The News
US President Donald Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status Tuesday, escalating the tensions between the administration and the country’s oldest university.
The threat to tax Harvard as if it were a political entity comes after the Ivy League school rejected administration demands for widespread changes to its policies, prompting Trump to freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding.
The Ivy League’s president suggested the demands — which include screening international students over antisemitism — were illegal and equated to government overreach. While Columbia University capitulated to President Donald Trump’s demands, Harvard’s defiance marks a major rebuke to his crackdown on higher education.
SIGNALS
Harvard could open door to more institutional opposition to Trump
Harvard’s opposition to Donald Trump could encourage more universities to stand up to the administration: “If Harvard had not taken this stand… it would have been nearly impossible for other institutions to do so,” the president of the American Council of Education told The New York Times. Still, the university has sought to minimize tensions with the administration: It has hired lawyers close to the White House, dismissed some faculty targeted by conservatives, and adopted an expansive definition of antisemitism. Harvard must consider whether cooperation is even rewarded, The Atlantic argued — Columbia’s funding remains frozen. For now, Harvard seems likely to sue the Trump administration, several law professors told The Harvard Crimson., setting up another contentious legal test of presidential authority.
Trump allies push to expand pressure campaign
The president’s most ardent supporters are eager for the administration to expand its pressure campaign on higher education, seeing the schools as hotbeds for leftwing radicalism that have fostered damaging ideas about race and gender, The Economist argued. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo said the showdown with Columbia University can serve as a “prototype” for how to weaken progressive influence in schools, showing universities are “vulnerable to financial pressure and fold easily.” “Cutting off the funding spigot is a nuclear-type weapon of enforcement,” one education lawyer told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s outside the legal system and is a remarkable exercise of executive authority.”
Law firms offer a ‘playbook’ for how to organize
More than 500 law firms have signed an amicus brief backing a legal practice that has been targeted by the administration for its past work. The show of solidarity marks the industry’s first coordinated response to the pressure Donald Trump has exerted on the nation’s largest law firms, including barring lawyers from meeting government officials, instructing agencies to terminate contracts, and singling out companies in executive orders. The growing recognition in America’s institutions that capitulation is unlikely to succeed, insistence on due process, and unity suggest the “beginnings of a playbook for standing up to [Trump’s] attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy,” The New York Times editorial board argued.