“Antisemitism seems to be a useful scapegoat for policies that Trump is pursuing,” said Jacob Miller, a senior and former president of Harvard Hillel who believes the university needs to do more to address antisemitism on campus. “Obviously Republicans are opposed to DEI, and at a more fundamental level, opposed to universities.”
Roni Brunn, a spokesperson for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, said members of her “nonpartisan” organization are divided over the administration’s demands; some, she said, are “livid.”
“I can appreciate the stated goals,” Brunn said. “We need to be much more nuanced and much more careful about policies.”
The Trump administration has said Harvard and other elite universities failed to protect Jewish students from harassment in the wake of campus protests over the war in Gaza. Saying the university’s inaction amounts to a violation of federal civil rights law, the administration earlier this week threatened to cut off federal funding unless Harvard agrees to the demands outlined in a letter sent to officials Thursday.
Those include shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; implementing “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies; toughening student discipline procedures; and offering “full cooperation” with the US Department of Homeland Security, whose immigration agents have arrested and are trying to deport several foreign students of other elite schools for protesting or speaking out against Israel.
The ultimatum follows Monday’s announcement the administration will “review” $9 billion of federal grants and contracts awarded to the university and its affiliated institutions, including preeminent research hospitals like Mass General Brigham and Boston Children’s Hospital.
Earlier this week, Miller, the former campus Hillel leader, wrote in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson that, “objectively important academic endeavors like cancer research, economic policy study, and artificial intelligence scholarship are almost surely threatened by these broad fiscal slashes.”
Indeed, in one of the few public responses from Harvard, president Alan Garber wrote in a letter Monday that, “If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation.”
On Friday, a Harvard spokesperson would only confirm the university received the administration’s demands and would not comment further.
The Trump administration had made similar threats and demands of other elite universities, including Princeton, Brown, and Columbia universities. After being threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, Columbia on March 21 agreed to nearly all of Trump’s demands.
But Harvard had already taken steps to stamp out antisemitism, including replacing the leadership of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies amid allegations of biased programming; adopting a definition of antisemitism favored by the Trump administration, despite concerns that it tramples on free speech rights; and stricter regulation of student protests.
Nonetheless, the administration still made broad and wide-ranging demands of Harvard.
Some Jewish Harvard alumni earlier this week had welcomed the Trump administration’s funding review as reinforcement. They want Harvard to more strongly enforce discipline of pro-Palestinian student protesters, and end what some view as anti-Israel bias in some academic programs.
It is unclear who from the Harvard community is working with the administration on a federal antisemitism taskforce. A spokesperson for hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumnus who has been sharply critical of his alma mater’s handling of campus antisemitism, did not respond to a request for comment. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard graduate who sued the university last year, said earlier this week that he is in communication with the taskforce.
”I’m working in a personal capacity to ensure the taskforce and policymakers know exactly what is happening on these campuses,” Kestenbaum said.
But Lawrence Summers, who was the first Jewish president of Harvard and is now a professor at the school, said the university’s shortcomings in responding to antisemitism do “not justify massive government overreach without regard to legal process, and efforts to engage in extortion.”
“I hope Harvard and other universities will carry out necessary reforms, but will do so based on leaders’ convictions about what is right, and not on the basis of extralegal demands,” Summers said in an interview.
Some on campus urged caution, saying it is premature to refuse to comply with the administration’s requests.
“If the Trump administration’s actions are unlawful, it’s entirely appropriate to resist them in court, and even to do so collectively,” said Harvard law professor Noah Feldman. “It would be wrong for universities to refuse to comply with civil rights laws.”
Others, though, have been calling on Harvard to be a leader in any pushback to what they see as the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom. If Harvard leaders don’t stand up now, they said, it will be harder to reject additional demands that might threaten the university’s independence.
Mathias Risse, Harvard professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy, said he hopes university leaders will “call out the bullying and the gas lighting for what it is” and form an “alliance,” in which “universities are putting their heads together, rather than being taken out one at a time.”
“Harvard is the face of global higher education, and so just to roll over and acquiesce without doing something that can plausibly be interpreted as taking a stance and making an alliance, that will just be pernicious,” Risse said.
And Kenneth Roth, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former head of Human Rights Watch, said at a presentation in Cambridge Thursday evening that universities must join together and “resist” or the government will “pick off one independent voice after the other.”
Meanwhile, others on campus expressed concerns at the demand to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which the administration’s letter says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes.”
If Harvard capitulates on DEI, said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a visiting scholar at Harvard who is on sabbatical from Princeton University, there will be “significant departures” of faculty and students.
“You could expect that many students who understand that diversity, equity, inclusion programs were meant to solve an existing problem of the long histories of exclusion would no longer want to be at a place like Harvard,” Muhammad said.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.