Trump threatens to steer Harvard grant money to trade schools

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President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to divert billions in grant dollars away from Harvard University and give those funds to trade schools across the U.S., escalating his clash with the elite institution. 

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The Trump administration has already moved to freeze funding and block Harvard’s ability to enroll international students in an intensifying battle over what the president has cast as a failure by the Ivy League university and others to crack down on antisemitism. Harvard is the oldest and richest U.S. university with a $53 billion endowment. 

Administration officials have been using that rationale to pressure schools to institute wide policy changes that university officials say infringe on free speech and their academic missions. Harvard has been front and center in Trump’s campaign, with the administration already suspending more than $2.6 billion in federal research money and saying the school won’t be able to receive new funding.  

The government had demanded a series of changes as a condition of continuing its financial relationship with the university: It has to remake its governance, transform admissions and faculty hiring, which the administration has called discriminatory, as well as stop admitting international students who officials say are hostile to American values. 

The administration has also said that Harvard should ensure more diverse viewpoints on a campus that it says leans too liberal. Harvard sued in April. The government has also moved to bar Harvard from enrolling foreign students, but the university won a temporary court order blocking the government from enforcing that ban. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that Harvard’s responses to government’s requests to provide information about misconduct by foreign students were insufficient. 

To regain its program certification, Harvard was given 72 hours to provide six categories of information about foreign students over the past five years, including disciplinary records and video of those engaged in protests. 

Harvard still hasn’t turned over foreign student lists, with Trump calling the university “very slow in the presentation of these documents.” The information is needed, Trump said in a second post on Monday, the Memorial Day holiday, to determine “how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.”

At Harvard nearly 6,800 students — 27% of the entire student body — come from other countries, up from 19.6% in 2006, according to the university’s data. 

Harvard says its international population on campus is comprised of more than 10,000 people, which includes fellows or others coming for nondegree programs and their dependents.