“Harvard Should No Longer Seek GRANTS From The Federal Government, Since None Will Be Provided”
“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution.”
I predicted that higher ed’s greatest vulnerability was not termination of current grants, but non-renewal and non-issuance of new grants. While universities like Harvard have some legal arguments regarding termination, there is almost no right to renewal or to new grants. I’ve made this point time and again in the past few weeks during media interviews.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon just issued a statement telling Harvard not to apply for new grants. Period.
“This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni. You have an approximately $53 Billion head start, much of which was made possible by the fact that you are living within the walls of, and benefiting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of America and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.”
Dear @Harvard: pic.twitter.com/XmMimXfkX0
— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) May 5, 2025
Here is the full letter:
UPDATE:
“Today, we received another letter from the administration doubling down on demands that would impose unprecedented and improper control over Harvard University and would have chilling implications for higher education. Today’s letter makes new threats to illegally withhold funding for lifesaving research and innovation in retaliation against Harvard for filing its lawsuit on April 21.
Harvard will continue to comply with the law, promote and encourage respect for viewpoint diversity, and combat antisemitism in our community. Harvard will also continue to defend against illegal government overreach aimed at stifling research and innovation that make Americans safer and more secure.”
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Comments
Okay I despise Harvard as much if not more than anyone else on this site and have expressed this multiple times. Having said this I have to recognize that not all grants to Harvard have been the same. There are the grants that go the base school and those that go to hospitals in the Boston area associated with Harvard of which there are many. Of those that going to the base school there are grants that go to STEM and others. Not all grants are alike.
I’ve not seen the list of grants which is probably quite long. However knowing that Harvard has used their name and cachet to attract excellent people in their fields over the years I feel fairly comfortable with the following assertions:
– At least some of the work if not much of the work done by STEM at
Harvard is probably valuable. Probably not all but I would wager much if
not most.
– Much if not most of the work done by Harvard affiliated hospitals is
important.
– Non STEM work is likely dumpster fire class, but perhaps not all of it.
I don’t feel comfortable withholding all of it. I would prefer to review the grants and selectively withhold.
I recognize the Harvard admin likely takes their cut of all grant monies. I
don’t like this but there is nothing I can do about it.
I am still 100% in favor of withdrawing their tax exempt status. I’m also in favor of blackballing their students from government employment, especially their law students.
Educational Institutions that engage in deliberate Civil Rights violations aren’t eligible to receive Federal Funding. There probably is some good at Harvard but like a turd in the punch bowl their commitment to discrimination in even one sector corrupts the entire institution. Perhaps had the leadership of these ‘good’ programs come forward publicly and raised all manner of hell to condemn the discriminatory actions of their colleagues then there might be an argument for more selectively. They didn’t, they observed it and chose to put their heads down and stay quiet so their inaction and failure of moral courage condemns them as well. Maybe leadership and faculty in other departments at other institutions will benefit from the object lesson of Harvard and buck the brown shirts at their University but I doubt it.
I hear what you are saying, but my response is “tough”. Let them dip into their many billions in endowments, and contributions from like-minded alumni. Columbia, Harvard, Brown, et al…… not a penny from taxpayers. You do remember that that’s where the money comes from in the end, right?
Sorry, my reply was directed at ztakddot.
There’s no other way to teach Harvard a lesson. The institution’s corruption and moral rot, and, the haughty and unrepentant arrogance of its administrators/faculty, with regard to rampant and gleeful Jew-hate, are deeply entrenched.
You simply cannot treat such a deeply immoral institution with half-measures and niceties.
Go look at the studies being done at:
Mass General Hospital
Brigham and Woman’s Hospital
Beth Israel Hospital
Children’s Hospital
Joslin Diabetes Center
and others whose doctors hold joint appointments with and teach at Harvard Medical School
and then come back and tell me this work should stop. These places aren’t owned by Harvard
but much of their research probably is funded at least in part through Harvard.
I don’t know the details because I’m not part of this at all. Ok, I’ve said what I came to this topic to say. I;m done.
Or the old Chem dept. Chair who was developing electronics that can work inside the body, and being paid by China. Can’t trust them.
The research projects can continue without the Harvard affiliation.
You do realize that Federal.Grants are not mandatory and that Harvard has zero entitlement to any future grant? That being the case then if locals in the area believe the loss of the grant funding for these programs is important then they can dig into their pockets to replace the funds.
Alternatively the funding for the very same sorts of.research could be moved to a different place. There’s far more hospitals, Universities and research institutions than just those affiliated with Harvard. Try bringing it to UAB as.an.example. I’m sure they’d love to host these programs.
I am sure many of those studies are worthwhile. However, my reaction is to let Harvard make the decision as to how worthwhile with its $50B endowment, I bet completing all of them would not make too big a dent in that pile of cash.
The world will not stop if Harvard has to dip into its billion dollar endowment
Your point is well taken, but those studies and health programs that are clearly beneficial will likely receive alternative funding. Sometimes the only way to cure a malignancy is to give treatment that causes some damage overall, but is sufficient to overcome the cancer and occult metastasizes without killing the host.
