Harvard University — the gold-plated symbol of American elitism — is in the fight of its life, and it’s a battle of its own making.
For the past month, Harvard has been locked in a standoff with the Trump administration over student visas, foreign money, anti-Semitism, and compliance with federal law. This is more than just another Beltway spat. This is a tectonic clash between the people who built this country and the elites who now believe they own it.
Why are taxpayers subsidizing institutions that actively undermine the very values that built this country?
To most Americans, Harvard stands for privilege, power, and a snobbish culture far removed from the everyday citizen. So why should you care what happens to Harvard?
Because this isn’t just about one Ivy League school. It’s about whether America will remain a free republic — or continue down the path of ideological capture by radical institutions.
It all began in April, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that Harvard provide records of foreign students involved in illegal, violent, or disruptive activities — like the kind of protests we saw last year that devolved into pro-Hamas encampments. Harvard missed the deadline. So the Trump administration pulled the plug: No more international student enrollments for Harvard.
To say that hurt would be an understatement. Foreign students make up 27% of Harvard’s student body — more than 6,700 individuals. Their tuition is a massive cash cow. Harvard sued, of course, and a federal judge has temporarily paused the visa ban. But the message from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was clear: Comply with federal law or face the consequences.
Then came a broader move: The administration paused all new student visa interviews nationwide while it considers expanding social media vetting for foreign applicants. After the chaos we saw on campuses last fall, that seems like basic common sense.
Next, the Trump administration turned off the federal funding faucet — more than $3 billion in research grants and contracts frozen. Harvard screamed censorship and filed another lawsuit, claiming this was a First Amendment violation. But let’s pause here: Harvard has a $53 billion endowment. That’s more than the GDP of more than 120 countries.
Why does an institution that rich receive any federal funding, let alone billions? Since World War II, the federal government has been throwing money at universities for research, including the development of the atomic bomb. Once the spigot opened, it never shut. Today, your taxpayer dollars are funding a $50,000 research project into the effects of coffee.
Congress is finally waking up. A bill is working its way through the Senate that would slap a tax on massive university endowments. Harvard alone could be facing an $850 million annual tax bill. About time!
Three key factors are driving Trump’s fight with Harvard.
The first reason is anti-Semitism. Harvard, like many elite schools, turned a blind eye to vile anti-Jewish sentiment after the October 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel. The administration says enough is enough — and it’s right.
Second, Harvard has refused to comply with the 2023 Supreme Court decision declaring race-based admissions unconstitutional. The message from Harvard? We’re above the law.
Third, Harvard has been deeply entrenched in woke ideological corruption. Trump said it plainly on the campaign trail: Elite universities like Harvard are controlled by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” That’s not hyperbole. Harvard has abandoned its motto, Veritas — truth — in favor of radical conformity.
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Just 9% of Harvard students identify as conservative. Among faculty, that number is a jaw-dropping 2.5%. This is a monoculture, not any sort of “marketplace of ideas.”
And it’s getting worse. In March, a Harvard professor openly called for firing any faculty who don’t support “gender-affirming care” for children. Think about that. This is not education. This is indoctrination.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression recently ranked Harvard dead last in the country for free speech. It scored zero out of 100.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Yeah, Harvard’s always been liberal. What else is new?” Here’s what is new: The radicalism cultivated behind ivy-covered walls has spilled into the real world.
We’ve had a cultural lab leak. Academic ideas once confined to lecture halls — critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion measures, gender ideology, climate hysteria — are now infecting K-12 classrooms, human resources departments, government agencies, and even the military.
This is no longer a theoretical problem. It’s practical. It’s personal. It affects your children’s education, your job, your freedom of speech, and your values.
So here’s the question we should all be asking: Why are taxpayers subsidizing institutions that actively undermine the very principles and beliefs that built this country?
Trump’s war on Harvard is about more than visas, lawsuits, or even money. It’s about reclaiming the soul of America from those who have hijacked it. Harvard may have prestige, but it no longer has integrity. It certainly doesn’t need your money — or your consent.
