US President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday accused Harvard University of violating the civil rights of its Jewish and Israeli students, and threatened to cut off all federal funding if the university does not take urgent action.
Harvard has been at the forefront of Trump’s campaign against top US universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”
Trump and his allies claim that Harvard and other prestigious universities are unaccountable bastions of liberal, anti-conservative bias and anti-Semitism.
Photo: AFP
In a letter sent to the president of Harvard, a federal task force accused it of failing to protect the students during campus protests against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
The task force said that, following an investigation, it concluded that “Harvard has been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff.”
It said that the majority of Jewish students at Harvard felt they suffer discrimination on campus, while a quarter felt physically unsafe.
“Jewish and Israeli students were assaulted and spit on; they hid their kippahs for fear of being harassed and concealed their Jewish identity from classmates for fear of ostracization,” it said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Harvard was in violation of civil rights legislation and “if you break federal law, you should not be receiving federal tax dollars.”
The school said it strongly disagreed with the government’s findings, as it “has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism in its community.”
The Trump administration has also sought to remove Harvard from an electronic student immigration registry and instructed US embassies to deny visas to international students hoping to attend the Massachusetts-based university.
Harvard has sued the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to block the efforts, and the courts have put those moves on hold for now.
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