Inside Trump’s pressure campaign on universities
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The Trump administration has expanded its focus to six more of the nation’s most exclusive universities, including Harvard.
PHOTO: SOPHIE PARK/NYTIMES
Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder and Jonathan Swan
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As he finished lunch in the private dining room outside the Oval Office on April 1, US President Donald Trump floated an astounding proposal: What if the government simply cancelled every dollar of the nearly US$9 billion (S$11.84 billion) promised to Harvard University?
The administration’s campaign to expunge “woke” ideology from college campuses had already forced Columbia University to strike a deal.
Now, the White House was eyeing the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.
“What if we never pay them?” Mr Trump casually asked, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, to describe the private discussion. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
The moment underscored the aggressive, ad-hoc approach continuing to shape one of the new administration’s most consequential policies.
Mr Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money
Their effort was energised by the campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, demonstrations during which Jewish students were sometimes harassed.
Soon after taking office, Mr Trump formed the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is scrutinising leading universities for potential civil rights violations and serving as an entry point to pressure schools to reassess their policies.
It is backed by the influence of Mr Stephen Miller, who is Mr Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and the architect of much of the President’s domestic agenda.
The opaque process is upending campuses nationwide, leaving elite institutions, long accustomed to operating with relative freedom from Washington, reeling from a blunt-force political attack that is at the leading edge of a bigger cultural battle.
The task force includes about 20 administration officials, most of whom the government has not publicly identified, citing potential security risks. They meet each week inside a rotating list of federal agency headquarters in Washington to discuss reports of discrimination on college campuses, review grants to universities, and write up discoveries and recommendations for Mr Trump.
On a parallel track, a few powerful aides in the West Wing, including Mr Miller, have separately moved to stymie funding for major institutions without formally going through the task force.
These aides have spoken privately of toppling a high-profile university to signal their seriousness, said two people familiar with the conversations.
And they have already partially suspended research funding for more than twice as many schools as has the task force, according to those familiar with their work.
This account of the inner workings of the higher education pressure campaign is based on interviews with more than two dozen senior administration officials, university leaders and outside advisers for both sides. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations or because they feared retribution against their campuses.
The White House scored an early win with Columbia’s capitulation
Since then, the Trump administration has expanded its focus to six more of the nation’s most exclusive universities, including Harvard.
By the time Mr Trump privately discussed stopping all payments to Harvard, the task force had opened a funding review.
That led the administration to send the university a list of demands, including that it bring in an outsider “to audit those programmes and departments that most fuel anti-Semitic harassment or reflect ideological capture”.
The government also insisted that Harvard change hiring and admissions in departments that “lack viewpoint diversity” and “immediately shutter” any programmes related to diversity
Harvard said on April 14 that it would not acquiesce.
The university’s president, Dr Alan M. Garber, wrote in an open letter that most of the administration’s demands “represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard”.
The university, Dr Garber added, “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”.
In a separate letter, two outside lawyers representing Harvard told administration officials that the university “is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.
Hours later, the task force announced a freeze of more than US$2.2 billion in grants and contracts for Harvard.
The scope of the administration’s campaign is now poised to widen. The Education Department has warned 60 universities that they could face repercussions from pending investigations into accusations of anti-Semitism.
“We’re not looking to just file lawsuits – we want to compel a cultural change in how Jewish Americans are treated on college campuses,” Attorney-General Pam Bondi, a member of the task force, said in an interview.
But the effort has gone beyond addressing anti-Semitism, with schools targeted for diversity programmes and supporting transgender athletes.
In the view of some of Mr Trump’s closest advisers and key donors, leftists have seized control of America’s most powerful institutions, including pillars of higher education, and wresting back power is key to the future of Western civilisation.
“The universities seem all powerful and they have acted as if they were all powerful, and we’re finally revealing that we can hit that where it hurts,” Mr Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has championed the strategy, said in an interview.
Protests provide an angle
During 2024’s presidential campaign, Mr Trump looked out from his rally stages and described a nation he viewed as rife with discrimination against conservatives.
And for him, nowhere was political injustice as pervasive as on college campuses run by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics”.
Weeks after opening his third presidential bid, Mr Trump had announced a “free speech policy initiative”, promising to strip federal research dollars and student loan support from universities involved in what he generalised as “censorship activities or election interferences”.
