The Trump administration is reportedly considering forcing fellow Ivy League school Columbia into a consent decree that would legally bind the school to follow federal guidelines in how it combats antisemitism.
Some Columbia professors, like those at Harvard, have sued the federal government in response. The government has suspended US$400 million in federal funding and grants to Columbia.
Harvard president Garber said the federal government’s demands that it “audit” the viewpoints of its students, faculty and staff to ferret out left-wing thinkers generally opposed to the Trump administration clearly violated the university’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote.
He added that while Harvard is taking steps to address antisemitism on campus, “these ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate”.
Harvard agreed in January to provide additional protections for Jewish students under a settlement resolving two lawsuits accusing the Ivy League school of becoming a hotbed of antisemitism.
To ease any funding crunch created by any cutoff in federal funding, Harvard is working to borrow US$750 million from Wall Street.
