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Donald Trump has accused leading US universities, including Harvard, of breaking federal laws on large foreign donations, escalating his attack on the country’s educational establishment.
The president signed an executive order on Wednesday directing federal agencies to enforce laws on foreign gifts to American universities — although it was not immediately clear how, or if, any school had violated the rules.
“There are currently laws on the books requiring certain disclosures of universities when they accept large foreign gifts. We believe that certain universities, including, for example, Harvard, have routinely violated this law,” White House staff secretary Will Scharf said, speaking in the Oval Office of the White House. “This law has not been effectively enforced,” he added.
Trump also signed an executive order overhauling the university accreditation system, a move that threatens even more federal funding on top of the billions of dollars he has already frozen. On the campaign trail, he promised to use such an order, calling it his “secret weapon”, to force universities to align with his political ideology.
Accreditation is granted by third-party companies, setting standards that universities must meet to unlock federal financial aid, including student loans and Pell grants.
“Many of those third-party accreditors have relied on a sort of woke ideology to accredit universities instead of accrediting based on merit and performance,” Scharf said as he gave Trump the order to sign.
Linda McMahon, education secretary, said: “America’s higher education accreditation system is broken. A small number of institutional accreditors — private, nongovernment entities — decide which institutions and their programmes qualify to receive over $100bn annually in Pell grants, federal student loans and other taxpayer-subsidised higher education funding.”
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