Senior Harvard faculty members have pledged to donate a portion of their salaries to schools to oppose the Trump administration’s demands.
The announcement comes after the Trump administration freezes more than $2 billion in Harvard’s federal funds. The school filed a lawsuit accordingly.
In a letter posted online, organizers asked senior faculty to commit 10% of their pay for a year or until the funding situation was resolved.
“We are deeply encouraged by the University’s rejection of the Trump Administration’s demands, and we also recognize that the University is currently facing serious economic damage to defend academic freedom,” the letter read in part.
The letter was published by Ryan Enos, Jeff Freier, Arcon Fan, Oliver Hart, Rebecca Henderson, Steve Levitsky, Eric Muskin, Martha Minow, Dani Rodrick, Seida Scopol and Steve Walt.
Specific uses of donated funds have not been laid out. Organizers said they were acting promptly to establish plans and asked others to personally sign a non-binding pledge to demonstrate their support as they move forward by formalizing the process.
“We assume that the faculty who has made the pledge will vote. If a majority agrees that the university has made a sincere effort to use its own resources to support staff, students and academic programs, the faculty will proceed with the donation,” the letter states.
Last year, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz, a Democratic candidate for Vice President, was in Cambridge on Monday, slamming the state of democracy and looking ahead.
The university has been a target for the Trump administration, and Harvard has called for all preferences to be “based on race, color, origin or its proxy” and to implement “met-based” policies by August. In response, Harvard became the first university to openly ignore the Trump administration, as it retains the university’s federal funds to push for a political agenda.
The Trump administration argued that the university hasn’t done enough to check anti-Semitism in its campus protests last year. Harvard Leadership says Harvard will not succumb to demands and is called a threat to academic freedom and the autonomy of all universities.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration released a federal investigation into schools and Harvard legal reviews based on allegations of race-based discrimination.
The school pledged its own reforms after publishing internal reports on anti-Semitism and anti-Arab bias.
Oral hearings in Harvard’s funding lawsuits are scheduled for tentatively at the end of July.
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