Following the March 31 announcement that “a comprehensive review of federal contracts and grants at Harvard University and its affiliates” would be undertaken to ensure “compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities,” the federal government’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism last night detailed its demands (“next steps”) via a letter to President Alan M. Garber and Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker. The letter details “several broad, non-exhaustive areas of reform that the government views as necessary for Harvard to implement to remain a responsible recipient of federal taxpayer dollars. We look forward to a meaningful dialogue focused on lasting, structural reforms at Harvard,” including:
● Oversight and accountability for biased programs that fuel antisemitism. “Programs and departments that fuel antisemitic harassment” must be changed to “address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture.”
● Disciplinary reform and consistent accountability. This comprises a requirement that disciplinary policies be made consistent and centrally accountable—and a specific requirement that masking must be banned, so protestors can be identified, plus a “clarified” time, place, and manner policy governing protests. Atop these specifics, Harvard “must review and report on disciplinary actions for antisemitic rule violations since October 7, 2023.”
● Student groups and their leaders “must be held accountable for violations of Harvard policy.”
● “Harvard must make meaningful governance reforms to improve its organizational structure to foster clear lines of authority and accountability, and to empower faculty and administrative leaders who are committed to implementing the changes indicated in this letter.”
● Merit-based admissions reform. “Harvard must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies,” ceasing “all preferences based on race, color, or national origin…” and demonstrate that such changes are “durable.”
● Merit-based hiring reform. University hiring policies must “cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in hiring throughout its teaching and research faculty, staff, and leadership…” and demonstrate that such changes are “durable.”
● Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). “DEI programs teach students, faculty, staff, and leadership to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes, which fuels division and hatred based on race, color, national origin, and other protected identity characteristics. All efforts should be made to shutter such programs.”
● Cooperation with law enforcement. “Harvard must cooperate with law enforcement to ensure student safety.”
● Transparency and reporting. “Harvard must comply fully with existing statutory reporting requirements under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, commit to full cooperation with DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and other federal regulators, and make organizational changes as necessary to enable full compliance.”
The letter, signed by representatives of the General Services Administration, U.S. Department of Education, and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, proceeds from the premise that “Harvard University…has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” It concludes, “We expect your immediate cooperation in implementing these critical reforms….”
According to a University spokesperson, “Harvard received the letter from the federal task force Thursday afternoon,” but no further comment is yet available. It is known that following the March 31 government announcement, President Garber’s community letter promised to “engage” with the government to discuss its concerns. Last night’s letter is apparently the federal response to that outreach.
Dissecting the Demands
As has been the case in the government’s recent series of actions, beginning with its March 7 notification to Columbia that its research funding would be halted in response to alleged failures to protect Jewish community members during the protests stemming from the Hamas terrorism and war in the Middle East, the demands on Harvard are unaccompanied by any presentation of evidence usually underlying a Title VI case under the Civil Rights Act. And although the demands detailed in the letter proceed from the premise of the University’s failure to “protect American students and faculty of antisemitic violence and harassment,” they in fact address other Trump administration priorities—eliminating any DEI programs or policies, immigration enforcement—that are only tangentially related to antisemitism, if at all.
The first demand, that programs be subjected to oversight and accountability, appears less stringent than the government’s specific demand that Columbia place Middle Eastern studies and related programs under academic “receivership.” It is worth noting that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently moved to change the leadership of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and FAS and the University have instituted sweeping programs to promote diverse viewpoints and protect free, open discourse on campus and in classrooms; see this account of FAS’s discussion of these matters earlier this week. Beyond such specific measures, it is chilling to think about this or any university negotiating with the government about the parameters of intellectual “bias” or “ideological capture.”
