![[left] Aerial view of Jet Set nightclub after roof collapse. [right] Rubby Perez doing a live performance there. Thumbnail done on Canva.](https://dmhsherald.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/HH-Thumnail-38-1200x777.png)
The news has spread that President Trump is adding and throwing around tariffs and tax related actions onto what feels like everything imaginable. However, for upcoming, present, and past students of the famous Harvard University in Massachusetts, this is almost unbelievable.
As of most recently, President Donald Trump has called for Ivy League school to lose a valuable tax break, hours after his administration announced it is freezing more than $2 billion in federal funds. Along with this the White House also demanded that the institution make extreme changes to hiring, admission choices, and teaching practices.
All of this is also supposed to “help fight anti-semitism on campus.” Since returning to office, and making many visual racial statements in his photos such as the token race kid in an earlier article, Trump has pushed to reshape top universities and colleges by threatening to withhold federal funds that are designated for research and other plans.
Harvard rejected these commands, becoming the first major US university to reject the President’s administration accusing the White House of trying to “control” its community. Trump responded to this threatening to go beyond the freeze, withholding the federal funds and targeting Harvard tax-exempt status.
Mr. President wrote on Truth Social, “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?” “Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
The increasing changes demanded by the White House would have transformed Harvard’s operations and ceded a large amount of control to the government. Its letter to Harvard on Friday said the university had failed to live up to the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” that justify federal investment. More changes included reporting students to the federal government who are “hostile” to American values, ensuring each academic department is “viewpoint diverse”, hiring an external government-approved party to audit programs and departments “that most fuel anti-semitic harassment”, and checking faculty staff for plagiarism.
President Trump on his run has accused leading universities of failing to protect Jewish students when college campuses around the country were roiled by protests against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel last year. The letter now orders the university(s) to take disciplinary action for “violations” and disturbances that happened during these protests.
In its explanation of rejecting of these demands, Harvard President Alan Garber said the university would not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights under the First Amendment protecting free speech. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard,” he said.
Shortly after his letter of resistance was sent, the education department said it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in contracts to Harvard immediately making the situation 2.2 billion dollars worse than before. “Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” the Department of Education said in a statement. The statement also included the disruption of learning plaguing campuses is unacceptable and the harassment of Jewish students is intolerable.
A professor of history at Harvard, David Armitage, told the BBC that the school could afford to resist as the richest university in the US and no price was too high to pay for freedom. “It’s a not unexpected act of entirely groundless and vengeful activity by the Trump administration which wants nothing more than to silence freedom of speech,” he said.
In March, the Trump administration said it was reviewing roughly $256m in federal contracts and grants at Harvard, and an additional $8.7bn in multi-year grant commitments. Harvard professors filed a lawsuit in response, alleging the government was unlawfully attacking freedom of speech and academic freedom. Harvard, which has a $53bn endowment, is one of a number of elite universities in the crosshairs of the new presidency. Columbia University in New York City agreed to a number of demands last month after the White House pulled $400m in federal funding.