Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration’s demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House as talks between the two sides intensify, four people familiar with the negotiations said.
According to one of the people, Harvard is reluctant to directly pay the federal government, but negotiators are still discussing the exact financial terms.
The sum sought by the government is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled its clash with the White House last week. It would also satisfy President Trump’s private demands that Harvard should pay far more than Columbia. The people who described the talks and the dynamics surrounding them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential negotiations.
Although the two sides have made progress toward a deal, Harvard is also skeptical of Columbia’s agreement to allow an outside monitor oversee its sweeping arrangement with the government. Harvard officials have signaled that such a requirement for its own settlement could be a redline as a potential infringement on the university’s academic freedom.
Neither Harvard nor the government has publicly detailed the types of terms they might find acceptable for a settlement. University officials, though, concluded months ago that even if they prevailed in their court fight against the government, a deal could help Harvard to avoid more troubles over the course of Mr. Trump’s term.
It is not clear when the administration and Harvard might reach an accord, but the university is expected to demand that any deal be tied to the federal lawsuit it brought against the government in April.
Mr. Trump said in June that his administration might strike an agreement with Harvard “over the next week or so.” Although that time frame has lapsed, the president has privately told aides that he will not green-light a deal unless the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university agrees to spend many millions of dollars.
The president’s focus on a settlement’s financial terms reflects a shift in strategy from the administration, which spent the first months of its assault on higher education highlighting the prospects of reorienting the industry’s perceived ideological tilt. Although the White House has tied federal research funds to its quest for negotiations with top schools since the winter, Mr. Trump’s focus on the financial conditions of any settlements emerged more recently.
Harvard has repeatedly declined to publicly discuss the negotiations.
A White House spokesman, Harrison W. Fields, said on Monday that the administration’s “proposition is simple and common sense: Don’t allow antisemitism and D.E.I. to run your campus, don’t break the law, and protect the civil liberties of all students.”
Mr. Fields added that the White House was “confident that Harvard will eventually come around and support the president’s vision, and through good-faith conversations and negotiations, a good deal is more than possible.”
The Trump administration openly depicted last week’s settlement with Columbia as a template for bargaining with Harvard and other universities it has targeted. And, indeed, higher education executives have spent days dissecting the fine print of the agreement, a wide-ranging deal that goes far beyond addressing antisemitism. They have focused on a provision that said no part of the settlement “shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions or the content of academic speech.”
Although some people assailed Columbia for agreeing to the deal, others saw the arrangement as a necessity and a model for others to consider.
“They didn’t admit wrongdoing — it’s a classic settlement,” said Donna E. Shalala, who was the health secretary under President Bill Clinton and led four schools, including the University of Miami and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You don’t admit wrongdoing, and you preserve your right to continue as an institution.”
Mr. Trump, Dr. Shalala said, had a long record of “transactional” bargaining with powerful institutions.
“The details are less important than getting the deal and getting the win,” she said. “So if you know that when you go into a negotiation that it’s less ideological than it is getting a win, then you can get a win on both sides.”
Harvard is now weighing its own calculations. But it faces a different range of considerations than Columbia, including its outsize standing in American life, its legal battle with the government and its insistence that it will not surrender its independence to any government.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in April, an early signal that the university might resist oversight like what the Trump administration has envisioned.
Harvard sued soon after Dr. Garber released his statement and after the Trump administration began to strip the university of billions of dollars in federal research money.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.
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