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Five Democratic senators — led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck E. Schumer ’71 (D-NY) — condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard in a Thursday letter, arguing that the White House was using antisemitism as a “guise” to undermine universities.
The senators, all of whom are Jewish, addressed their letter to President Donald Trump, accusing his administration of “using what is a real crisis as a pretext to attack people and institutions that do not agree with you.”
The senators wrote that there is “perhaps no clearer example than that of the administration’s attack on Harvard,” citing the administration’s order to freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding to the University and threats to revoke its tax-exempt status.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck E. Schumer ’71 (D-NY) and Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Richard Blumenthal ’67 (D-CT), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) all joined the letter.
“These attacks go far beyond constructive and necessary efforts to support Jewish students on campus,” they wrote. “They instead seem to be aimed at broadly changing the way the university functions, exacting huge penalties in ways wholly unrelated to combating antisemitism.”
The senators requested responses to eight questions, to be answered by Wednesday — including how the Trump administration chose which schools to target for funding cuts, what specific charges of antisemitism the administration has levied against Harvard, and how the administration chose what funds to terminate.
The letter also demanded to know whether the Trump administration had revoked students’ visas and initiated deportation proceedings “based solely on their expressed views and speech, which the administration has identified as antisemitic.”
The State Department revoked student visas belonging to thousands of international students in recent weeks, including some who were apparently targeted for pro-Palestine statements. The Department of Justice moved on Friday to reinstate many of the revoked visas — including 12 held by Harvard students and recent graduates — after a wave of court challenges.
But international students at Harvard could still find their legal status in jeopardy. The Department of Homeland Security threatened in mid-April to revoke Harvard’s authorization to host international students unless the University turns over disciplinary records related to their participation in protests.
Harvard’s deadline to respond is Wednesday — the same date Schumer and his co-signatories gave Trump.
The senators also questioned if the Trump administration had considered Harvard’s recent actions to combat antisemitism, asking why the administration believed that “the steps that Harvard has already taken to strengthen its response to antisemitism are insufficient.”
Harvard has introduced training on antisemitism for academic and residential advisers and expanded its kosher meal options.
The University has also taken more controversial actions — including adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which classifies certain criticisms of Israel as antisemitic, in a lawsuit settlement in January.
And some Jewish Harvard affiliates cheered a series of shake ups in academic programs — including at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Harvard Divinity School — as efforts to rein in antisemitic curricula, even as others blasted the changes as suppression.
The senators expressed their concern that the Trump administration’s funding cuts were “targeting scientific institutions across universities” and “disproportionately” attacking Harvard Medical School.
HMS — which spends nearly $1 billion a year — receives a significant fraction of its research funding from federal agencies.
The senators asked how the Trump administration would prevent its funding cuts from “hurting Jewish students, and other students who had nothing to do with antisemitic activity on campuses and may in fact have been victims of it.”
“We strongly support efforts to ensure universities uphold their duty to protect students from unlawful discrimination and harassment,” the senators wrote.
But they accuse the administration’s actions and rhetoric of “making Jews less safe by pitting Jewish safety against other communities and undermining the freedoms and democratic norms that have allowed Jewish communities, and so many others, to thrive in the United States.”
“We urge you to reverse course immediately,” they wrote.
—Staff writer Megan L. Blonigen can be reached at megan.blonigen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @MeganBlonigen.
