The US Department of Education froze over $3.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University just hours after the school rejected President Donald Trump's demands to make policy changes on diversity.
A Department of Education task force on combating anti-Semitism stated that it was freezing $US2.2 billion ($A3.5 billion) in multi-year grants and $US60 million ($A95 million) in multi-year contract value to Harvard University.
The move marks a new level of contentiousness between President Donald Trump's administration and American universities it accuses of being captured by the extreme left.
Trump's administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous prestigious universities, pressing the institutions to make policy and other changes and citing what it says is a failure to fight anti-Semitism on campus.
Deportation proceedings have begun against some detained international students who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while visas for hundreds of other students have been cancelled. The crackdown has raised concerns about speech and academic freedoms.
Harvard on Monday rejected the Trump administration's demands that to receive federal funding, it would end diversity efforts and take other steps that the university said would stifle the intellectual freedoms of faculty and students.
Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a public letter that demands made on Friday by the federal Department of Education would allow the federal government "to control the Harvard community" and threaten the school's "values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge".
"No government - regardless of which party is in power - should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," he added.
The Department of Education said the letter "reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws".
With AAP.
