“American President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to revoke the tax exemptions that Harvard University benefits from, after the institution refused on Monday to comply with certain demands, AFP reports.
The United States government has already revoked multi-year federal grants worth $2.2 billion from the university.
Perhaps Harvard should lose its tax exemptions and be taxed as a political entity, if it continues to support the ‘madness’ of political and ideological terrorism, Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.
The university, located near Boston, is a private institution with assets worth over 50 billion dollars and is exempt from taxes by both the federal government of the U.S. and the state of Massachusetts.
At Harvard, as well as in other American institutions of higher education, students have mobilized against the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip. After Trump’s return to the White House, such situations have caught the government’s attention.
The President has accused these universities of allowing the proliferation of anti-Semitism on campus, and the executive has requested them to implement several measures, including an ‘audit’ of the opinions of students and faculty. If they refuse, their grants will be cut.
Unlike Columbia University in New York, Harvard refused. The university’s president, Allan Garber, assured students and professors in a letter on Monday that Harvard will not give up ‘either its independence or the rights guaranteed by the Constitution’.”