I am completely comfortable withholding all of it. Ideally it would cause productive researchers to leave Harvard for other institutions. Surely almost all of them would be granted acceptable tenured contracts at many other universities.
Changing jobs, sometimes involuntarily, is a part of life, and no reason academics or government should be above it. As for Harvard, they’re wasting that beautiful historic campus and should be replaced by a more righteous institution.
Worrying about the small stuff is not the way to work, and it’s certainly not a caution the left grants the right in its own predations. Learn from the other side and hit back.
Or, are you trying to soften the blow on Harvard? It should be hard, not soft. It should scare others into compliance. It should cause Harvard to go private, or to embark on a multi-year self-auditing, introspection and cleansing that returns it to a status that we can be happy to support, maybe at first with intensive and intrusive monitoring as proposed in the prior letter to Harvard from the Trump administration — but they’ll have to qualify for that, it’s off the table for now.
This is nothing but the “panda ploy” discussed in the EPA article here today.
What’s next, we fund Red Crescent because they also put band-aids on kids?
While the tail of a snake may be harmless it is still attached to the head.
Bottom line: This administration has zero tolerance for Jew hatred in federally funded institutions. Jew hatred has shown to be extremely destructive multidimensionally in societies throughout human history.
They don’t just take a cut, they take a majority. Their ‘indirect costs’ on grants are an amazing 70%. Now it’s been capped for anyone at 15 percent going forward, but Harvard has been taking the money for w hat ever it wants and then maybe spending some on the grants purpose.
I hear what you’re saying, ztakddot, but I’d draw the line differently, banning future grants to Harvard University but not to other institutions that are merely affiliated with Harvard, such as the various hospitals and also the various research institutions that are jointly sponsored by Harvard and other universities. Harvard University, itself, is a single institution and can fairly be treated as such, with one element paying the price for another element’s transgressions. To attempt to distinguish among particular grants would require an undue amount of effort and inevitably result in mistakes. The loss of important research that might otherwise be conducted would be ameliorated by the migration of professors and researchers from Harvard to other institutions.
If the money does not go to Harvard Researchers, the researchers can leave Harvard and go to the money….
I agree that stem research is immensely valuable to mankind. That said, withholding Federal grant money is likely to be the most potent weapon to use in order to get Harvard to make significant changes since these are foundational activities of a research institution…at which point funding can continue. It’s all in the Art of the Deal.
– Krumhorn
They can file grants through the vehicles available to the hospitals and have Harvard individuals as consultants or other support personnel on the grants.
The point is to cut off Harvard’s gravy train of indirect costs that they’ve enjoyed for so long and it’s glorious (because they are thick thieves). This way, the indirects will go directly to those hospitals.
When I worked at Dunn &Bradstreet software 30 years ago there was an Account Manager Supervisor on one of the other teams that went to Harvard. She was arrogant and self-righteous where she would remind people the went to Harvard. Her team had the highest turnover rate. That lead to the lowest profit ratio of all the Acct Mgt teams. Upper management loved her and her degree.
In fairness, they are all this bad, I had a candidate Yalie refuse to put his resume in standard format because YALE. His resume was a wall of unreadable prose. He didn’t get hired, not by me anyway.
Stop approving student visas, too.
No student loans for Harvard students.
While I agree with what the letter outlines, I’m not sure it helps the cause when the secretary of education demonstrates a penchant for the arbitrary capitalization of ordinary nouns such as “billion” and “nation,” along with a habit of capitalizing entire words for emphasis. This is the sort of person who forms plurals with an apostrophe. I’m sure Harvard is mightily impressed with the intellect of its opponents.
In all fairness, her boss does it worse on social media daily.
It’s written at a level all Harvard undergrads can understand, including the ones in remedial math.
OK, it could have used your proofreading. Or mine. This shows that it was written in haste, not by someone with a defective intellect, although we all know that Harvard (and Yale, and Princeton, etc.) considers everyone outside a 5 mile radius of campus an inferior intellect). I consider the letter a masterpiece. The message is clear and powerful. It is what I now expect from this administration.
I certainly don’t disagree with the validity of your statement but I have had to listen to a lot of uneducated people who were holding a check just out of reach.
Good, if they want to be a piece of garbage they’re welcome to do so. I don’t feel like I have to fund them being a piece of garbage.
So not giving them any new grants is squashing their speech? They have an inherent right to more taxpayer money?
Many, from Harvard to California, seem to think so
Harvard should welcome this letter. They have plenty of “FU” money in their endowment … enough to be free to ignore any government demands on what they do with their research dollars. For those STEM researchers fearing loss of their grants, is there no reason that they cannot shop for new campuses to house their research?
Let private industry fund STEM research, as used to be the case. Individual states and private donors can also fund research into other subjects that they consider to be in the public interest.
Perhaps I’m behind the times, but I’m still stunned about the remedial math, so the appeal to support their purportedly superior STEM work is falling flat.
As an aside, I think this decision is a good start to revoking federal funding to all private colleges and universities. Eventually, the federal government needs to get out of education altogether.