Linda McMahon, President Trump’s top education official, has played a leading role in pressuring the Ivy League university to comply with the administration’s demands.
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Linda McMahon, the country’s top education official, wants to reopen talks with Harvard University, but offered little indication that the Trump administration would consider changing its aggressive tactics to ease the standoff with the university.
Instead, she noted that U.S. officials have more ways to pressure Harvard to submit to President Trump’s agenda, and she blamed the university’s lawsuit against the administration for stifling talks.
“It’s a little bit hard to have open negotiations when we’ve got a lawsuit pending,” Ms. McMahon said in an interview on Friday. “When you’re sitting and talking, do you have to have all your lawyers present, do all those things to make sure you’re not compromising the lawsuit? That’s kind of stuff I’d have to have the lawyers respond to as well.”
Ms. McMahon repeatedly said she would like to return to negotiations with Harvard. Still, she declined to describe what more she would like to see from university officials for at least a brief détente. The two sides have been locked in an increasingly aggressive and litigious battle over Mr. Trump’s persistence in trying to bend the school to his will by threatening to pull all $9 billion it receives in federal funding without significant changes to its admissions, curriculum and hiring practices.
The fight is part of a broader bid by the president to realign what he views as the liberal tilt of elite college campuses, with Harvard earning praise from White House critics for its resistance.
But that resistance has come at a price. The government has canceled roughly $2.7 billion in grants, with another nearly $1 billion in funding for Harvard’s research partners now in limbo. Earlier this week, the administration took a significant step toward a lawsuit against Harvard when the Justice Department opened an investigation under the False Claims Act, a law designed to punish those who swindle the government.