In a move that may place further pressure on Harvard University to negotiate its way to restore funding from the federal government, the Trump administration formally notified the school that it violated federal civil rights laws in its mishandling of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campus.
The “Notice of Violation,” which was sent to Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, on Monday, disclosed the findings of a federal investigation into the school’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars entities that receive federal funding from discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin.
The agency conducting the probe, the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, concluded that Harvard “has been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” putting the university “in violent violation” of federal civil rights law.
The agency listed out several specific discoveries, including its findings that “Jewish and Israeli students were assaulted and spit on,” images with antisemitic tropes — including swastikas and dollar signs — were “widely circulated among the Harvard community,” and that a majority of Jewish students experienced “negative bias or discrimination” on campus, while a quarter felt “physically unsafe.”
In terms of institutional failures, the agency concluded that the school’s leaders allowed the campus to be overrun by demonstrations that “flagrantly” violated the school’s rules of conduct — in which anti-Israel protestors called for “genocide and murder” and denied Jewish and Israeli students access to spaces on campus — and also failed to immediately disperse a weeks-long encampment that “instilled fear in, and disrupted the studies of” Jewish and Israeli students. “Even worse,” the government writes, the punishments that the school eventually doled out to the offending students were “lax and inconsistent.”
The letter noted that Harvard “did not dispute our findings of fact, nor could it” and that the school’s “inaction in the face of these civil rights violations is a clear example of the demographic hierarchy that has taken hold of the University.” The government then informed Harvard that it would immediately lose out on “all federal financial resources” should it fail to “institute adequate changes.”
Such a notice typically indicates that the Justice Department is gearing up to launch a lawsuit, or, on the other hand, signals that a voluntary resolution may be underway. The administration issued a similar notice to Columbia University last May, and has since been working with the New York City-based Ivy to negotiate an agreement to restore its federal funding.
The letter comes amid reports that Harvard may be reconsidering its defiant approach to the government’s multi-pronged crackdown. Two weeks ago, President Trump announced on Truth Social that his administration was currently working on a settlement with Harvard and that a deal might be announced “over the next week or so.” The president offered Harvard’s leaders rare praise, writing that they “have acted extremely appropriately during these negotiations, and appear to be committed to doing what is right.”
Last week, Mr. Garber reportedly confirmed to top donors that the university had reopened dialogue with the White House, though he declined to offer specifics on a potential settlement.
It’s not yet clear what such an agreement would look like, or what concessions would be made on either side. In April, the administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard after the school refused to implement a list of broad reforms to quash antisemitism and anti-conservative bias on campus.
The following month, the Department of Homeland Security informed Harvard it was stripping the university of its student and exchange visitor program certification — which allows it to enroll some 7,000 international students — due to Harvard’s “failure to comply with simple reporting requirements,” for fostering an “unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students,” and for employing “racist” diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Both measures pose serious challenges to Harvard’s status as a leading research institution and threaten to uproot the school’s day-to-day operations. The school responded by challenging both moves in federal court.
The school succeeded in temporarily blocking the government’s foreign student ban via a preliminary injunction. However, Harvard is still frozen out of the billions in revoked federal funding and will continue to be at least through the end of July, when the lawsuit is scheduled to take place.
A settlement agreement is likely to please some of Harvard’s top donors which have, for weeks, been quietly urging Mr. Garber to restore its relationship with the federal government through dialogue, not the courts. Faculty and students, on the other hand, have pitched their support behind Mr. Garber’s resistance, hailing him as somewhat of a folk-hero on campus.
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