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Attacks on Harvard by Trump administration have built for months. A timeline of the dispute

By CNN Newsource

Published April 26, 2025 4:00 am

By Andy Rose, CNN

(CNN) — Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has made a major push to put America’s elite universities on notice over political ideology. But the groundwork for the White House’s stronger stance was laid more than a year earlier.

Two months after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel sparked the Gaza war – and protests over it at US colleges – the then-president of Harvard University was asked in a congressional hearing whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate Harvard’s rules against bullying and harassment.

“It can be, depending on the context,” Claudine Gay said in a response that slackened the jaws of many students and donors and deeply divided the campus and its alumni.

Gay later apologized. But the backlash, plus a plagiarism scandal, ultimately led her to resign, with Jewish organizations agreeing the nation’s oldest, wealthiest and most prestigious university wasn’t taking antisemitism seriously enough.

The reaction also provided a fresh line of criticism for conservative groups and politicians who for decades had complained about liberal teachings at ivory tower institutions.

Harvard soon launched a task force on antisemitism that called for stronger action against “harassment, abuse and intimidation” and more consistent discipline for violators. Since then, the school says it has tightened its ban on encampments and other protests that disrupt student activities, made “doxing” a violation of its anti-harassment and anti-bullying rules and expanded “inclusion and belonging efforts” to include Jewish students.

Still, the Trump administration’s claims of campus antisemitism continue to dog Harvard, with the White House this month making sweeping new policy demands of its leaders while threatening billions of dollars in federal funding. The Anti-Defamation League and Harvard’s Hillel chapter have expressed appreciation for the administration’s focus on antisemitism but also decried funding cuts as overreach with the potential to harm Jewish students.

While such pressure has yielded changes at other American universities, Harvard has refused to comply and is now the first institution to sue the Republican administration over it, claiming it violated federal procedures and the First Amendment.

Here’s a timeline of key events in the Harvard dispute:

January 29: Days into his second term, Trump signs an executive order calling for tougher enforcement of government efforts against antisemitism. Since the October 7, 2023, attack, “Jewish students have faced an unrelenting barrage of discrimination; denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault,” the order says.

No specific universities are mentioned, but top administration officials are told to recommend how higher education institutions should “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and how the government “if warranted, (take) actions to remove such aliens” under federal legal authority that covers any foreigner who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity.”

The administration will cite the executive order repeatedly in pressuring Harvard to change its policies and separately will use claims of participation in pro-Palestinian protests or other claims without evidence to move to deport or revoke the visas of foreign scholars.

February 3: The Department of Justice announces the creation of a multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism led by Leo Terrell, a lawyer and former talk radio host who, upon his appointment by Trump as an assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Department of Justice, retweeted an X post calling him “HARVARD’S WORST NIGHTMARE.”

February 27: The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sends a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber demanding a meeting within 30 days with “relevant administrators, faculty, staff members, and any on-campus Jewish stakeholder groups” relative to Trump’s executive order on curbing antisemitism.

“(W)e write to notify you that we are aware of allegations that your institution may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination, in potential violation of statutes that we enforce,” says the letter signed by Terrell.

February 28: The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announces it will visit 10 university campuses to “meet with university leadership, impacted students and staff, local law enforcement, and community members.” Harvard is among them.

March 8: “We’re going to bankrupt these universities. We’re going to take away every single federal dollar,” Terrell tells Fox News regarding institutions he accuses of permitting antisemitism, adding, “If these universities do not play ball, lawyer up, because the federal government is coming after you.”

March 10: Harvard is included in a list of 60 schools receiving letters from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, advising them they are under investigation for potential Civil Rights Act violations “relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”

“US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon says in a statement. “That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”

March 31: The General Services Administration notifies Harvard it is conducting an official review “of all Federal contracts and grants,” with “greater than $8.7 billion of multi-year grant commitments” to be reviewed, according to a memo and an email from an agency commissioner, Josh Gruenbaum. “The Federal Government reserves the right to terminate for convenience any contracts it has with your institution at any time during the period of performance,” the memo says.

