Before Sending April 11 Demands, Trump Administration Privately Floated an Aggressive Agenda to Harvard

Updated July 22, 2025, at 2:19 p.m.

The Trump administration drafted a confidential strategy memo in early April outlining policy demands it could impose on Harvard, including placing a lien on University assets, putting academic departments in receivership, and nixing a cultural center for minority students, according to a court filing last week.

The four-page memo — which includes both a summary of internal changes Harvard had already made in response to antisemitism complaints and a wish list of future federal interventions — also laid out potential governance reforms designed to directly increase the Trump administration’s sway over Harvard’s leaders.

The memo was dated April 3, the same day the White House sent a formal letter to Harvard threatening to cut off $9 billion in federal funding unless it enacted sweeping reforms.

While the April 3 letter was released publicly and laid out broad categories of institutional change, the accompanying internal memo — marked “Privileged and Confidential” — was not made public at the time. Instead, it was sent privately to Harvard’s legal team on April 3.

The memo offers the most detailed picture to date of how federal officials were weighing their options in the early stages of the government’s pressure campaign. Describing its proposed reforms as a “menu” of options, it outlines an even more interventionist agenda than what was formally conveyed to Harvard in the April 3 letter or an April 11 missive laying out more detailed demands.

The April 11 letter, which Trump administration staff later said was sent in error, reportedly shocked Harvard officials. But the memo suggests that Harvard was aware, well before it publicly rejected the April 11 demands, that the Trump administration was prepared to pursue the kind of intervention that University leaders would later denounce as unacceptable.

For more than a week after receiving the memo, Harvard continued talks with the government, and its top brass held out hope that the confrontation with the White House could be deescalated. It was only after the April 11 letter formalized many of the demands that Harvard took negotiations, at least temporarily, off the table.

Harvard described elements of the memo in earlier court filings, but the full document was not public until late on the night of July 14, when it was released as part of a 2,000-page administrative record.

While several of the memo’s proposals were later incorporated into the April 11 letter — including calls to eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, impose a mask ban at protests, and centralize disciplinary authority under the Office of the President — many others never surfaced in official correspondence.

Among the most significant measures floated in the memo are a proposed federal lien on all Harvard assets to guarantee compliance with any future settlement, the potential abolition of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Faculty Council, and the appointment of a federally approved senior provost to oversee implementation of reforms to certain programs, which could alternatively be placed under receivership.

The targeted programs included Jewish Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Ethnicity, Migration, Rights within the FAS; Religion and Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School; and the Harvard School of Public Health’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

The memo did not describe how directly the federal government would attempt to oversee the senior vice provost’s selection. But a similar official was appointed at Columbia University when the school conceded to Trump administration demands in the spring. The memo on Harvard suggests that the government hoped to see similar changes in Cambridge.

“Install new leadership in problematic depts, same goals as CU,” the memo read.

That was not the only change that the Trump administration apparently sought to replicate from its campaign at Columbia. The memo also proposed using trademark law to penalize unrecognized student groups — like Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, which staged the spring 2024 encampment — that use the Harvard name.

It also called for unrecognized student groups to be held “accountable” and suggested that recognized organizations that share membership with unrecognized groups should be penalized, too. Unlike later documents, the memo did not spell out punishments, but it described itself as proposing an “augmented Columbia accountability ask.”

A letter to Columbia in March called for “formal investigations, disciplinary proceedings, and expulsion as appropriate” for members of recognized student organizations that supported unrecognized groups.

And the memo to Harvard singled out the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, which runs programs for minority, first-generation, and low-income students, for “elimination.” The office’s website was taken offline in July, and its future remains uncertain.

Some of the starkest changes discussed in the memo involved reforms to Harvard’s governance structure, including a minimum requirement of 15 years of “acceptable leadership experience” for future Harvard presidents. That standard could have excluded former University President Claudine Gay, who served four years as Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean before she was announced in 2022 as Harvard’s next president.

It could also exclude Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, who had 12 years of experience as the University’s provost before being named interim president in January 2024 after Gay’s resignation.

