US President Donald Trump said on Monday (May 26) he is considering taking US$3 billion of previously awarded grant money for scientific and engineering research away from Harvard University and giving it to trade schools.
His comments on his social media platform Truth Social come less than a week after his administration sought to block the Ivy League school from enrolling foreign students as part of Trump’s extraordinary effort to seize some government control of US academia.
Trump, a Republican, has frozen some US$3 billion in federal grants to Harvard in recent weeks, complaining that it has hired Democrats, “Radical Left idiots and ‘bird brains’” as professors. Harvard, a private university, has sued to restore the funding, saying the cuts are an unconstitutional attack on its free speech rights and unlawful.
Most of that grant money is appropriated by Congress for the National Institutes of Health to disburse to fund biomedical research after a lengthy application process by individual scientists, work that is not typically done at trade schools.
It was not clear whether Trump was referring to Harvard grants his administration has already frozen. Harvard has said it was told that virtually all of its federal grant awards were revoked earlier in May, in a series of letters by the NIH, the US Forest Service, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and other agencies.
The letters each said the grants were being suspended because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities.”
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Harvard did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. The White House did not respond to questions about the specific funds Trump wants to repurpose or how it could be reallocated to trade schools under the law.
On Friday, a US judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol foreign students, a policy the university said was part of Trump’s broader effort to retaliate against it for refusing to “surrender its academic independence.”
The order provides temporary relief to thousands of international students, who were faced with potentially having to transfer under a policy that the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts called a “blatant violation” of the US Constitution and other federal laws.
It said the move would have an “immediate and devastating effect” on the university and more than 7,000 visa holders.
Harvard enrolled nearly 6,800 international students in its current school year, representing 27 per cent of total enrolment and a significant chunk of its revenue from tuition fees.
The move was the latest escalation in a broader battle between Harvard and the White House, as Trump seeks to compel universities, law firms, news media, courts and other institutions to align with his agenda. Trump and fellow Republicans have long accused elite universities of left-wing bias.
In recent weeks, the administration has proposed ending Harvard’s tax-exempt status and hiking taxes on its endowment, and opened an investigation into whether it violated civil rights laws by discriminating against “white, Asian, male, or straight employees” or job or training programme applicants.
Harvard has said its hiring and admissions are compliant with the law. REUTERS
