Is Trump Administration Confrontation with Harvard Due to a Mistake?

Last week, the Trump Administration sent a letter to Harvard University threatening serious consequences were the University not to adopt a broad series of reforms including (but not limited to) changes in hiring and admissions. Unlike some other universities, Harvard stood its ground and announced it would not comply. Now it appears someone in the Trump Administration may have acted prematurely in sending the letter in the midst of negotiations between the two sides.

According to a New York Times report the letter may have been sent in error.

The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.

It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.

But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.

Once the letter was sent, however, Harvard felt the need to respond to the official demands, leading to the current confrontation in which the Trump Administration is threatening to cut off all federal money to the university and to reconsider its tax-exempt status (a legally questionable move, as Eugene discusses here).

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