President Donald Trump on Friday re-upped his threat to strip Harvard University of its tax-exempt status, escalating a showdown with the first major college that has defied the administration’s efforts to crack down on campus activism.
“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump wrote on his social media site Friday morning from Palm Beach, Florida, where he is spending the weekend. “It’s what they deserve!”
The president has questioned the fate of Harvard’s tax-exempt status — which a majority of U.S. colleges and universities have — ever since the school refused to comply with the administration’s demands for broad government and leadership changes, revisions to its admissions policy, and audits of how diversity is viewed on the campus. That prompted the administration to block more than $2 billion in federal grants to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution.
A Harvard spokesperson told GBH News there is “no legal basis” to rescind the school’s tax-exempt status.
“Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It would result in diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programs, and lost opportunities for innovation. The unlawful use of this instrument more broadly would have grave consequences for the future of higher education in America.”
The Treasury Department directed a senior official at the Internal Revenue Service to begin the process of revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status shortly after a social media post from Trump in mid-April questioning it, although the White House has suggested that the tax agency’s scrutiny of Harvard began before Trump’s public comments targeting the school.
The White House has also said any IRS actions will be conducted independently of the president. Federal tax law prohibits senior members of the executive branch from requesting that an IRS employee conduct or terminate an audit or investigation.
Economist Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told GBH News the move would carry major consequences for Harvard.
“When an institution loses tax-preferred status, they have to pay income taxes on any income or endowment growth that they have, and also donors have to tax on any gifts because they’re suddenly not charitable contributions,” Kelchen explained.
Harvard could also owe local property taxes on its real estate if the school loses its tax-exempt status. It’s possible Cambridge would waive that obligation, Kelchen said, but doing so might put the city at risk of federal retribution.
Democrats say Trump’s actions against Harvard are purely political. The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, along with Massachusetts’ two Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and the Senate Finance Committee chairman, Ron Wyden of Oregon, called for an inspector general investigation into Trump’s attempts to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status.
Trump’s move “raises troubling constitutional questions, including whether the president is trying to squelch Harvard’s free speech rights and whether the revocation of its tax-exempt status will deprive the university of its due process rights,” the senators wrote in a letter Friday to Heather Hill, the acting Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
Trump’s battle against Harvard is part of a broader campaign the administration is framing as an effort to root out antisemitism on college campuses. But the White House also sees a political upside in the fight, framing it as a bigger war against elite institutions decried by Trump’s loyal supporters.
An increasing number of Americans say they have little to no confidence in higher education, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Many of those critics are concerned about colleges pushing political agendas, the quality of education, and the high cost of attendance.
“Those criticisms are not wrong. Institutions need to address them,” Catharine Bond Hill, managing director of the research firm Ithaka S+R and a former president of Vassar College, told GBH News. “I think we did swing a little too far on the woke side and we haven’t done enough in terms of cost and improving graduation rates.”
But she believes some policymakers and the public have lost sight of the ways higher education makes our nation stronger.
“They do this through research, groundbreaking research, but also through educating undergraduates and graduate students that add to our country’s pool of human capital. And that’s what has driven — and continues to drive —both innovation and economic growth that make us all better off,” Bond Hill said.
Associated Press reporter Seung Min Kim reported from Washington.
GBH News reporter Kirk Carapezza reported from Boston.