Six months later, he complained about “racial discrimination” in higher education, suggesting universities were increasingly hostile to white students.
He vowed to open civil rights investigations into schools that promoted diversity, and he doubled down on those threats when the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in college admissions.
At the same time, Mr Miller, the long-time adviser of Mr Trump, was working on similar issues at America First Legal, the non-profit he started during the Biden administration.
The group has sued New York University and Northwestern University, accusing them of discriminating against white men.
Mr Trump turned more forcefully to combating anti-Semitism as a political rallying cry after Oct 7, 2023, when Hamas militants led an attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel in what was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
War in the Gaza Strip followed, and so did months of protests, particularly among pro-Palestinian students on college campuses.
The key players
The task force to combat anti-Semitism was announced Feb 1, with the stated goal to “eradicate anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses”. The exact metrics to measure that progress remain unclear.
The administration has declined to identify all members of the group, but its titular head is Mr Leo Terrell, senior counsel in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
A fixture on social media and Fox News’ Hannity show, Mr Terrell is a Trump favourite.
The public face of the task force has largely been Ms Linda McMahon, the education secretary. Other identified members include Mr Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the General Services Administration, and Mr Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel at the health department.
Coordinated through the Justice Department’s civil rights division, the task force also includes officials from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The commission is investigating “dozens” of anti-Semitism complaints on college campuses that could become part of the task force’s investigation, according to two task force members.
The group also includes data specialists, civil rights lawyers and former academics in the government.
In February, task force members announced a special focus on 10 universities: Columbia; George Washington University; Harvard; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California.
The task force said it planned to visit each school and hold meetings with administrators, students, local law enforcement officials and community members.
By going after Columbia and Harvard early, the task force set the tone.
The goal, one senior administration official said, was to make examples of elite schools
The White House also zeroed in on five schools – Brown University, Cornell University, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, according to people familiar with the process.
All have had millions in federal funding suspended, threatening projects, laboratories and jobs, and upending a multigenerational pact between the government and universities. Since around World War II, colleges have been at the heart of the American research system.
A scramble to respond
Some universities got wind that their institutions were under scrutiny only when stop-work orders for federally funded research trickled in.
On one campus, a faculty member heard from a government program officer that a cut to research money was imminent – a warning that sent campus leaders scrambling.
Dr J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s president, said in March that the university learnt “through various news outlets” that the Trump administration was suspending about US$175 million for research projects.
Brown’s provost sent a memo about “troubling rumours” shortly before White House officials said, with little fanfare, that the administration planned to stop US$510 million in funding.
After The Daily Caller, a conservative media outlet, reported that US$210 million in research funding to Princeton was suspended, the university’s president, Mr Christopher Eisgruber, wrote in a campus email that “the full rationale for this action is not yet clear”.
When The New York Times asked the White House for comment, a spokesperson replied with a link to a Daily Caller reporter’s social media post and only three words: “This is accurate.”
Some school administrators have said that murkiness has complicated considerations of court challenges.
They are left feeling in the dark, one university official said.
Mr Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic in March that the Trump administration’s moves against Columbia were creating “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s”.
“There is a pattern here of intrusions in academic freedom of strong universities that should be of concern to every American,” he said in an interview on The Daily – a podcast from the Times.
In the scramble for self-defence, some university leaders have reached out to Jewish activists to push back on what they view as the administration’s overly broad definition of anti-Semitism.
Other schools have focused on outreach to Mr Trump through his allies. Harvard hired as a lobbyist Mr Brian Ballard, a former Trump campaign finance chair whose firm once employed Ms Susie Wiles, Mr Trump’s chief of staff, and Ms Bondi.
Dartmouth installed a former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee as the college’s top lawyer.
But it is unclear how much these connections will help. The key staff members on the issue inside the West Wing are Mr Miller; Mr Vince Haley, the head of the domestic policy council; and Ms May Mailman, senior policy strategist – all three of whom are seen as hard-line culture warriors resistant to lobbying.
Seeking generational change
In the long run, the goal of Mr Trump and his allies is to permanently disrupt the elite world of higher education.
“We want to set them back a generation or two,” Mr Rufo said. NYTIMES