The memo also recommended addressing “gatekeeping” procedures for the Board of Overseers, the University’s second-highest governing body. While alumni can currently run for a seat on the Board via petition, the memo encouraged lowering institutional barriers to write-in candidacies and curbing the influence of the Harvard Alumni Association, which oversees nominations. The last time a write-in candidate successfully appeared on the ballot was in 2021.

The memo also suggested that the government could demand that Harvard make a “public change of stance on hiring priorities” — likely a call to repudiate an emphasis on race and gender diversity among faculty. The government could call on Harvard to “end prioritization of ‘activists’ and DEI criteria,” the memo added.

It also suggested that Harvard could be asked to conduct University-wide “cluster hiring” of faculty — a practice that would centralize those hiring decisions under Garber’s office, rather than individual departments, and could give the federal government a stronger lever to influence job offers.

While the April 3 and April 11 letters remain the official statements of federal intent, the memo provides a rare look at what Trump administration attorneys were considering behind the scenes — and what they might seek now that negotiation talks have resumed between Harvard and the White House.

In one section, the document acknowledged a number of steps Harvard had already taken that aligned with federal priorities. Those included changes to protest policies prohibiting overnight encampments, the suspension of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Harvard Divinity School, and the dismissal of the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

The memo also cheered Harvard’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has been used to classify some criticisms of Israel as antisemitic; guidance from Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra requiring center directors to explain how their programs advance intellectual diversity; and an increase in campus police patrols. It noted that Harvard had cut its partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and suggested that Harvard should be asked not to reestablish ties.

But the memo cast those moves as only a beginning, presenting them as a baseline for more sweeping reforms.

Among the other proposals surfaced in the memo is a recommendation to launch a “Legacy of Antisemitism” initiative — a project that appears to draw inspiration from Harvard's embattled $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, which drew criticism after researchers alleged they were instructed to slow their work and avoid overly ambitious findings. The memo offers no detail about what the proposed antisemitism initiative would involve.

But another document released on Monday — an undated 10-page report authored by an unidentified individual or group whose relationship to the Trump administration remains unclear — provides a more detailed vision.

It called for the creation of a Center for Antisemitism Research, led by a director jointly appointed by Harvard and religious leaders at Harvard Chabad and Hillel. The center would be tasked with investigating the historical roots of antisemitism at Harvard and analyzing declining Jewish student enrollment.

Beyond the initiative, the report leveled wide-ranging accusations of “antisemitism and anti-Americanism” against the University and includes a laundry list of proposed reforms. It urged Harvard to suspend student government operations for five years, sever ties with Palestinian institutions including Dar-al-Kalima University as well as Birzeit, and establish a conservative academic center modeled after the nonpartisan Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The report also named specific faculty, students, and pro-Palestine student groups that it said should be sanctioned.

Whether Harvard ever received the report — and the extent of the report’s coordination with the Trump administration — remains unclear. A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Neither Harvard or the Trump administration has cited the report in legal documents.

But the proposals the report contains closely mirror themes from the April 3 memo — particularly around hiring, student disciplines, campus protests, and institutional governance — and changes already in place on campus.

The report also mirrors many of the demands eventually issued to Harvard on April 11.

Since April, Harvard has launched a concerted campaign against DEI programming on campus, renaming offices across nearly all of Harvard’s schools and pulling back from prior commitments to recruiting underrepresented faculty and students.

It has also reportedly been in conversations with donors and members of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, on building an initiative like the Hoover Institution to hold conservative programming.

The April 3 memo and the accompanying 10-page report could serve as a de facto roadmap for ongoing negotiations between Harvard and the Trump administration. Though not official policy, the documents reflect the contours of what federal officials have considered — and may yet pursue — as part of a settlement.

Harvard has not yet publicly acknowledged that negotiations with the Trump administration have resumed, keeping discussions confined to a small group of top administrators and select donors. The terms of a potential settlement agreement remain unclear.

Correction: July 22, 2025

Due to an editing error, a previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the administrative record containing the memo was released on April 14. In fact, it was released July 14.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.

—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.