The administration of United States President Donald Trump has slashed another $450m in grants from Harvard University, amid an ongoing feud over anti-Semitism, presidential control and the limits of academic freedom.
On Tuesday, a joint task force assembled under Trump accused Harvard, the country’s oldest university, of perpetrating a “long-standing policy and practice of discriminating on the basis of race”.
“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement,” the task force said in a statement.
“By prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support.”
The elimination of another $450m in grants came in addition to the more than $2.2bn in federal funds that were already suspended last week, the task force added.
The feud between the president and Harvard – a prestigious Ivy League campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts – began in March, when Trump sought to impose new rules and regulations on top schools that had played host to pro-Palestinian protests over the last year.
Trump has called such protests “illegal” and accused participants of anti-Semitism. But student protest leaders have described their actions as a peaceful response to Israel’s war in Gaza, which has elicited concerns about human rights abuses, including genocide.
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