President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that his administration is “getting very close” to a $500 million deal with Harvard University to reverse more than $2 billion in frozen grants.
“I guess we reached a deal with Harvard. All you have to do is paper it, right Linda?” Trump asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon during a press event in the Oval Office. “It’ll be great.”
“They’ll be paying about $500 million, and they’ll be operating trade schools,” the president continued. “They’ll be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things. Engines, lots of things.”
The Trump administration in March froze $2.4 billion in federal grants to Harvard, claiming the university didn’t adequately combat antisemitism on its campus. The administration initially proposed $500 million to settle the dispute.
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Settlement talks have gone on for months, with a federal judge in Boston writing in an order last month that the administration had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
The White House and Harvard did not respond to requests for comment from NOTUS.
“It’s a big investment in trade school done by some very smart people,” Trump said. “And then their sins are forgiven.”
Harvard is not the only university to settle with the Trump administration. Columbia University and Brown University also agreed to pay millions to restore frozen federal funding.
Columbia, also targeted by Trump for antisemitism allegations, agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government over three years, as it works to restore $1.3 billion in frozen research grants.
In July, Brown made several concessions,including adopting the administration’s definitions of male and female and sharing a wealth of student data, while ensuring the government has no say over curriculum or academic speech. Brown agreed to pay $50 million to local workforce development organizations over the next 10 years. The federal government will reimburse the university for $50 million in unpaid federal grant costs.
“The Trump Administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” McMahon said in a July statement.
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