Trump reiterates plan to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status
US President Donald Trump says Harvard University will be stripped of its tax-exempt status, redoubling an extraordinary threat amid a broader chess match over free speech, political ideology and federal funding at the Ivy League school and across American academia.
“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump posted Friday morning on Truth Social, News.Az reports, citing CNN.
Trump floated a trial balloon April 15 for the notion of removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and the Internal Revenue Service had been making plans to carry out the idea.
Harvard’s president has said the school “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
Harvard has emerged as the Trump administration’s most high-profile foe after the White House’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism last month announced a freeze of more than $2 billion in its federal research funding. The university sued for release of the money, with a resolution unlikely until midsummer at the soonest.
The Trump administration also has threatened to revoke the university’s ability to host international students if it doesn’t submit to a long list of demands, including: eliminating its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, banning masks at campus protests, enacting merit-based hiring and admissions changes, turning over foreign students’ discipline records, and reducing the power held by faculty and administrators who are “more committed to activism than scholarship.”
While the White House has said its aim is a crackdown on antisemitism following protests across US campuses over the war in Gaza, scholars and prominent Jewish organizations have expressed concern with its far-reaching attacks on Harvard.
Harvard in recent days has taken some symbolic steps toward the Trump administration’s ultimatums, renaming its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging as Community and Campus Life and reportedly cutting off resources for affinity group celebrations during commencement.
The university also shared data with the Department of Homeland Security in response to its request for information on the illegal activity and disciplinary records of international students, though it did not detail what it gave.
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