It’s time to cut off the funding, tax the endowment, and force accountability. Because in the fight for America’s future, no institution should be above the people who pay the bills.
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Amid all the turmoil involving Harvard — most recently, the Trump administration withholding federal grants and making it the poster child for academic rot — the poison Ivy League’s liquidity problem is worsening. In the past two months, Harvard has turned to the bond markets twice to quickly raise over $1 billion in cash. This follows a scramble in 2024 to raise $1.5 billion through similar bond offerings, which still fell short of its initial target.
Revulsion to Harvard’s institutional wokeness and its embrace of open anti-Semitism by faculty and students was already causing a financial squeeze. As I wrote in November: “Despite an endowment exceeding $50 billion, Harvard had to expedite bond offerings earlier this year to quickly raise $1.6 billion in cash.” Harvard was already in a cash crunch before President Donald Trump announced he was turning off the spigot of federal grants.
Harvard cannot afford to also lose its revenue stream from the federal government — but it’s going to.
But why is Harvard facing a liquidity crisis if its endowment is truly worth $53 billion as reported? Per published reports as of 2024, only about 20% of Harvard’s endowment is held in liquid assets such as cash, stocks, and bonds. The remaining 80% is tied up in illiquid investments — 71% in private equity and hedge funds and another 8% in real estate and other alternative assets.
While the endowment appears impressive on paper, it produces relatively little usable cash for Harvard — roughly $2 billion annually. And when the market turns south, as it recently has, the financial gimmickry underpinning these investments can actually consume cash.
In early March, Harvard announced it would return to the debt markets to raise $450 million in cash via tax-exempt bonds. Barely five weeks later, the university had to rush another $750 million bond offering — this time in taxable bonds — bringing its total new debt to $1.1 billion. According to the Harvard Crimson, this pushes the university’s total debt burden to $8.2 billion.
Despite its wealth, Harvard relies on billions of dollars in non-tuition revenue each year to pay its bills. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, the university reported $6.5 billion in operating revenue. Of that, just 21% came from tuition. Nearly half — 45% — came from philanthropic donations, while federal grants comprised another significant portion.
With the donors starting to hold their noses and sit on their wallets, Harvard cannot afford to also lose its revenue stream from the federal government — but it’s going to. The Trump administration recently announced that it would suspend $2.2 billion in federal grants.
Meanwhile, Harvard President Alan Garber remains committed to admissions policies that appear racially discriminatory, as well as remaining steadfast in his commitment to keeping Harvard a welcoming space for foreign nationals who are hostile to Jews. As reported by CNN:
Harvard refused to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, ban masks at campus protests, enact merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, and reduce the power of faculty and administrators the Republican administration has called ‘more committed to activism than scholarship.’
Despite Garber’s repugnant principles, they also invite more problems for the school. Like Bob Jones University before it, Harvard’s policies are racially discriminatory. Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory admissions policies and prohibiting interracial dating. Now Harvard may suffer the same fate:
The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.
Donors have long benefited from itemized tax deductions for their munificent donations to Harvard’s operating budget. If Harvard loses its tax-exempt status, donations will no longer be tax-deductible. While I do not doubt that donors had a genuine passion for Harvard while donating to the school, the tax ramifications were also a motivator. Losing the tax deductibility of donations would constrict that revenue stream even further.
Ultimately, Harvard’s multibillion-dollar bond offerings may barely serve as a Band-Aid if federal and donor revenue streams dry up. However illiquid the famed endowment may be, the university may soon be forced to start selling what assets it can. According to New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino, “Wall Street execs who follow the college endowment business say it's only a matter of time before Harvard starts selling what's liquid in its portfolio, i.e., stocks.” He is also trying to confirm if Harvard is, in fact, already selling liquid assets held by the endowment.
Harvard cannot borrow its way out of its cash crisis. For now, the university scrambles for more loans to cover bills and meet payroll. But lenders will not endlessly bankroll unsecured debt from a tarnished institution bleeding cash. A day of reckoning approaches.
