The nation’s oldest university is not sitting idly as President Donald Trump threatens to revoke its tax-exempt status and cut it off from federal funding.
Harvard University President Alan Garber said Friday that Trump’s threats to politicize higher education were “highly illegal” and that removing the school’s tax-exempt status would be “destructive” to both Harvard and higher education at large.
Garber, 69, told The Wall Street Journal that if Trump follows through on his threats, it will send a “dire” message to education institutions nationwide.
“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 an existential threat to so many educational institutions,” he said.
A rift widened between Harvard and the White House on April 11, when the Trump administration sent a letter demanding significant reforms at the university. These included overhauling the university’s hiring practices, admissions, teaching, and research programs. The Trump administration later claimed the letter was sent in error, but public comments suggested they meant what they wrote.
Harvard responded that they would not give in to the White House’s demands, which placed the Massachusetts institution in Trump’s crosshairs. He froze all federal funding for the university and followed up with the additional threat of having its tax-exempt status taken away.
“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday. “It’s what they deserve!”
An official in the Trump administration told the Journal that Trump’s post was not a directive to the IRS to take action against Harvard. Garber suggested he is unwilling to bow to Trump like others—namely, a handful of the nation’s largest law firms—have done before him.
“If the government goes through with a plan to revoke our tax-exempt status, it would, number one, be highly illegal,” he said. “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, obviously, that would be severely impaired if we were to lose our tax-exempt status.”
Harvard, like most universities, is exempt from federal income tax because it is considered a charitable organization operating for educational purposes. Taking away that status would put Harvard on the hook for as much as $525 million more per year, just based on taxes it would owe from its $53 billion endowment alone, reports the New York Post. That figure would rise further after accounting for property taxes.
Should the Ivy League institution lose its tax-exempt status, it would also likely suffer from decreased alumni donations, as any future giving to the university would no longer be considered tax-deductible.
Harvard sued the Trump administration last month, setting up a legal showdown between the president and one of the nation’s most prestigious universities. The school argues that the Trump administration violated its constitutional rights by freezing billions in federal funding, which it claims has impeded its academic independence.
Such attacks have not been limited to Harvard. The Trump administration created a new government task force and charged it with investigating schools that allegedly failed to protect Jewish students last year amid pro-Palestine protests. The task force has also been directed to search for schools that still have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in place in order to eradicate them.
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