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New York Times

5 days ago

Neither Harvard nor the government has publicly detailed the types of terms they might find acceptable for a settlement.
Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration's demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House as talks between the two sides intensify, four people familiar with the negotiations said.
According to one of the people, Harvard is reluctant to directly pay the federal government, but negotiators are still discussing the exact financial terms.
The sum sought by the government, which recently accused Harvard of civil rights violations, is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled antisemitism claims with the White House last week. Neither Harvard nor the government has publicly detailed potential terms for a settlement and what allegations the money would be intended to resolve.
President Trump has privately demanded that Harvard pay far more than Columbia. The people who described the talks and the dynamics surrounding them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential negotiations.
Although the two sides have made progress toward a deal, Harvard is also skeptical of Columbia's agreement to allow an outside monitor to oversee its sweeping arrangement with the government. Harvard officials have signaled that such a requirement for their own settlement could be a redline as a potential infringement on the university's academic freedom.
University officials, though, concluded months ago that even if they prevailed in their court fight against the government, a deal could help Harvard to avoid more troubles over the course of Mr. Trump's term.
The timing was unclear for when the administration and Harvard might reach an accord, but the university is expected to demand that any deal be tied to the federal lawsuit it brought against the government in April.
Mr. Trump said in June that his administration might strike an agreement with Harvard 'over the next week or so.' Although that time frame has lapsed, the president has privately told aides that he will not green-light a deal unless the nation's oldest and wealthiest university agrees to spend many millions of dollars.
The president's focus on financial terms reflects a shift in strategy for the administration, which spent the first months of its assault on higher education highlighting the prospects of reorienting the industry's perceived ideological tilt. Although the White House has tied federal research funds to its quest for negotiations with top schools since the winter, Mr. Trump's focus on the financial conditions of any settlements emerged more recently.
Harvard declined to comment on Monday.
A White House spokesman, Harrison W. Fields, said on Monday that the administration's 'proposition is simple and common sense: Don't allow antisemitism and D.E.I. to run your campus, don't break the law, and protect the civil liberties of all students.'
Mr. Fields added that the White House was 'confident that Harvard will eventually come around and support the president's vision, and through good-faith conversations and negotiations, a good deal is more than possible.'
The Trump administration publicly depicted last week's settlement with Columbia as a template for bargaining with Harvard and other universities it has targeted. And, indeed, higher education executives have spent days dissecting the fine print of Columbia's agreement, a wide-ranging deal that goes far beyond addressing antisemitism. Many have focused on a provision that said no part of the settlement 'shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions or the content of academic speech.'
Although some people assailed Columbia for agreeing to the deal, others saw the arrangement as a necessity and a model for others to consider.
'They didn't admit wrongdoing — it's a classic settlement,' said Donna E. Shalala, who was the health secretary under President Bill Clinton and led four schools, including the University of Miami and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 'You don't admit wrongdoing, and you preserve your right to continue as an institution.'
Mr. Trump, Dr. Shalala said, had a long record of 'transactional' bargaining with powerful institutions.
'The details are less important than getting the deal and getting the win,' she said. 'So if you know that when you go into a negotiation that it's less ideological than it is getting a win, then you can get a win on both sides.'
Harvard is now weighing its own calculations. But it faces a different range of considerations than Columbia, including its outsize standing in American life, its legal battle with the government and its insistence that it will not surrender its independence to any government.
'No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,' Harvard's president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in April, an early signal that the university might resist oversight like what the Trump administration has envisioned.
Harvard sued soon after Dr. Garber released his statement and after the Trump administration began to strip the university of billions of dollars in federal research money.
Just last Monday, a federal judge in Boston appeared deeply skeptical in a hearing about the government's tactics against Harvard.
Although the judge, Allison D. Burroughs, did not immediately issue a decision in the case, her barrage of questions suggested serious doubts about the government's efforts to tie research funding to accusations of antisemitism.
Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized Judge Burroughs after the hearing, where the university's negotiations with the White House were not substantively discussed.
'Harvard wants to settle, but I think Columbia handled it better,' Mr. Trump said to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday.
His administration has not always insisted on payments from elite universities to settle disputes with the government.
When the administration cut a deal this summer with the University of Pennsylvania over accusations that the Ivy League school had violated civil rights laws by allowing a transgender person onto its women's swim team, Penn agreed to apologies and policy changes but no financial penalties.
But the administration has been eyeing Harvard's wealth for months, and Trump aides believe that the university is able to pay much more than Columbia did. Columbia's $200 million fine will go to the Treasury, a White House official said last week, until Congress decides how to spend it.
In April, when a government lawyer sent Harvard's legal team an array of potential actions by the university, one was the possibility of Harvard agreeing to a lien on its assets so the government could recoup federal dollars 'in event of noncompliance in the future.'
The idea, included in a document that became public in connection with Harvard's lawsuit against the government, gained little traction. When the administration sent Harvard a list of demands later that month, the notion of a lien was not mentioned.
Harvard has an endowment valued at about $53 billion. But most of the endowment is restricted, meaning that university leaders are limited in how they can tap a war chest that has long animated Mr. Trump and his aides. In a memorandum this month, Harvard's leaders wrote that a series of actions from Washington — including an increase in the excise tax on endowments and the administration's quest to eliminate grant funding to Harvard — could affect the university's budget by close to $1 billion a year.
'We hope that our legal challenges will reverse some of these federal actions and that our efforts to raise alternative sources of funding will be successful,' the Harvard officials wrote. 'As that work proceeds, we also need to prepare for the possibility that the lost revenues will not be restored anytime soon.'
Columbia's agreement with the federal government was intended to restart the flow of federal grant money, which is essential to top research universities. About 11 percent of Harvard's revenue comes through federally sponsored research.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.