After Harvard rejects US demands, Trump adds new threat

US President Donald Trump threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status on Tuesday and said the university should apologise, a day after it rejected what it called unlawful demands to overhaul academic programmes or lose federal grants.

Beginning with Columbia University, the Trump administration has rebuked universities across the country over their handling of the pro-Palestinian student protest movement that roiled campuses last year following the 2023 Hamas-led attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Trump has called the protests anti-American, accused universities of "radical left" ideology, and promised to end federal grants and contracts to universities that do not agree to his administration's demands.

Trump said in a social media post on Tuesday he was mulling whether to seek to end Harvard's tax-exempt status if it continued pushing what he called "political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?'"

He did not say how he would do this. Under the US tax code, most universities are exempt from federal income tax because they are deemed to be "operated exclusively" for public educational purposes.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Trump wanted Harvard to apologise. She accused Harvard and other schools of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by recipients of federal funding based on race or national origin.

Under Title VI, federal funds can be terminated only after a lengthy investigation and hearings as well as a 30-day notice to Congress, which has not happened at Columbia or Harvard.

Some professors and students have said the protests are being unfairly targetted as a pretext for an unconstitutional attack on academic freedoms.

Columbia, a private school in New York City, agreed to negotiations over demands to tighten its protest rules after the Trump administration said last month it had terminated grants and contracts worth $400 million (AED 1.4 billion), mostly for medical and other scientific research.

Harvard President Alan Garber in a letter on Monday said demands the Trump administration made of the Massachusetts university, including an audit to ensure the "viewpoint diversity" of its students and faculty and an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, were unprecedented "assertions of power, unmoored from the law" that violated constitutional free speech and the Civil Rights Act.

Like Columbia, he said Harvard had worked to fight prejudice on its campus while preserving academic freedoms and the right to protest.

Hours after Garber's letter, the Trump administration's Joint Task Force said it was freezing more than $2 billion (AED 7 billion) in contracts and grants to Harvard, the country's oldest and richest university. The administration did not respond to questions about which grants and contracts had been cut, and Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.

Some Columbia professors have sued the Trump administration, saying the grant terminations violated Title VI and their constitutional speech and due process rights. A federal judge in New York ordered the Trump administration to reply by May 1.

After reading the Harvard president's letter, Columbia's interim president, Claire Shipman, said in a statement on Monday night that Columbia will continue "good faith discussions" and "constructive dialog" with the US Justice Department's antisemitism task force. "We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire," she wrote.