Ivy League Universities Face Questions of Power Under Federal Funding Scrutiny

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By Catalina Casarella 

Throughout the past few weeks, the Trump Administration has been expanding their efforts of reform in higher education. The most recent focus has been the Antisemitism Task Force’s review of various Ivy League institutions’ policies, ranging from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in hiring and admissions, to student disciplinary methods. 

On April 11, the Department of Education sent a letter to Harvard’s administration threatening to pull over 8 billion dollars in federal grants and research contracts if the university does not agree to all the terms and oversight that their letter requests. Harvard University responded on April 14 with their own letter via their legal team, rejecting all of the federal government’s demands and voicing concerns about the threat such requests pose to their freedom as a private, non-governmental institution. 

Federal concern about how Ivy League institutions are being run is not as new as it may seem. In March of 2024 under the Biden administration, The House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means (a bipartisan committee headed by Jason Smith (R)) sent letters to Cornell, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania requesting information on what actions were being taken to combat antisemitism on their campuses. This attention started when Ivy League institutions became the grounds for the most active protests against the war in Gaza. 

However, the Trump administration has taken a far more aggressive policy in the reform of higher education. They have now threatened, and actively followed through, on freezing funding for the universities who do not agree with the requests of the Department of Education. Some universities, like Harvard and Cornell, have publicly denounced any and all federal administrative requests, accepting the loss of funding for various programs. However, others, such as Columbia University, have consented to the terms of the federal government rather than lose essential federal funding. 

These back-and-forths raise two major questions: one is how much federal oversight of private educational institutions is constitutionally just, and the second is what kinds of institutions actually ought to receive federal funding. While the letter addressed to Harvard University clearly frames the issue as the latter, Harvard’s response clearly responds to the former. 

This disconnect between recent federal budget cuts and the public response is constant in the debates about Trump’s administrative attempts to curb government spending. On the one hand, should there be 8 billion dollars of federal funding going to what is already the wealthiest university in the United States? And, if there really is anti-semitism being overlooked by an institution’s administration, isn’t it the role of the federal government to step in and protect the citizens who are being harmed by such injustices? On the other hand, is it the federal government’s right to audit the hiring activity of any university, whether they be a private institution that receives government assistance for research or completely publicly funded? 

Another consideration is the intention behind  all of these actions. The letter to Harvard in particular displays requests to immediately stop all DEI admission and hiring policies, and to furthermore allow the appointed government committee to be allowed audits of all the university’s admission and hiring choices until at least 2028. These requests are  such a step into the university’s administrative workings, that it is possible the federal government never expected or even desired compliance, but simply wanted to publicly justify the freezing of the university’s funding. This possibility introduces yet another question about the approach the federal government ought to be taking in this fiscal tightening, even in places where it may be needed.  

These actions go even beyond the issue of whether these prominent universities will comply with these particular federal requests – or whether the requests are even justified. At the heart of this issue is a disagreement about the role of federal funding in private educational institutions, and what power funding ought to correspond to. In the past months, this debate has come to a head, and as even these various institutions themselves are split, it does not seem as if any consensus is close at hand for the American public.