2 weeks Ago
A week after Harvard University essentially told the Trump Administration to go jump into the Charles River, there are signs that its defiance may be rattling the White House. On Friday, the Times, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter, reported that the letter containing the Administration's demands for a top-to-bottom revamp of Harvard, which even the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal described as "effectively a federal receivership," was sent without proper authorization. According to the story, the sender was one of the members of the Presidential task force on antisemitism, which is leading the crusade against top research universities.
The Times also quoted a White House official, the senior policy strategist May Mailman, who said negotiations between the two sides could still resume. Whether or not Donald Trump will blink, as he did a couple of weeks ago when his punitive tariff proposals caused eruptions in the stock and bond markets, isn't entirely clear yet. But it seems like the Administration was taken aback by Harvard's refusal to buckle before the President's threats in the same way that Columbia University and certain law firms did.
Perhaps some people in the White House now realize that, even as it has halted more than two billion dollars in federal funding to Harvard, it has taken on an adversary that is rich and powerful enough to fight back. As a tax-exempt not-for-profit, Harvard doesn't have any shareholders, but, like other big charitable organizations and major corporations, it releases an annual report on its finances. The latest one, which covers its 2024 financial year, said that the university "generated an operating surplus of $45 million on a revenue base of $6.
5 billion." That pot of money was used to finance an institution that encompasses Harvard College, twelve graduate schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In total, Harvard has close to twenty-five thousand students and employs.
.. John Cassidy.
