Trump Says a Deal with Harvard is Close

Has the Trump administration finally reached a deal with Harvard? President Trump suggested it had or at least that it was very close today.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday previewed a $500 million deal on trade schools with Harvard University, following months of talks about a potential settlement amid a broader fight between the Trump administration and the school.

“I guess we reached a deal with Harvard today, so we’ll see. What you have to do is paper it, right, Linda?” Trump asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon during an event in the Oval Office on pediatric cancer, before later saying the administration is “close to finalizing” it.

McMahon responded affirmatively but did not provide any specifics…

Trump said Tuesday that officials are “very close” to a deal and Harvard “will be paying about $500 million and they’ll be operating trade schools. They’ll be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things, engines, lots of things.”

News of the possible deal comes on the same day that we’re learning that, earlier this month, Harvard sent a lengthy letter attacking the administration which had accused the school of not doing enough to stop anti-Semitism on campus.

In a strongly worded, 163-page letter with attachments on Sept. 19, which has not been previously reported, Harvard assailed the government’s findings. The university accused investigators at the Health and Human Services Department of relying on “inaccurate and incomplete facts,” failing to meet a single legal requirement to prove discrimination and drawing sweeping conclusions from a survey of one-half of 1 percent of the student body…

Harvard said the health department’s decision to refer its findings to the Justice Department was “based on a fabricated and distorted interpretation of the record.”

The stark language was a departure from months of mostly measured tones from Harvard as the university has resisted the administration’s pressure campaign to impose President Trump’s political agenda on the nation’s elite colleges.

The administration’s response to the Harvard letter came yesterday in the form of an effort to block the school from getting future research grants.

The Health and Human Services Department on Monday started the process for blocking Harvard University from receiving future research grants, three months after finding that the university violated civil rights law by failing to address the harassment of Jewish students on campus.

Debarment is the government’s formal way of blacklisting contractors. Monday’s announcement that the Trump administration was initiating the debarment process represented a shift from May, when Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a letter that simply disqualified Harvard from future federal funding.

With this move, the administration is increasing pressure on Harvard at a time when the White House and university leaders have struggled to negotiate a settlement to their months-long dispute over the administration’s campaign to expunge “woke” ideology from college campuses.

Today, the NY Times is reporting that the possible breakthrough mentioned by the president is the result of some behind the scenes efforts by Stephen A. Schwarzman, a billionaire who has reached out to Trump on behalf of the school.

Mr. Schwarzman spoke with Mr. Trump once during the past weekend and again in a phone call on Tuesday, acting as an emissary between the White House and Harvard, according to three people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Schwarzman’s involvement was an attempt by Harvard to pierce a division inside the administration between advisers eager to deliver a deal for Mr. Trump and more ideologically driven aides who viewed the terms as too favorable to the university…

…the president’s haste to announce a settlement on Tuesday privately worried some allies who said the turn of events would make it more difficult to extract additional concessions from the university.

So to sum all this up, it sounds like both sides have been playing hardball behind the scenes but Harvard has found someone Trump is listening to and that may have finally brought this to a close, or very close to it. But it also sounds like Trump wasn’t expected to reveal this potential deal yet which hasn’t reached the paper stage.

So who knows if this time it will really work out or if something else will blow it up and we’ll still be talking about a potential deal a month from now.

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