “all federal financial resources,” but the school has struck a defiant stance, filing lawsuits against the administration, unlike other elite universities such as Columbia that have struck deals with the White House.