The Trump administration is working to ensure that institutions granted federal funding and tax-exempt status are compliant with federal law and policy.
Shortly after putting woke medical journals that receive funding from the National Institutes of Health on blast over their alleged bias, Edward Martin Jr., the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announced an investigation into Wikipedia.
Martin noted in an April 24 letter obtained by the Free Press that "Wikipedia, which operates via its fiscal sponsor, the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., is engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code."
The statute cited by Martin holds that tax-exempt organizations must be:
organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.
The IRS law notes further that tax-exempt organizations are not to "carry on" propaganda, attempt to influence legislation, or "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
Martin suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation, through Wikipedia, "is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public," and is "permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security of the United States."
'Most readers assume Wikipedia is a reliable online encyclopedia, but in reality, it has become a biased platform.'
Blaze News previously reported that editors at Wikipedia, whose parent company spent nearly 30% of its 2023-2024 budget on DEI programs,
A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia suffers a "significant liberal bias in the choice of news media sources."
Wikipedia — which still claimed at the time of publication that COVID-19 lab leak "explanations are not supported by science" — has not only been criticized for being a repository of leftist propaganda but for its alleged "widespread antisemitic and anti-Israel" content.
While previously silent on the suppression of conservative voices, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League — whose censorious outfit Wikipedia categorized as an "unreliable source" last year — stated last month that "most readers assume Wikipedia is a reliable online encyclopedia, but in reality, it has become a biased platform manipulated by agenda-driven editors on many topics."
The ADL alleged that a group of at least 30 editors "acted in concert to circumvent Wikipedia's policies to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information."
Martin, who has reportedly been aiding the Justice Department's Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, noted in his letter, "Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia's 'educational' mission."
The D.C. attorney also took issue with Wikipedia's apparent direction from a board "composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers."
Martin indicated that his office has received information that "demonstrates that Wikipedia's informational management policies benefit foreign powers."
'The public is entitled to rely on a reasonable expectation of neutrality, transparency, and accountability.'
Martin expressed additional concern about the amplification of the leftist and foreign propaganda on Wikipedia, noting that search engines such as Google have prioritized Wikipedia results, and AI platforms train their large-language models on Wikipedia data.
The Department of Justice has requested that the Wikimedia Foundation provide information by May 15 concerning its policy and operations, including what:
"As a nonprofit corporation, which is incorporated in the District of Columbia, the Wikimedia Foundation is subject to specific legal obligations and fiduciary duties consistent with its tax-exempt status," wrote Martin. "The public is entitled to rely on a reasonable expectation of neutrality, transparency, and accountability in its operations and publications."
Although it did not acknowledge Martin's latter, the Wikimedia Foundation claimed in a statement obtained by the Washington Post that Wikipedia's content was governed by policies that ensure information is presented as "accurately, fairly and neutrally as possible."
"Wikipedia is one of the last places online that shows the promise of the internet, housing more than 65 million articles written to inform, not persuade," said the statement. "Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
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The Trump administration has explicitly threatened, and in some cases suspended, the funding of universities across the country, citing violations of federal law and policy.
Amid this governmental campaign to fight anti-Semitism on campus, keep men out of women's sports, maximize viewpoint diversity, eliminate discriminatory DEI practices, and kick divisive critical race theory programming to the curb, Harvard University has emerged as the administration's white whale.
Democrats and other leftists have, through their overreactions to the administration's handling of Harvard, given away their own suspicions that the 389-year-old institution's neutralization as a political entity and restoration to former glory would mark a turning point — perhaps not an end to the left's long march through the institutions but certainly a landmark arrest of the American campus slide into lawlessness, lunacy, and identitarianism.
This concern appears to ground Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer's (N.Y.) statement, "The Trump administration is making unprecedented demands of universities aimed at undermining or even destroying these vital institutions."
'Tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences.'
"Universities must do more to fight antisemitism on campus, but the administration should not use it as an excuse for a broad and extra-legal attack on these institutions," continued Schumer. "Harvard is right to resist."
