The president of the USA, Donald Trump, asked that Harvard University loses a valuable tax exemption, hours after his administration announced the freezing of more than US $ 2 billion in federal funds for this prestigious institution.
The White House has demanded that the oldest university in the United States implement changes in its hiring, admission and teaching practices, which, it states, will help combat anti -Semitism on campus.
Since his return to the presidency in January, Trump has promoted the restructuring of the best US universities, threatening to retain federal funds, mainly aimed at research.
On Monday Harvard became the first great American university to reject the demands of his administration, accusing the White House of trying to “control” his community.
In a social media post on Tuesday morning, Trump threatened to go beyond the simple retention of federal funds and criticized Harvard’s tax exemption.
In the US, universities, as well as many beneficial organizations and religious groups, are exempt from the payment of federal income taxes. However, this valuable fiscal exemption can be eliminated if the groups are involved in political activities or deviate from their declared objectives.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose your tax exemption status and be taxed as a political entity if it continues to promote ‘disease’ with political, ideological and terrorist inspiration?” Trump wrote in Truth Social. “Remember, tax exemption depends totally on acting in public interest!”
Losing tax exemption could cost Harvard millions of dollars every year.
The radical changes required by the White House would have transformed Harvard’s operations and assigned much of the government’s control to the government.
Trump’s demands
In the letter that the White House sent to Harvard last Friday, obtained by the newspaper The New York Times, It was claimed that the University had not complied with the “conditions of intellectual and civil rights” that justify the investment of federal funds.
The letter included 10 categories for the proposed changes, including:
- Report to the federal government students who are “hostile” to US values
- Guarantee that each academic department has “diversity of views”
- Hire an external entity approved by the Government to audit the programs and departments “that most foster anti -Semitic harassment”
- Investigate teachers to detect plagiarism
President Trump has accused the main US universities of not having protected Jewish students when in the university campus throughout the country protests against the war in Gaza and the support of the United States to Israel were held last year.
By explaining his rejection of these demands of the federal government, the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, said that the University will not renounce its independence or its constitutional rights protected by the first amendment that protects freedom of expression.
“While some of the demands filed by the Government aim to combat anti -Semitism, most represent a direct government regulation of intellectual conditions in Harvard,” he said in his response letter.
“A vindictive act”
Shortly after Garber sent this letter, the Department of Education announced the immediate freezing of US $ 2.2 billion in subsidies and US $ 60 million in Harvard contracts.
“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the worrying mentality of privileges, endemic in the most prestigious universities and higher education centers in our country,” said the Department of Education in a statement.
David Armitage, Harvard’s history professor, told the BBC that the university could afford to resist Trump’s pressures, being the richest in the United States, and that no price was too high to maintain freedom.
“It is an act, as expected, totally unfounded and vindictive, by the Trump administration, whose sole objective is to silence freedom of expression,” he said.
In March, the Trump administration announced the review of approximately US $ 256 million in federal contracts and subsidies to Harvard, and other US $ 8.7 billion in multiannual subsidies commitments.
Harvard teachers filed a lawsuit in response, claiming that the government was illegally attacking freedom of expression and academic freedom.
Harvard, which has a heritage of US $ 53,000 million, is one of the several elite universities in the Trump government.
The University of Columbia, in New York City, agreed to a series of demands of the Trump administration last month after the White House threatened to withdraw US $ 400 million of federal funds.
The requests included the expulsion of students, the reform of their admission policies, the prohibition of carrying garments that cover the face and serve to hide the identity, and adopt and promulgate a definition of anti -Semitism.
Columbia also had to submit to his Department of Studies from Middle East to the “academic intervention” and the supervision of an official outside the institution.
A day before the deadline given by the Trump administration, Columbia Claudicó.
Other universities in the sights
In recent days it was reported that the federal government froze US $ 1 billion in funds for the University of Cornell, in the state of New York, and US $ 790 million for Northwestern University, near Chicago, waiting for the results of an anti -Semitism investigation.
Princeton University, in New Jersey, was informed that research scholarships would be suspended worth US $ 210 million and Brown University lost financing worth US $ 500 million.
“This confrontation has been created for several months and represents another attack by the Trump administration to the pillars of US democracy and society. And that is why Harvard has refused to be blackmail and to end their diversity programs,” Dafyddddddddddddddddddic, professor of American politics and international security at the University of Portsmouth, in the United Kingdom, told BBC world.
The experts agree that the cuts promoted by the Trump administration will endanger the viability of important research programs planned by the universities affected for a long time, not to mention the possible escape of brains.
“The drastic cuts that are coming will force universities to withdraw from research, which could leave only some groups of active research teachers. Worse, it could lead to the total collapse of the system,” Robert A. Brown, president emeritus of the University of Boston in the specialized magazine in the specialized magazine in the specialized magazine in the magazine Times Higher Education.
“The result could be that only the richest universities can sustain research and others wilt,” he added.