The Trump administration escalated its pressure campaign on Harvard University with two new investigations into antisemitism on campus and the school’s admissions policies, issues the federal government has repeatedly scrutinized on the Ivy League campus.
The inquiries were announced Monday by the Education Department; Linda McMahon, the education secretary, vowed to “investigate these complaints thoroughly.”
A Harvard spokesman, Jason Newton, said the university was “reviewing the U.S. Department of Education’s latest actions, which represent the government’s latest retaliatory actions against Harvard for its refusal to surrender our independence and constitutional rights.”
Harvard officials have said that the school is complying with a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that rejected the use of race-based admissions at colleges after a conservative legal advocacy group, Students for Fair Admissions, sued the university.
The university has acknowledged missteps in its responses to antisemitism, including in the wake of Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. But the university began making changes to address criticism before President Trump returned to the White House last year. In recent months, Jewish students and faculty members have described an improving campus atmosphere, and some have expressed skepticism that Mr. Trump’s crusade against antisemitism is about protecting Jews at Harvard.
This year, Harvard has been increasingly targeted by the federal government since President Trump abruptly reversed his position on a potential deal to end the government’s pressure campaign on the university.
After a report in The New York Times on Feb. 2 that Mr. Trump had retreated from a demand for Harvard to pay a $200 million fine as a part of a broader settlement, the president responded on social media with a series of late-night and early-morning posts that floated the possibility of a criminal investigation of the university. He also said he had increased the fine to $1 billion.
Four days later, the Defense Department severed some of its academic ties with Harvard.
On Feb. 13, the Justice Department sued Harvard over claims that the school had refused the government’s demands to provide detailed admissions data. The government is seeking the data as part of a Health and Human Services Department investigation into whether its admissions process discriminates against white applicants. (The Education Department said its investigation on Monday was also targeting the school’s admissions data.)
And last Friday, the Justice Department sued Harvard over accusations of antisemitism, claiming the university had failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from severe harassment.
The administration started looking into antisemitism allegations at Harvard early last year, around the time it began a pressure campaign that included halting billions in research funding for the school. Harvard sued over that money in federal court and won. An appeal of that ruling is pending.
The Education Department’s statement about its new investigation did not mention any specific allegations beyond “the institution’s purported failure to protect Jewish students.”
Mr. Newton, the Harvard spokesman, said the university was “firmly committed to confronting antisemitism, following the law, and ensuring that our Jewish and Israeli students, faculty and staff are supported, safe, and fully included in campus life.”
He also said the university “continues to comply with the law in its admissions practices” after the Supreme Court’s ruling, and that it supplied information to federal agencies “consistent with our legal obligations and institutional responsibilities.”
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
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