Harvard University has been hit with a $2.3bn federal funding freeze after the Ivy League institution took a stand against the Trump administration’s ongoing demands.
The freeze, representing 35.9 percent of Harvard’s $6.4bn operating expenses, immediately followed a letter on Monday from Harvard University lawyers to the Trump administration, stating that it rejected the government’s demands.
The letter, issued by Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and LLP King & Spalding LLP, said that “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
Harvard is the first university to take a stand against the government, which said it is investigating 60 universities over allegations of antisemitism. Several Ivy League schools have already had funding threatened or cancelled.
Why in the flying fuck are my tax dollars going to fuckin harvard?!?!
Edit: I admit I 100% did not think about research grants and I also admit I am forever skeptical of any university’s budget and financing regardless if they’re public or private. Nothing about higher education operating costs adds up to me.
They’re grants. Universities are one of the foremost research institutions in the world. Not granting them additional research funds would basically mean we’re relying on donations or private research, which would be driven by profit potential instead of overall benefit to mankind.
Remember how after SARS universities started researching novel vaccine creation methods and that research lead to an extremely rapid development and response to COVID when more traditional vaccines would have taken several more years. But none of that was obviously profitable so there were no companies interested in doing that kind of research?
You know how nMRI and CRT machines are really neat but they didn’t exist because we didn’t understand physics enough to use giant spinning magnets and radioactive isotopes to see inside people without cutting them open. And how there wasn’t a commercial use for those kind of low energy particles so existing reactors were just disposing of them as waste?
That kind of stuff.
Because the government wants (should want, its debatable rn) people to become educated and contribute to society, so they subsidize education. A lot of this money goes to research and scholarships, and while it’s questionable why Harvard needs billions from the government when they already charge out the ass, it makes sense that the government (and in theory, the taxpayers too) want more people to get good education to help the country we all live in do better. This applies for a lot of colleges and universities, not just Harvard.