Harvard University is dedicating $250 million of its own funds to support researchers after US President Donald Trump's administration froze nearly $3 billion in federal grants and contracts in recent weeks, the university announced on Wednesday.
The elite Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of Trump's most prominent targets. The Republican president has been making an extraordinary effort to revamp private colleges and schools across the US that he says foster anti-American, Marxist and "radical left" ideologies. He has criticized Harvard in particular for hiring prominent Democrats to teaching or leadership positions.
Harvard is suing the Trump administration over its decision to cut off grants awarded to the school's researchers, mostly in the medical sciences. Harvard calls this an unconstitutional attempt to curtail academic freedom and speech rights.
The government announced the cuts last month, hours after Harvard's president, Dr. Alan Garber, denounced a lengthy list of demands by the Trump administration to overhaul the school's leadership, teaching and admissions, and audit the views of its students and professors.
Garber, in a joint statement with Provost John Manning, said the Trump administration was "stopping lifesaving research" and called it an "extraordinarily challenging time" for the country's oldest and wealthiest university.