By Nandita Bose, Nate Raymond and Kanishka Singh
Washington (Reuters) -S -President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration was close to a deal with the Harvard University that would include a payment of $ 500 million by the Ivy League institution, after months of negotiations on school policy.
The administration has arranged with various prestigious universities and threatens to withhold federal funds on issues, including pro-Palestinian protests against Israel's war in Gaza, campus diversity and transgender policy.
“We are very close,” Trump told reporters during an event in the Oval Office. “Linda is the last details,” he said, referring to educational secretary Linda McMahon.
“And they pay around $ 500 million and they will exploit trading schools. They will teach people how to do AI and many other things, motorbikes, many things,” he said. He did not offer any further details about the deal.
Cambridge, Harvard -based in Massachusetts had no immediate comments on Trump's comments.
Proponents of rights have caused freedom of expression, privacy and academic freedom problems about the probes of the Trump administration to universities.
Trump has said that Harvard and other universities have allowed impressions of anti-Semitism during pro-Palestinian protests.
Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say that the government wrongly equales the criticism of Israel's attack on Gaza and its occupation of Palestinian territories with anti -Semitism, and advocacy for Palestinian rights with support for extremism. The government has not announced probes in Islamophobia.
Harvard Task Forces said at the end of April that the Jewish and Muslim students of the school had to deal with intolerance and abuse during Israel's war in Gaza after the Hamas attack in October 2023.
Actions against Harvard, other Ivy League schools
Various other Ivy League schools have concluded deals with the Trump administration in recent months, including Columbia University and Brown University, which accepted certain government requirements. Columbia agreed to pay more than $ 220 million to the government and Brown said it will pay $ 50 million to support the development of local workforce.
The Trump administration has set up the Pro-Palestinian protest movement that the Harvard campus ravaged and proceeded to terminate more than $ 2 billion in financing for research subsidies at the university.
It also tried to prohibit international students to go to the school, threaten Harvard's accreditation status and opened the door to cut off more funds by finding that it had violated the federal civil rights legislation.
Harvard President Alan Garber has said that the various federal actions since Trump returned to the office since Trump, could rid the school of almost $ 1 billion annually, forcing it to dismiss the staff and freeze the recruitment.
Harvard challenged some of those actions in court and stated that the Trump government took revenge in violation of his free speech rights after refusing to meet the requirements of civil servants that it is revised his board, hiring and academic programs to adapt to their ideological agenda.
The two lawsuits were assigned to the American district judge Allison Burroughs, an appointed in Boston of the Democratic former President Barack Obama, who blocked the Trump government to close the door to international students and did not prohibit the investigation finance of Harvard on 3 September.
But the administration in the days since the ruling has continued to escalate with Harvard. A day before Trump's last comments, the US Department of Health and Human Services said that it would start a process that could lead to the school excluding contracts with all government agencies or receiving financing.
The government has had to deal with other legal setbacks in its attempts to freeze federal financing at universities. Last week a federal judge ordered Trump's government to restore more than $ 500 million to frozen federal subsidies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose, Kanishka Singh and Jasper Ward in Washington, Nate Raymond in Boston and Brad Brooks in Colorado; Edit by Donna Bryson, Daniel Wallis and Edmund Klamann)
