Harvard leaders, students, and faculty are melting down over President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to defund the university.
The meltdowns have now intensified after Trump’s most recent threat to revoke the elite school’s tax-exempt status.
According to Newsweek, Harvard President Alan Garber lashed out after Trump said he would revoke the university’s tax status.
Garber called the move “illegal” as the two camps continue to be at odds over the institution’s inaction on tamping down on students’ pro-Hamas activism on campus.
Harvard is particularly upset with Trump and his administration for freezing a large pot of $2 billion in federal grants and funding.
This has led the university to file a federal lawsuit against the administration to unfreeze it.
Garber held nothing back as he told the media how he believes Trump’s actions against the university are illegal and unconstitutional.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Garber said the president’s revoking of Harvard’s tax-exempt status is “highly illegal, unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move.”
“Tax-exempt status is granted to educational institutions to enable them to successfully carry out their mission of education, and for research universities, of research.”
Garber added, “Obviously, that would be severely impaired if we were to lose our tax-exempt status. And I should add, it would be destructive to Harvard, but the message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one, which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be called an existential threat to so many educational institutions.”
However, the “political disagreements” are not that at all.
Trump and his administration simply want the university to tamp down on student activism related to the Hamas-Israel war, and the extreme anti-Semitism witnessed across the campus.
Newsweek noted:
“Harvard is one of several Ivy League institutions the Trump administration has threatened over campus activism and what the White House characterizes as antisemitism on the part of student protesters.”
Columbia University was another institution that Trump threatened.
Ultimately, the Ivy League school made several concessions to the Trump administration as it knew what the right move was.
Many of Trump’s supporters applauded the president for going after the school’s tax-exempt status.
“Harvard Law evidently wants more (of a certain type of) bad behavior,” one X user wrote.
“So, they reward bad behavior. We should not tolerate those who reward bad behavior.”
Another X user wrote, “Eradicate the privileged, elitist universities.
“Fund trade schools.”
It’ll be fascinating to see who ultimately wins in court on this one.
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