The White House is directing federal agencies to cancel all remaining contracts with Harvard University – about $100 million in all, two senior Trump administration officials told CNN – the latest barb against the school as it refuses to bend to the White House’s barrage of policy demands amid a broader politically charged assault on US colleges.
“We recommend that your agency terminate for convenience each contract that it determines has failed to meet its standards,” reads a Tuesday letter to procurement executives from General Services Administration official Josh Gruenbaum, who also signed an April letter to Harvard with a series of demands on governance and curriculum the school rejected.
The New York Times first reported the latest planned cuts, which come on top of $2.65 billion in recent federal cuts to Harvard. The White House announced nearly two months ago it was reviewing about $9 billion in contracts and grant commitments the government had pledged to pay to Harvard over several years.
Tuesday’s letter repeats a litany of complaints against Harvard, including claims the university “continues to engage in race discrimination” in its admission process – the subject of a landmark Supreme Court decision – and shows a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students.”
CNN has reached out to lawyers for Harvard, which in recent weeks has borne the bulk of the White House’s ire against institutions it believes embody a liberal woke front.
The university near Boston broadly has refused many government demands, including that it hand over foreign students’ entire conduct records and allow audits to confirm it has expanded “viewpoint diversity.” But officials say they are complying with the Supreme Court’s order knocking down affirmative action and have taken steps to address antisemitism on campus.
“I don’t know fully what the motivations are, but I do know that there are people who are fighting a cultural battle,” Harvard President Alan Garber told NPR in an interview recorded and aired before the plans for new cuts came to light Tuesday.
“I don’t know if that is what is driving the administration,” Garber said. “They don’t like what’s happened to campuses, and sometimes they don’t like what we represent.”
The US Department of Education has warned US colleges and universities of possible consequences if they don’t take adequate steps to protect Jewish students and separately threatened federal funding of any American academic institution that considers race in most aspects of student life.
Harvard has been lashed on both fronts. The nation’s oldest and wealthiest university sued the Trump administration last month over its freeze of $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts, which it followed with the halt of another $450 million.
Garber said the loss of funding will affect people far beyond their Massachusetts campus.
“At the center of our university is teaching and learning. But actually, if you look at the activities of the university, so much of this is about research,” he told NPR. “There’s so many discoveries that have come from Harvard and other research universities, advances in cancer and treatments of cancer of all kinds.”
The Trump administration last week canceled Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, a move that was the subject of a brief telephone status conference with lawyers Tuesday after a federal judge put it on hold. The school has argued revocation of its certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program was “clear retaliation” for its refusal of the government’s ideologically rooted policy demands.
Trump further has threatened to cut off $3 billion more in Harvard’s federal grant funding and pull its tax-exempt status.
On Tuesday, organizers from the alumni group Crimson Courage rallied thousands of people online to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to slash remaining contracts, with some speaking in stark terms about the stakes of the fight.
New York Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, a Democrat and former member of Congress in a district won by Trump in 2016, called the university’s efforts a “moral fight.”
“What Harvard is, in many respects, is a test case for the Trump administration. The goal here is to figure out how much information can be controlled, how much dissent can be quashed, how much of the ability can they leverage by way of the power of the state to control the way we communicate?” the Harvard alum said.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Harvard alumna and another Democrat, noted the school’s international students “contribute $400 million to our local economy every year and support thousands and thousands of jobs.”
Trump, Healey said, is “directly undercutting our ability to attract the world’s talent.”
SOURCE:CNN