The concern similarly lurks in the background of Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop's assertion that "the assault on Harvard is part of a broader Trumpian assault on elite universities, which is itself part of a yet broader federal assault on progressive institutions and groups deemed enemies of the president."
Prokop added, "Tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences, forever transforming the relationship between the federal government and academia."
Despite the alarmist rhetoric peddled by activists and Democratic lawmakers, the Trump administration's insistence that institutional beneficiaries of federal funding hold up their ends of the bargain — especially in the case of Harvard University — appears to be neither unlawful nor unprecedented.
While the Trump administration is less ambiguous in its language and more confrontational with its actions — which have in a number of cases already borne fruit — it is simply exercising muscles previously flexed by previous governments to ensure federally funded universities comply with federal civil rights law and public policy.
The Trump administration has threatened, frozen, and/or temporarily suspended federal funding to a number of schools in recent months. For example, the administration:
While the Trump administration has taken a similar approach to Harvard, the country's oldest university has proven a tougher nut to crack.
Blaze News previously reported that the administration notified Harvard University President Alan Garber and Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, on April 11 that billions of dollars in federal funds were at stake unless the institution agreed to implement a number of "critical reforms."
'Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions.'
The government specifically asked for Harvard's cooperation in implementing these reforms:
The university, which has an endowment of $53.2 billion, initially responded by suggesting the necessary reforms were already underway and that the Trump administration's demands were unlawful.
Barack Obama, a Democrat whose administration threatened its fair share of universities' federal funding, was among the liberals who celebrated Harvard's defiance, writing, "Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect."
'That stops under the Trump Administration.'
Evidently not interested in playing Obama-supported games, the Trump administration provided the Massachusetts university with a steady stream of bad news.
For starters,
Julie Hartman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, told Blaze News in a statement, "The Department has given Columbia and Harvard every opportunity to come into compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws."
"On March 10, OCR sent letters to both universities reminding them of their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus," continued Hartman. "ED has also attempted multiple times to engage in negotiations with both of these universities, and the Department hopes to continue negotiating with them to protect students' civil rights."
"In the past, educational entities were allowed to violate Title VI with little to no enforcement action from the federal government," added the ED spokeswoman. "That stops under the Trump Administration. We will not allow taxpayer funds to sponsor discrimination against American students."
After the administration began derailing the school's gravy train, Harvard doubled down on its defiance.
When announcing the university's lawsuit against the administration on April 21, Harvard President Alan Garber suggested that the pause on injections of taxpayer dollars into his wealthy institution were "unlawful and beyond the government's authority."
"These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world," wrote Garber.
Garber is hardly the first in recent weeks to suggest the Trump administration's handling of Harvard's defiance was somehow unlawful, harmful, or unprecedented.
Andrew Tyrie, senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told the Harvard Gazette, "This is weakening the United States and imperiling the prosperity and the security of millions of Americans."
'This is the first time an administration has tried something like this.'
Joshua Cherniss, an associate political theory professor at Georgetown University, said, "I study, to some extent, authoritarian regimes, and I think that some of what we're seeing — while it's not equivalent to fully formed authoritarianism — is starting to approach it in terms of trying to have the government dictate the ideas that are taught, that can be expressed and that can't be expressed."
While there has been much of this pearl-clutching about threats to Harvard's gravy train, there has also been shirt-rending over the Trump administration's threat to Harvard's tax-exempt status.
Trump recently wrote, "Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?' Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!"
"To my knowledge, this is the first time an administration has tried something like this," said R. William Snyder, a professor at the business college of George Mason University, told CNN. "The whole purpose of higher education is to educate the masses. Just because they educate in a way that you don't like, is that grounds to terminate their tax-exempt status? I'd say no."
Contrary to these critics' suggestions, this was not, however, the first time an administration threatened tax-exempt status or funding.
Like Synder, many critics of the president's proposal to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status appeared to strategically develop long-term memory loss.
Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo and Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett were, however, happy to remind such critics that should Harvard lose its tax-exempt status over alleged noncompliance with federal law or policy, it wouldn't be the first.
