(Washington) Harvard University did not do enough to protect Jewish students from harassment, reveals an investigation by the Trump administration, which now threatens to cut all federal funding from the university if it does not take adequate measures.
A federal working group sent a letter to Harvard on Monday, saying that the prestigious institution had violated the laws on civil rights requiring universities they protect students from discrimination based on ethnic or national origin.
According to the working group, the investigators noted that Harvard had sometimes “deliberately participated in the anti -Semitic harassment of students, teachers and Jewish staff” and that the leaders had let anti -Semitism spread to the Cambridge, in Massachusetts campus.
“The absence of proper adequate changes will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and will continue to allocate Harvard relations with the federal government,” supported officials in the letter, obtained by the Associated Press and initially reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Harvard did not comment immediately.
This survey is added to the friction between the White House and Harvard, which lost more than 2.6 billion US in federal research subsidies after rejected a series of requests requiring radical changes in its governance, its recruitment and its admission.
The Trump administration accuses Harvard for months of tolerating anti -Semitism on his campus, but the conclusions of the official survey pave the way to negotiating an agreement or, failing that, an attempt to deprive the university of federal funding.
The investigation mainly concerns the demonstrations that took place on the campus in connection with the war between Israel and Hamas. It indicates that the campus was “invaded by an illegal camp for several weeks” which sowed fear among Jewish and Israeli students and disrupted their studies.
The investigation accuses Harvard of having imposed a lax and inconsistent discipline towards the students who participated in these camps, adding that none of these had been suspended.
Harvard president Alan Garber recognized the problems of anti -Semitism and anti -Muslim prejudices on the campus, but says that Harvard has made progress in this regard. He announced new initiatives in April, after the publication by Harvard of internal reports reporting anti -Semitism and Islamophobia on the campus.
“Harvard cannot – and will not tolerate – sectarianism,” wrote Mr. Garber by publishing these reports.
Monday’s letter concludes that Harvard violated title VI of the 1964 civil rights law. Such conclusions have almost always been resolved by voluntary agreements between establishments and the federal government. However, the Trump administration has adopted a much firmer position than its predecessors.
This makes decades that an administration did not even try to completely deprive a school of its federal funding for violation of civil rights.
