And Harvard University is the latest school to face a
federal funding freeze from the Trump administration. Global affairs
correspondent Maya Rodriguez is joining us live from our DC
newsroom. Maya, really unprecedented here, why is
the government taking this action and what's Harvard's response?
Yeah, Nate, so Harvard is one of 60
colleges and universities that the Department of Education said it
was investigating for allegedly not doing enough to protect Jewish
students on campus, but the government's recent recommendations to
Harvard go beyond cracking down on anti-Semitism. Now Harvard's
president says it will not meet those demands and that
the government should not be able to dictate how a
private university can operate. The federal government froze more
than$2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University after the
school said it won't comply with a list of demands
from the Trump administration over alleged violations of civil rights
laws. The Trump administration claims its demands are needed
to fight anti-Semitism on college campuses, but in a
letter to Harvard sent Friday, the list of demands
went beyond that to include. Governance and leadership reforms
at Harvard, changes to hiring and admissions policies,
and discontinuation of DEI programs. American Council on Education
President Ted Mitchells. Those are not decisions for the
federal government. We do not have a federal system
of higher education. Harvard's president responded to the government
, writing, the university will not surrender its independence
or. Its constitutional rights. Former Harvard president Lawrence
Summers says universities can do better, but disagrees with
the Trump administration's approach. Universities are in need of
a great deal of reform, and it's come too
slowly, but that's not a reason why the government
can entirely suspend the law. Harvard is not the
administration's only. It's also paused federal funding for schools
including the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell,
and Northwestern University. Columbia University has been discussing policy
changes after the Trump administration threatened to cut hundreds of
millions of dollars in federal funding there, but on
Monday, Colombia's acting president said the university would not
relinquish its independence to the federal government. The Trump
administration is also facing pushback because of other federal cuts
to higher education. On Monday, a group of
universities, including MIT, Princeton, and the University
of Illinois sued the Department of Energy over previous cuts
to federal research funding, Nate. Yeah, a
lot of that funding going to research. So what
effect will these funding freezes then have on these universities
, uh, including Harvard? I mean, it's
no small dollar number that's, that's going frozen.
Yeah, Nate, like you mentioned, the money
that's been frozen is used for research at these universities
. So for years universities have used these federal dollars
to work on things like medical treatments and scientific breakthroughs
. Experts tell us that withholding that money will set
the US back when it comes to science, medicine
, and technology research, Nate.