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Harvard just stood up to Trump. How long can it last?
BBC News
Harvard University says it will not acquiesce to US President Donald Trump’s demands – federal funding or no.
“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber said in a letter posted on the university’s website.
Not long after Harvard refused to agree to the White House’s sweeping list of demands – which included directions on how to govern, hire and teach – the Trump administration froze $2.2bn (£1.7bn) of federal funds to the institution.
Many students and alumni lauded the university’s decision to stand its ground, despite the consequences. Former President Barack Obama, an alumnus himself, called Trump’s move “ham-handed” and praised Harvard as “an example for other higher-ed institutions”.
But with billions in the balance, the battle for the higher ground may just be the opening salvo in a war of attrition between the federal government and higher education.
Trump’s attacks on Harvard are not isolated – the government’s antisemitism task force has identified at least 60 universities for review.
At issue, the government says, is last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests, which wracked campuses across the country, and which the Trump administration says contributed to the harassment of Jewish students.
Last month, Columbia University agreed to many of the administration’s demands in the wake of the protests – after the government cut $400m in funding.
Harvard, too, made concessions. It agreed to engage with the administration’s task force to combat antisemitism. The school dismissed the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended its Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative over accusations of anti-Israel bias.
And in January, Harvard settled two lawsuits brought by Jewish students alleging antisemitism. It did not admit any wrongdoing, and said the settlement showed its commitment to supporting its Jewish students and staff.
But the university drew the line at the White House’s list of demands on Friday.
ReutersHarvard student Sa’maia Evans, who is an activist and member of the university’s African and African American Resistance Organization, said the university’s decision to take a stand was a long time coming.
“Harvard will only do that of which it is held accountable to,” she told the BBC. She pointed to campus protests in the past few weeks – and the widespread criticism of Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration – as helping to put pressure on university officials.
“They know the public – they would experience public backlash” if they capitulated, Ms Evans said.
“It would be atypical (for) Harvard to do anything outside of what would be in its own interest.”
With a $53.2bn endowment – a figure that is larger than the GDP of some small countries – Harvard is uniquely able to weather the storm. But experts say it is still left in a crunch.
“Most policymakers think of endowments as a chequing account, a debit card where you can withdraw money and use it for any purpose,” said Steven Bloom, the spokesperson for American Council on Education. “But it’s not.”
While Harvard’s endowment is eye-popping, it says 70% of the money is earmarked for specific projects – which is typical for educational endowments, according to Mr Bloom.
Harvard has to spend the money the way the donors have directed, or it risks legal liability.
And Harvard’s expenses are huge – its 2024 operating budget was $6.4bn. About a third of that was funded by the endowment – with 16% coming from the federal government, often to help with things that are supposed to create good for the whole of the US, such as biomedical research.
Mr Bloom said the golden rule for endowment finance was that universities should not spend more than 5% of their total endowment each year. Making up for a $2bn loss means the school will need to boost its endowment by $40bn.
“You can’t find 40 billion dollars under a rock,” Mr Bloom said.
And that pain will only increase if Trump is able to make good on his threat to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status. That status helps the school avoid paying taxes on its investments and properties. Harvard has campuses all over the Greater Boston area, and is estimated by Bloomberg to have saved $158m on its property tax bills in 2023.
The realities of the situation have made some students sceptical about how long it can go on.
“There’s more the government can do if it wants to attack Harvard, and I’m not optimistic that it’s going to stop after cutting $2.2 billion,” Matthew Tobin, the academic representative on Harvard’s student council.
Mr Tobin said the idea that the Trump administration was making these demands to help Harvard is “malarkey”.
“Its a total bad-faith attack,” he told the BBC. “The funding cuts have to do with Trump attacking an institution that he views as liberal, and wanting to exercise more control over what people teach and how students learn and think.”
With addition reporting from Isabella Bull in Boston
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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.
In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.
The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.
Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

The disclosures also report gifts, travel, food and lodging that the justices received in 2025. Jackson and Sotomayor were the only two to report gifts. Jackson was given a painting for her chambers valued at $2,500, and Sotomayor reported a trip to Kansas City to watch the opening of a musical based on her children’s book, Just Ask.
In addition, she reported receiving free tickets worth $4,333 while on “a private trip to Puerto Rico.” The tickets were from the record label that represents Bad Bunny, and her trip coincided with the artist’s months-long concert series in San Juan. Sotomayor’s parents were from Puerto Rico, and she has spent much time there over the years.
The justices also disclosed significant reimbursements for travel throughout 2025. Thomas’ travel, food and lodging expenses were paid for by the Hoover Institution for speaking at a celebration of conservative economist Thomas Sowell.
Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Barrett and Jackson were reimbursed for international travel, where they gave speeches, spoke about their books or taught. Roberts was the only sitting member of the court not to report any gifts or travel reimbursements.
The annual filings also shed some light on the justices’ activities off the bench. Kavanaugh reported that in addition to his duties as a Supreme Court justice, he serves as a coach to multiple D.C.-area Catholic Youth Organization girls’ basketball teams. Coach K, as he is known by his players, wrote the court’s June decision declaring that states can ban transgender women and girl athletes from playing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.

The justices’ salaries are established by law. The chief justice earns the most, at $320,700 per year. The eight associate justices earn $306,600 per year. While that is a lot of money to most Americans, the justices and even their law clerks could earn more the minute they leave their Supreme Court jobs for large law firms.
Roberts was the only member of the court to report investing in individual stocks. Alito in the past has also owned shares of individual stocks, but his report is not due for three months when his extension runs out. For the most part, the justices do not own individual stocks, but do invest in index funds, mutual funds and other such investment programs in order to both make money and limit potential conflicts of interest that would require their recusal from certain cases.
However — and this is a big however — the financial reporting forms the justices are required to fill out are so unspecific and the reporting ranges for investment earnings are so broad that it is impossible to determine any justice’s overall wealth. In addition, the current value of the justices’ homes isn’t reported. Neither is their spouses’ income, which in the case of the chief justice, for instance, likely far exceeds his take-home pay.
News
Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show
At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.
A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.
City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”
Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.
Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.
“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.
Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.
Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.
“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.
The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.
Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.
“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.
Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”
He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.
Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.
On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.
News
DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote
The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.
The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”
“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.
The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.
“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.
Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”
“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”
The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.
While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.
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