As reported, the University’s disciplinary policies are complex not least because they are delegated to the individual schools (as is the case across Harvard’s research and teaching activities). That said, Harvard has repeatedly reemphasized its University policies on rights and responsibilities (and clarified how they will be centrally enforced)—a hallmark of President Garber’s administration since he assumed the office in January 2024. Harvard has also communicated about the tightened time, place, and manner rules on protests (and enforced challenges to them this year). And, this week, the University put a student group on probation for conducting a pro-Palestinian protest on Tuesday in violation of the rules. FAS has also adopted a series of recommendations to bring its College disciplinary process more directly under faculty supervision and control, and to conform College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences disciplinary outcomes.
A masking ban (also required of Columbia) of course has speech implications: protestors mask to conceal their identities, which can thwart enforcement of policies, but also to protect themselves and their speech acts from doxxing and harassment, which reached threatening levels on this and other campuses in the fall of 2023. The reporting requirement appears new; Harvard reports on disciplinary actions in only the most general ways, in part to comply with the 1974 federal law governing students’ privacy.
A general requirement to overhaul Harvard governance would involve its form of incorporation under the Commonwealth charter of 1650 and subsequent interpretations—a significant legal matter, not a snap of the fingers. The Corporation was enlarged and its internal operations were strengthened in 2010, but this new government request is a singularly sweeping, ill-defined demand, not susceptible to “immediate” change.
The University has repeatedly stated that it is in compliance with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling outlawing consideration of race in admissions—and of course it would be foolhardy for it to try to evade complying: it would be at extreme legal jeopardy. The new letter appears to assert that Harvard is not complying with the law in admissions and in hiring—but does so without advancing any evidence that that is the case. The Department of Education’s February 14 “Dear Colleague” letter to institutions of higher education asserts extraordinarily broad claims about diversity, and the Trump administration has promulgated similarly broad orders overturning decades of federal practice concerning affirmative action in hiring and contracting (which orders it is now systematically applying, for example, alleging that law firms maintain illegal diversity programs, and jawboning other private entities to repeal such programs or policies). This is, in other words, a broadly changed, and rapidly evolving, field of policy; Harvard is here being told to alter practices (which it has asserted, in admissions, it is not pursuing) to suit new policies in short order, all in the context of an investigation of unrelated claims of antisemitic behaviors on campus.
Bringing the point home, the letter directs Harvard to “shutter” its DEI offices and programs, for the broad reasons stated.
Finally, and most threateningly, Harvard must “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security, at a time when immigration authorities have been detaining foreign students who have protested or spoken on behalf of Palestinians and moving to deport them. These cases—particularly involving Columbia and Tufts graduate students who are being held in Louisiana—are the subject of fierce litigation. As reported, Harvard protects students’ privacy in accordance with federal law; provides information on students or access to nonpublic spaces only when law enforcement officials present a legal order concerning the matter; and directs community members contacted by outside law enforcement officials to provide nonpublic information or access to nonpublic spaces to immediately refer such requests to the Office of General Counsel and the University Police Department. These are all standard, legal processes, but may not satisfy a federal administration intent on pressing immigration cases in every conceivable way.
The Claims Against Harvard in Context
Compared to the government demands made of Columbia, those presented to Harvard are less intimately intrusive into private university governance and academic affairs, and they are couched in terms of “cooperation,” without a rigid deadline for compliance. So they are somewhat tailored to this different institution’s different circumstances and perceived behaviors.
On the other hand, the “next steps” outlined are incredibly broad and systematic in nature, to the point of being open-ended (“meaningful governance reforms”); are non-exclusive (“several broad, non-exhaustive areas of reform that the government views as necessary for Harvard to implement to remain a responsible recipient of federal taxpayer dollars”); encompass an agenda far beyond any concerns immediately related to antisemitic acts or harassing behaviors (thus raising a larger agenda implicating higher education broadly); and are, as presented, seemingly unanchored to any normal procedures of legal investigation and correction under the civil rights laws.
Thus Harvard (and its affiliated hospitals)—like Columbia, Penn, Princeton, and now Brown—faces a wholesale threat to the funding of what has heretofore been uncontroversial, and potentially lifesaving, research, mostly in the life and biomedical sciences, as a new federal administration wields its financial leverage to advance a broad political agenda of enforced change across much of American higher education.
