Harvard, Trump freezes 2.2 billion in funding: 'Bullying of Jewish students'

Harvard is rebelling and being punished for its resistance to Donald Trump: with the president threatening on Truth Social to revoke the university's tax exemptions, the administration froze $2.26 billion in federal funds in retaliation for the world's richest university's refusal to give up its independence by changing its programmes as demanded by the White House. "There have been acts of anti-Semitism and bullying of Jewish students on the Harvard campus," said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt commenting on the cuts.

Yet America's most important university is not backing down. Deciding that there are more important things than money, Harvard has learnt the lesson of Columbia but, unlike the New York university that bowed to Trump's demands without, however, having its funding restored, the Massachusetts university has chosen the hard line. "Neither Harvard nor any other private university can afford to be occupied by the government," wrote William Burck and Robert Hur, the university's lawyers, who were perhaps chosen for their proximity to Trump's world.

An ethics advisor to the Trump Organisation, Burck represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the recent plea deal with the administration, while Hur in 2018 investigated the handling of top secret documents by then-Vice President Joe Biden, whom he described as 'an elder of good intentions and little memory'. By rejecting Trump's demands on recruitment, admissions and curriculum, some observers say the university has infused other universities in the country ready to capitulate to avoid incurring the president's wrath.

According to J. Michael Luttig, a well-known former judge respected by conservatives, the uprising could encourage resistance from law firms, courts, the media and other White House targets: 'This is a huge decision. It could be the turning point." Former President Barack Obama, himself a student of both Columbia and Harvard, praised his alma mater in Massachusetts as an example to other universities for rejecting "an illegitimate and misguided attempt to stifle academic freedom".

So did the professors at Yale, the only Ivy League university - and the alma mater of number two J.D. Vance - so far unaffected by the cuts. With an endowment to 2024 of $53 billion, Harvard receives $9 billion in federal funds that the Trump administration in recent weeks has put 'under review'.