The Trump administration’s war with Harvard University is apparently all one big whoops.
A senior Trump official told Harvard University that the letter it received last week containing a list of demands was sent in error, The New York Times reports.
The letter included a series of demands regarding the school’s hiring policies, admissions, and curriculum—demands so extreme that Harvard officials felt they had little choice but to refuse.
Now, White House officials are claiming that the letter—who they say was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney—was sent in error. While its content was authentic, some insiders believe it was sent prematurely, while others thought it had been intended for internal use only.
The letter directed Harvard to implement reforms to governance and leadership, as well as its hiring and admissions processes, if the school wanted to continue receiving federal funding. It demanded that Harvard implement merit-based policies and cease all “preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof” as well as prevent the admittance of international students “hostile to American values” and discontinue all DEI programs.
Many of the demands laid out in the letter related to the antisemitism that the Trump administration alleges exists on many university campuses, including Harvard. One such demand was the reforming or removal of programs with “egregious records of antisemitism,” including programs in the Divinity School, the School of Public Health, and the Graduate School of Education.
Prior to the arrival of the letter, Harvard and the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force had been engaged in discussions designed to avoid a confrontation. The demands made in the letter were so extreme that Harvard concluded a deal was no longer possible, leading the university to publicly refuse to accept and Trump to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding to the school.
Soon after Harvard announced its decision to reject the administration’s terms, Josh Gruenbaum, an official at the General Services Administration, called one of the university’s lawyers. While he initially said that neither he nor Thomas Wheeler, acting general counsel for the Department of Education, had authorized the letter, he later said the letter was authorized but had been sent prematurely.
Gruenbaum also contacted a lawyer for Columbia University, which eventually followed Harvard’s lead in refusing to comply with the Trump administration’s demands after initially caving to some, to let them know the letter to Harvard had been unauthorized.
White House senior policy strategist May Mailman said that Harvard’s response was excessive, telling the New York Times, “It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks.” She added, “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”
For its part, Harvard responded that there were no signs the letter was anything less than legitimate and admin-approved. University officials explained in a statement released on Friday that the letter was “signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised.”
The statement continued, “Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”
“It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say,” the statement continued. Harvard concluded that, “… Even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on not only Harvard students and employees but also on “the standing of American higher education in the world.”
Despite now saying that the letter was sent in error—whether that means because it was sent at all, or even if it was simply sent prematurely—the Trump administration has not withdrawn its demands or reversed its decision to freeze $2.2 billion in grants to the school. Nor has the president backed off his threats to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status.
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