Trump says government will revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status
President Donald Trump says Harvard University will be stripped of its tax-exempt status, redoubling an extraordinary threat amid a broader chess match over free speech, political ideology and federal funding at the Ivy League school and across American academia.
“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump Friday morning on Truth Social.
Trump floated a trial balloon for the notion of removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and the Internal Revenue Service had been making plans to carry out the idea. CNN reached out Friday to the IRS and Harvard for comment.
Harvard’s president has the school “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
Harvard has emerged as the Trump administration’s most high-profile foe after the White House’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism last month announced a freeze of more than $2 billion in its federal research funding. The university sued for release of the money, with a resolution unlikely until midsummer at the soonest.
The Trump administration also has threatened to revoke the university’s ability to host international students if it doesn’t submit to a long list of demands, including: eliminating its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, banning masks at campus protests, enacting merit-based hiring and admissions changes, turning over foreign students’ discipline records, and reducing the power held by faculty and administrators who are “more committed to activism than scholarship.”
While the White House has said its aim is a crackdown on antisemitism following protests across U.S. campuses over the war in Gaza, scholars and prominent have expressed concern with its far-reaching attacks on Harvard.
Harvard in recent days has taken some symbolic steps toward the Trump administration’s ultimatums, renaming its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging as Community and Campus Life and cutting off resources for affinity group celebrations during commencement.
The university also with the Department of Homeland Security in response to its request for information on the illegal activity and disciplinary records of international students, though it did not detail what it gave.
And Harvard this week released two lengthy internal reports, one on how antisemitism and anti-Israel bias is handled on campus and another on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias. While school officials don’t entirely disagree with the White House’s position that antisemitism is a major problem at the university, that report shows, the sides still strongly disagree over who should decide what reforms are required and whether federal or school officials should oversee them.
Harvard’s steps so far to curb antisemitism are “positive,” a White House official told CNN this week, but “what we’re seeing is not enough, and there’s actually probably going to be additional funding being cut.”
