Trump’s deal-making with other elite US schools scrambles Harvard negotiations

WASHINGTON – By the start of last week, Harvard University had signalled its readiness to meet US President Donald Trump’s demand that it spend US$500 million (S$643 million) to settle its

damaging, months-long battle with the administration

and restore its crucial research funding.

Then, two days after The New York Times reported that Harvard was open to such a financial commitment, the White House announced a far cheaper deal with Brown University: US$50 million, doled out over a decade, to bolster state workforce development programmes.

The terms stunned officials at Harvard, who marvelled that another Ivy League school got away with paying so little, according to three people familiar with the deliberations.

But Harvard officials also bristled over how their university, after months of work to address anti-Semitism on campus and with a seeming advantage in its court fight against the government, was facing a demand from Mr Trump to pay 10 times more.

The people who discussed the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing talks that are supposed to remain confidential.

White House officials are dismissive of the comparison between Brown and Harvard, arguing that their grievances against Harvard are more far-reaching, including assertions that the school has yet to do enough to ensure the safety of Jewish students and their claim that the school is flouting the Supreme Court’s ruling on race-conscious admissions.

“If Harvard wants the Brown deal, then it has to be like Brown, and I just think it’s not,” said Ms May Mailman, the top White House official under Mr Stephen Miller who has served as the architect of the administration’s crusade against top schools, in an interview in the West Wing last week.

Ms Mailman, who graduated from Harvard Law School, pointed out that Brown, unlike Harvard, did not sue the administration. She challenged Harvard to reach an agreement that included terms that would allow the government to more closely scrutinise its behaviour.

“If Harvard feels really good about what it’s already doing, then great,” she said. “Let’s sign this deal tomorrow.”

Harvard said on Aug 4 that it had no comment.

But the White House’s recent record of deal-making threatens to complicate the settlement talks, according to the people familiar with the talks.

University officials were sensitive to the possibility that a deal with the government – after Harvard spent months waging a public fight against Mr Trump – would be seen as surrendering to the President and offering him a political gift.

The terms of the Brown agreement, though, added new complexity to Harvard’s internal debates about the size of a potential financial settlement. For many people close to those discussions, spending US$500 million is less of a concern than what forking that money over would signal on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus and beyond.

For those close to the discussions, Mr Trump’s demand is far too large, and they argued that acquiescing to it would be seen as the university scrambling to buy its way out of Mr Trump’s ire.

They contended that Harvard has taken far more aggressive steps than Columbia University – which agreed to a US$200 million fine in July – to combat anti-Semitism. They also noted that Harvard, unlike Brown, did not publicly agree to consider divesting from Israel as a condition of ending campus protests in 2024. (Brown’s board ultimately voted not to divest.)

Others at Harvard regard Mr Trump’s proposal as a bargain for the school to get back billions of dollars in funding that make much of its society-shaping research possible.

Before the Brown deal, Harvard leaders and the school’s team were studying settlement structures that could insulate the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university from accusations that it caved to Mr Trump.

In their stop-and-start talks with the White House, they are expected to maintain their insistence on steps to shield the university’s academic freedom. To that end, they are also likely to remain equally resistant to a monitoring arrangement, which some fear would invite intrusions and stifle the school’s autonomy.

Harvard has been exploring a structure in which any money the university agrees to spend will go to vocational and workforce training programmes instead of the federal government, Mr Trump, his presidential library or his allies, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Harvard officials believe that such an arrangement would allow them to argue to their students, faculty, alumni and others in academia that the funds would not be used to fill Mr Trump’s coffers.

Harvard’s consideration of putting money towards workforce programmes aligns with some of what Mr Trump has espoused. In a social media post in May, the President talked up the prospect of taking US$3 billion from Harvard and “giving it to trade schools all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed”.

But no matter the structure, White House officials have made it clear that an extraordinary sum will be required to reach a settlement. Last week, after the Times reported the US$500 million figure, a journalist asked Mr Trump whether that amount would be enough to reach a deal.

“Well, it’s a lot of money,” he replied. “We’re negotiating with Harvard.”

Although Brown and Harvard are among the nation’s richest and most prominent universities, the schools have significant differences, especially around their finances.

The Trump administration has repeatedly castigated Harvard for its US$53 billion endowment, which is loaded with restrictions that limit how it may be used, but it has made far less fuss about Brown’s similarly tied-up US$7 billion fund.

Harvard also has much more federal research money at stake. The Trump administration has warned that it could ultimately strip US$9 billion in funding for Harvard; it threatened US$510 million in funding for Brown.

One reason the Brown deal has so miffed Harvard officials is that some terms look much like those they expected for themselves.

The government agreed, for instance, that it could not use the deal “to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech”. Brown avoided a monitoring arrangement, and the university won the right to direct its US$50 million settlement payment towards workforce programmes of its choosing.

But Harvard has a more antagonistic relationship with the Trump administration, as the university has sued the administration to stop its retribution campaign against the school.

That dynamic has fuelled worries at Harvard that the White House is seeking a far higher financial penalty as a punishment for fighting, not because the school’s troubles alone warrant US$500 million.

After Harvard refused a list of Trump administration demands in April, the university sued. In July, a federal judge in Boston appeared sceptical of the government’s tactics when it blocked billions in research funding from Harvard.

Before and after the July 21 hearing, the administration pursued a wide-ranging campaign against the university.

In addition to its attack on Harvard’s research money, the government has opened investigations, sought to block the school from enrolling international students, demanded thousands of documents and tried to challenge the university’s accreditation, which is essential for students to be eligible for federal student aid programmes, such as Pell Grants.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services told Harvard that it had referred the university to the Justice Department “to initiate appropriate proceedings to address Harvard’s anti-Semitic discrimination”.

“Rather than voluntarily comply with its obligations under Title VI, Harvard has chosen scorched-earth litigation against the federal government,” Ms Paula Stannard, the director of the health department’s Office for Civil Rights, wrote on July 31, referring to the section of federal civil rights law that bars discrimination on the basis of race, colour or national origin.

“The parties’ several months’ engagement has been fruitless.”

As Harvard president Alan Garber and other university leaders face the White House’s fury, they are also confronting campus-level misgivings about a potential deal with a president many at the school see as bent on authoritarianism.

At best, many at Harvard view Mr Trump as duplicitous and believe it would be risky for the university to enter a long-term arrangement.

“I think even the simplest deals with untrustworthy people can be challenging,” said Harvard economics professor Oliver Hart, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on contract theory. “But a continuing relationship is much, much worse, much harder.”

Prof Hart warned that, no matter the written terms of a settlement, the federal government would retain enormous power with effectively limitless financial resources to take on Harvard.

Ms Mailman, who recently left the full-time White House staff but remains involved in the administration’s higher-education strategy, all but dared Harvard to stay defiant.

“I think there’s still a deal to be had, but from our perspective, at the end of the day, Harvard has a US$53 billion endowment,” she said. “They don’t need federal funds. And even if they win a lawsuit, great. But what happens next year? What happens the year after?” NYTIMES