Harvard students, faculty defend university against Trump's threat of pulling tax exemption status

Fox News

26-05-2025

The Trump administration threatened to revoke Harvard University's tax-exempt status, prompting students and faculty members to run to its defense.
"It mustn't lose its tax exemptions," Harvey Mansfield, a retired Harvard professor of over 60 years, told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital met with Mansfield at his farm estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a rural town outside of Boston. Mansfield, 93, taught political science and political philosophy at Harvard. The author of the book "Dead White Males" first attended Harvard at age 17.
"That would force it to close its doors. That's going much too far. And the whole idea of placing tax exemption as a penalty for misbehavior by universities is, I think, exaggerated and improper," Mansfield said.
Fox News Digital was also able to speak with Kem, a native of Thailand. Kem, who did not disclose his major and last name, heard chatter of Harvard's nonprofit status being revoked.
"I think that this school does a lot of research that benefits the public good. I think any kind of rescinding of its non-profit status would probably do more harm to the American public than any kind of benefit that could happen. I hope the school and the administration come to an amicable settlement and let education proceed without disruption," Kem said.
Harvard filed a suit against the Trump administration over their policy to terminate Harvard's visa program due to "pro-terrorist conduct" at campus protests.
Leading up to Trump's latest restriction on Harvard, many international students did not want to speak with Fox News Digital about the debacle between the school and President Donald Trump.
The Ivy League school became a target of Trump's broader probe into universities' handling of anti-Semitism on campus after several schools were rocked by violent protests in the wake of the October 7 terror attacks on Israel by Hamas.
The Trump administration has frozen $2.2 billion in funding to the university and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status due to the Ivy League school's failure to address antisemitism on campus.
The Department of Education's Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism released a statement on May 13, citing recent reporting that "has exposed the Harvard Law Review's (HLR) pattern of endemic race discrimination when evaluating articles for inclusion in its journal."
The findings resulted in the Trump administration cutting an additional $450 million in grants from the university.
Harvard hit back with a lawsuit last month over the funding freeze, saying it was unlawful.
Andrew Hayes, a law student, told Fox News Digital that "there's certainly a lot of political discrimination."
"If we were counting the conservative faculty here, you'd see a lot more of that. You could count them all on one hand out of 150 members. I know from friends who are on the law review that there's a lot of political and racial calculus, and even racial calculus that goes into article selection," the senior added.
Leo Koerner, the president of the college's Republican club, said he does think that Harvard produces more than it takes.
The third-year history major does not think Harvard should be permanently defunded. He said the Ivy League school has administrative bloat that could be minimized to cut costs.
"I think there's a lot of bloat and that comes from the administration and it's a huge amount of deans. There are more administrators and professors than students. It's an insane thing," he said.
"I do think it produces more than it takes properly managed right now that we see a lot of problems. And we see a lot of things that are being taught and things that are not allowed to be taught, people not allowed to speak. Those are the things that Harvard is trying to work on," the junior said.
The Trump administration also shared issues with Harvard's admission policies.
The New York Times reported that Trump is using the Department of Justice to investigate whether Harvard's admissions policies comply with a Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action.
Spain native Berné Leon, a teaching fellow at Harvard, said Trump is using every excuse to "attack the university."
"I think that the administration considers that liberal art colleges are something that is in the way to their objectives and I think that because the university has rejected the call to essentially turn over the administration, the capacity to decide what is taught at the university or who they hire — Well, they're going to be trying to find any sort of excuse to make our life difficult in the university," Leon said.
He went on to say, "I do know that some people consider that there has still been some form of affirmative action since the Supreme Court overturned the practice. But, my understanding is that what the university does essentially is looking at the profiles of students beyond their grades, which doesn't account, as far as I know, as affirmative action at all."
"It's simply looking at the students beyond their grades," he added.
Fox News Digital reached out to Deptarment of Education for comment but did not immediately hear back.