Bob Jones University, a private university in Greenville, South Carolina, had racist policies on its books in the mid-20th century — including prohibitions on interracial dating and marriage. Determining that the school's discriminatory policies did not serve a public purpose and were contrary to established public policy, the IRS revoked the school's tax-exempt status in 1975. This decision prompted a heated legal battle.
Ultimately, in Bob Jones University v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in 1983 that the IRS had authority to deny status to Bob Jones University, Goldsboro Christian School, and other institutions with racist policies.
Powerline recently noted that Harvard, like BJU, has already been found by the Supreme Court to engage in illegal race discrimination — meaning the path to status revocation might be an altogether simpler matter, assuming an activist judge isn't ready to throw more caltrops before the administration.
Just as revoking a misaligned university's tax-exempt status would be nothing new, the Trump administration's threats to universities' federal funding are similarly business as usual.
While the Trump administration has followed through by suspending or freezing funding to a number of universities for their alleged noncompliance with federal law and policy, the Biden administration appeared keen to do something similar — efforts that in a number of cases resulted in agreements and resolutions.
In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, the Biden Education Department's Office for Civil Rights opened hundreds of investigations into complaints about anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While such investigations are customarily backed by the implicit threat of suspending noncompliant schools' federal funding, NPR noted that Biden officials expressly threatened to cut funding to schools that failed to take aggressive remedial action.
The Education Department noted in its 2024 fiscal year annual report that the University of Illinois, Drexel University, and Brown University remedied compliance concerns identified by the OCR, thereby preserving their funding.
While concerns were expressed about the possibility that these investigations could chill free speech on campus, critics were not up in arms as they are now.
There also does not appear to have been leftist apoplexy when years earlier, the first Trump administration's Education Department OCR took the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to task after concluding on the basis of nearly 400 reports of sexual harassment and sexual violence that the institution was out of compliance with Title IX. The government ultimately secured a resolution agreement with the school in place of fines or denial of funding.
The Obama administration similarly threatened federal funding for schools that fell out of line with federal law and policy without the same volume of uproar seen today.
For instance, the Obama Education Department's OCR came after Tufts University for Title IX violations, specifically with regard to its handling of sexual harassment and misconduct complaints. It also notified schools that noncompliance with Title IX could result in the OCR initiating "proceedings to withdraw Federal funding by the Department or refer the case to the U.S. Department of Justice for litigation."
In 2016, the Obama administration circulated guidance stating that so-called gender identity was protected under Title IX.
Politico noted at the time that the advisory included "a threat that the Obama administration has leveled against North Carolina in the standoff over the state's law blocking legal protections for gay and transgender individuals: If a state fails to comply with the administration's interpretation of the law, it runs the risk of being sued by the federal government and losing federal funding, particularly for education."
In April 2011, the Obama ED OCR established mandates requiring universities to reduce students' due process rights. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicated that failure on the part of universities to heed the regulations, which were announced in a letter from then-Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.
Obama also proposed shifting federal funding away from universities perceived as failing to keep net tuition down.
The previous two Democratic administrations appear to have liberally threatened schools' funding without the accompaniment of a chorus of doomsdayers warning of the coming peril and civilizational harms. Their threats also paved the way for those issued in recent weeks by the Trump administration.
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The federal judge may be one of the first in the country to address the problem of her colleagues attempting to usurp the power of the president head-on.
The Trump administration appears to be making an example of Harvard to motivate entities in higher education to comply with federal civil rights law and stop foisting extreme views of social structures and institutions on society.
From 2021 to 2022, abortions, not screenings, made up approximately 97 percent of Planned Parenthood’s ‘pregnancy resolution services.’
McMahon made clear to Harvard that the federal government was willing to keep federal funding if the institution was committed to complying with federal law, protect students, and end its racial preferences by finally abiding by the Supreme Court's decision to end affirmative action.
One judge said that, because the Biden administration's Department of Education thought DEI was fine, the Trump administration must somehow follow suit.
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