When the Trump administration demanded “immediate cooperation” with a series of conditions on Harvard’s federal funding, the University stayed silent for two weeks.

But on Friday, the government quietly sent Harvard a new, more detailed list of orders — and three days later, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 delivered a scathing rejection of what he described as “unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community.”

It is not clear if the Friday letter prompted Harvard’s shift from embracing cautious dialogue with the Trump administration to outright rejection. But the new demands show how deeply President Donald Trump and his administration aim to shape the inner workings of Harvard.

When the University publicly released a memo listing the new demands on Monday, they drew instant backlash from academics who described them as unacceptable and counter to decadeslong traditions of academic freedom.

Former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey S. Flier said in an interview that if the University had acceded to the demands, it would have marked “the end of Harvard as an independent institution.”

“It was overwhelmingly overreaching any reasonable level of interest in seeing Harvard change,” Flier said.

Government professor Steven Levitsky wrote in a text message that the new demands were “impossible to accept.”

“It would have been the end of Harvard — a death blow to academic freedom,” Levitsky wrote.

The initial demands sent by the White House two weeks ago asked Harvard to implement some concrete policies such as banning masks and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — though most asks remained vague.

The Friday demands were more concrete and would have impacted wide swaths of the University. They would have required Harvard to disempower faculty leaders involved with campus activism, punish members of prominent pro-Palestine student groups, and conduct ideological screenings of international applicants.

And they would have mandated an external audit of schools and programs that “reflect ideological capture” or “fuel antisemitic harassment” — from human rights research centers to the entire Harvard Medical School.

Below, The Crimson analyzes how the demands in Friday’s letter converge with the debates that have played out on Harvard’s campus in recent years — and national battles over the future of higher education.

[ Read the Trump administration’s updated demands to Harvard. ]

Reforming Governance

In the letter, the Trump administration specifically instructed Harvard to begin “reducing the power” held by tenured and untenured faculty and administrators who are “more committed to activism than scholarship.”

The letter did not define what it would mean to prioritize activism over scholarship. But many faculty have participated in anti-Trump demonstrations, and a contingent of professors led the most vocal push for Harvard to resist federal demands.

The letter’s language also seemed to invoke conservatives’ arguments that some academic disciplines — particularly fields that study race, gender, and sexuality — are activism, not scholarship.

Auditing Academic Programs

The Trump administration also asked Harvard to commission a third party to audit programs that contribute to antisemitism or “reflect ideological capture.” The White House demanded audits of entire schools — including the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Divinity School, School of Public Health, and Medical School.

Unlike demands sent to Columbia University last month, Friday’s letter to Harvard did not include orders to place programs into academic receivership. But it tasked the proposed external audit with singling out faculty members “who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7” for discipline.

The Trump administration also named individual programs, including the Religion and Public Life Program at HDS, the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Harvard has already made changes to several of the listed programs — which some students and faculty criticized at the time as attempts to preemptively appease Trump. HSPH announced in March that it had severed ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank. Later that month, Harvard administrators dismissed two faculty leaders at CMES over allegations that the center’s programs skewed pro-Palestine.

And, days later, the Divinity School announced it had suspended its Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which was housed under the RPL program named in Trump’s letter.

Enforcing ‘Viewpoint Diversity’

Trump ordered Harvard to launch a third-party audit for “viewpoint diversity” among affiliates — and demanded that the University reshape the composition of its faculty and student body if the audits found Harvard failed to meet the administration’s standards.

The letter explained that if the Trump administration found Harvard lacked viewpoint diversity, the University would be required to onboard “a critical mass” of faculty or students to improve the ideological diversity on campus.

It also stipulated that if current faculty prove to be “not capable” of hiring colleagues or admitting students that would improve their departments’ viewpoint diversity, they would be “transferred to the closest cognate department” that does meet the demands.

The audits would take place annually until at least 2028, according to the letter.

Harvard’s faculty has long skewed liberal, with more than 77 percent of surveyed professors identifying as liberal in The Crimson’s annual FAS survey in 2023.

