Trump gains powerful allies in Harvard battle as university fights for billions

EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump’s legal defense in a major lawsuit from Harvard got a major boost from a slew of state prosecutors who formally joined his side on Monday.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird led 15 other attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in support of Trump after the Massachusetts institution sued the administration to prevent billions in federal funding from being stripped from its coffers over its lax response to antisemitism on campus.

Bird argues there’s precedent for Trump’s actions, pointing to another popular Republican president who, in the 1980s, challenged a South Carolina college over its ban on interracial relationships.

The Trump-Harvard case, Bird said, “is not the first time the federal government has [altered] funding because a university wasn’t following anti-discrimination laws.”

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“That’s exactly what’s happening here with Harvard; they’re not following anti-discrimination laws, and they’re not stopping antisemitism on campus or protecting Jewish students and Israeli students, and so, because of that, there’s a big parallel.”

Bird noted that Harvard has the nation’s largest endowment at around $50 billion, in addition to billions more in government grants that are conditional.

“One of those conditions for that type of funding is that they’re going to follow anti-discrimination-wise,” she said, adding that Iowa is relevant and now involved in the case because Iowans’ taxes fund those federal grants, and that if Harvard is allowed to let antisemitism run rampant, other colleges farther west may be able to do so to.

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While Harvard has shown some improvement since Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., grilled its president and the University of Pennsylvania’s then-president last year, a clear message must still be sent that their conduct was unacceptable, Bird said.

“President Trump has shown that he is leading and he is making sure that our college campuses that are funded with taxpayer dollars will not engage in discrimination against Jewish students or against people from Israel. And so I think he has taken a strong step here. And I think the law is on his side.”

Like the Harvard case, Bob Jones — an Evangelical college in Greenville, South Carolina — saw its tax-exempt status stripped, which similarly affected its bottom line.

The original IRS policy change banning discrimination went into effect under former President Richard Nixon, but it wasn’t until 1983 that the government — then run by former President Ronald Reagan — won a similar lawsuit.

The Supreme Court ruled there that the public interest in preventing discrimination trumped any related invocation of religious freedom.

Following the Bob Jones case, then-college president Bob Jones III went on national television in 2000 to declare the university was wrong in its prior race-based policies and officially lifted the ban on interracial dating. 

On its website, the college explained, “Our sincere desire is to exhibit a truly Christ-like spirit and biblical position in these areas. Today, Bob Jones University enrolls students from all 50 states and nearly 50 countries, representing various ethnicities and cultures.”