Harvard President calls Trump’s tax threat ‘highly illegal’ amid funding clash

Harvard University President Alan Garber pushed back on Friday against President Donald Trump’s plan to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, calling the move ‘highly illegal’ and ‘destructive to Harvard’ in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Trump’s decision to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status is “highly illegal, unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move.” Tax-exempt status is granted to educational institutions to enable them to successfully carry out their mission of education, and for research universities, of research,” Garber told The Wall Street Journal.

However, Garber acknowledged that losing tax-exempt status would be deeply damaging to Harvard. “Obviously, that would be severely impaired if we were to lose our tax-exempt status. And I should add, it would be destructive to Harvard, but the message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one — which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be called an existential threat to so many educational institutions,” Garber said.

Earlier, President Donald Trump renewed his threat to strip Harvard University of its tax-exempt status. “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump wrote on his social media site on Friday morning. “It’s what they deserve!”

Trump has challenged Harvard’s tax-exempt status after the university refused to comply with his administration’s demands for leadership changes, admissions policy revisions, and diversity audits. In response, the administration blocked over $2 billion in federal grants to the school.”

Harvard is amongst several universities nationwide where pro-Palestinian protests erupted on campus amid last year’s war in Gaza. Since then, the Trump administration has intensified scrutiny of these institutions, with multiple Ivy League presidents testifying before Congress over allegations of antisemitism.

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