Conducting Plagiarism Checks

The letter asked Harvard to check faculty members’ scholarship for plagiarism and conduct plagiarism reviews in its hiring process.

The demands for plagiarism reviews invoke a tactic of choice among right-wing activists, who used plagiarism allegations against former Harvard President Claudine Gay to call for her ouster. After Gay’s resignation, a string of anonymous complaints accused other Black woman scholars at Harvard of plagiarism.

Conservative activists — including right-wing activist Christopher F. Rufo — have argued that plagiarism has become endemic in academia as a result of efforts to hire and retain a diverse faculty.

Overhauling Student Discipline

The Friday letter also asked Harvard to call in police against student protesters “to stop incidents that violate time, place, and manner rules when necessary.”

Unlike many peer institutions, the University opted against sending in police to clear the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard last spring. The patient approach spared Harvard from the disruptive arrests that rocked college campuses nationwide. More than 3,100 people were arrested or detained for their participation in spring 2024 campus protests.

The letter demanded that Harvard consolidate its disciplinary policies under the University’s central administration and shift responsibilities away from school-level Administrative Boards and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Faculty Council.

After the encampment, Ad Boards across several graduate schools took a lenient approach to participants, with only the Harvard College Ad Board issuing harsher punishments. But the Ad Board lightened its penalties after the Faculty Council criticized its handling of undergraduates’ cases.

The demand to restructure Harvard’s disciplinary procedures is in line with the Trump administration’s other calls to place universities’ operations under administrative, rather than faculty, control.

Derecognizing Student Organizations

The Trump administration also instructed Harvard to pull recognition and funding from student organizations that promoted criminal actions or “anti-Semitic activity.” It singled out five groups for derecognition — the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduate Students 4 Palestine, Law Students 4 Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild — and asked Harvard to discipline their officers and members.

The Trump administration also ordered the University to retroactively discipline students who participated in a pro-Palestine demonstration at Harvard Business School in October 2023, the occupation of University Hall in November 2023, and the Harvard Yard encampment last year.

The proposed overhaul to Harvard’s protest rules mirror similar demands that Columbia exercise “full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators,” and punish student groups and their members for violating the school’s policies.

Columbia hired 36 new campus patrol officers following Trump’s demands.

The Trump administration also ordered Harvard to enforce a mask ban with “serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.”

Eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

In the Friday letter, the Trump administration reiterated its demand that Harvard cut all diversity programs.

The letter also demanded Harvard cease any hiring or admissions decisions “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Since the Supreme Court ruled Harvard’s race-conscious admission unconstitutional in 2023, College admissions officers have admitted students without knowing their race. And last June, the FAS stopped requiring that candidates for faculty positions submit statements detailing their commitments to diversity.

The letter from federal officials also requested that the University submit data from its hiring and admissions processes. The data would include the race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized test scores of applicants and candidates.

It’s not clear whether the demands would actually require the University to change its admissions processes — which already must follow federal law. But the administration’s request for data suggests that they want Harvard to demonstrate its reforms are tangibly changing the makeup of its student body and employees.

Harvard has made changes that obscure the demographics of its newly admitted classes — adjusting the formulas it uses to report data and delaying the release of information on the latest admissions cycle.

Monitoring International Students

Friday’s letter also asked Harvard to ramp up its monitoring of international students as the Trump administration continues its revoking student visas en masse — sometimes targeting pro-Palestine activists, often acting without explanation. So far, at least 12 Harvard students and recent graduates had their visas revoked.

The demands, which ask Harvard to “immediately report” international students for violating conduct policies, would require the University to stay in near constant contact with the Trump administration.

The letter also seemed to propose an ideological litmus test for applicants. It asked Harvard to screen international students during the admissions process to shut out students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.”

The letter also ordered Harvard to exclude international applicants who are “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism” — terms the Trump administration has wielded broadly to describe criticism of Israel.

The White House demanded that the reforms be “demonstrated through structural and personnel changes,” and that they be shared both with the federal government for audit and with the public “on a non-individualized basis.”

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.