Trump seeks $1bn from Harvard as campus feud escalates

Donald Trump, the United States president, has said his administration will seek $1 billion in damages from Harvard University, deepening a long-running confrontation between the White House and one of America’s most powerful academic institutions.

In a series of late-night posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the government wanted “nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University”, accusing the school of unspecified “serious and heinous illegalities”. He did not set out the legal basis for the claim or explain how the figure had been calculated.

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The announcement followed a report by The New York Times that the Trump administration had dropped an earlier demand for a $200 million payment during talks aimed at resolving a dispute over frozen federal funding. Trump rejected the account, accusing Harvard of “feeding a lot of nonsense” to the newspaper.

Harvard, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has emerged as the most prominent target of the administration’s campaign against what it describes as “woke” and “radical left” ideas on university campuses. Officials have accused the university of failing to do enough to tackle antisemitism during pro-Palestine protests, a charge the university has strongly denied.

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The row has already had major financial and legal consequences. In April last year, the administration revoked about $2 billion in research grants and froze other federal funding to Harvard. The university sued, arguing that no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”.

A federal court later overturned the funding cuts, ruling that the government had violated the university’s free speech rights. The White House said it would challenge what it called an “egregious decision” and insisted Harvard remained ineligible for future grants, even as negotiations over a possible settlement continued.

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Trump has also previously threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status and seize patents linked to federally funded research. Other Ivy League universities, including Columbia, Penn, and Brown, have chosen to strike deals with the administration to protect their funding rather than fight the claims in court.

Reacting to the wider coverage of the dispute, Trump also dismissed references to falling approval ratings, writing that the newspaper “got it ALL WRONG, my Poll Numbers are Great!”, as the battle between the White House and America’s elite universities shows no sign of cooling.