April 1: Trump speaks favorably of the idea of cutting off all federal funding to Harvard, The New York Times later reported. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” the president says in a private interaction at the White House, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

April 3: The GSA’s Gruenbaum tells Harvard’s Garber via email, “I am sending you an official notice of pre-conditions your institution must comply with in order to be in good standing and continue to be the recipient of federal taxpayer dollars.”

Attached to the email is a two-page letter also signed by attorneys with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education with “immediate next steps that we regard as necessary for Harvard University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”

In addition to demanding further steps to prevent antisemitism and punish those who discriminate against Jewish people, the letter demands Harvard “cease all preferences based on race, color, or national origin” in admissions and hiring, make efforts to “shutter” DEI programs and improve “viewpoint diversity.”

April 11: The Trump administration sends a new letter expanding on the April 3 correspondence. In stronger language, the same attorneys write, “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.”

That is followed by a proposed four-page “agreement in principle” of demands. They include Harvard reform its international student program “to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism,” and report to the federal government any foreign student who commits conduct violations.

The proposed agreement would also require Harvard to pay for outside review through 2028 of the school’s “viewpoint diversity” and hire a “critical mass of new faculty” if it is not found to be sufficiently diverse. Additionally, the previous email’s requirement of “efforts” to close DEI programs is made mandatory by August.

April 14: Harvard publicly releases the April 11 letter as well as a response from Garber, who categorically refuses the proposal, saying the government’s demands would violate the First Amendment. “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he writes.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

While the administration confirms the legitimacy of its April 11 letter, a senior official later told the New York Times it was intended to continue negotiations. “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,” May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist, said to the Times.

On the same day, the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announces “a freeze on $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 (million) in multi-year contract value” to Harvard in response to the school’s actions. “Within hours of the Freeze Order, Harvard began receiving stop work orders,” the university says in its lawsuit.

April 15: Trump says in a Truth Social post: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”

Shortly afterward, the Internal Revenue Service begins making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status. The idea “was certainly worth looking into,” McMahon, the education secretary, tells CNN.

April 16: The Department of Homeland Security threatens to revoke Harvard’s certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visa Program, jeopardizing the enrollment of thousands of international students. “It is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard University, not a guarantee,” reads the letter.

April 17: The Department of Education sends a records request to Harvard demanding information on all overseas gifts, plus information relating to “expelled foreign students,” effectively reviving a four-year investigation closed at the end of the Biden administration, with Harvard agreeing to update its financial disclosures.

“Critical aspects of Harvard’s recent foreign funding disclosure submissions are a cause for concern with the Department,” the letter says.

April 21: Harvard sues the Trump administration, calling threats to its federal funding a violation of the First Amendment, as well as “arbitrary and capricious.”

“HHS has not notified Harvard of, or provided any justification for, the imposition of any additional conditions on any specific grants,” the lawsuit says, adding the White House has failed to follow the law on how grants can be canceled.

April 22: Still, the Trump administration considers itself to be in an ongoing negotiation with Harvard and other universities, and the demands in the letters sent to Harvard are part of the back-and-forth, the education secretary reiterates.

“We had hoped Harvard would come back to the table to discuss these. We would like to have viewpoint diversity,” McMahon tells CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” The April 11 letter, she added, “was intended to have both parties sit down again and continue their negotiations.”

April 23: Harvard asks a federal judge to fast-track its legal challenge to the funding freeze, arguing it threatens critical research and academic endeavors and “chills Harvard’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” its filing states.

April 28: The first court appearance for both sides in Harvard’s lawsuit is set for this date by US Judge Allison Burroughs – a Barack Obama appointee – in a Boston courtroom. The judge is expected to set deadlines for the government to provide documentation showing its internal deliberations about the funding freeze.