A summer of turmoil in higher education continued this week, as Columbia University and Brown University announced major settlement deals with the Trump administration, while Harvard made a series of appointments and administrative changes that appear calibrated to shift campus culture amid accusations of antisemitism.
On Wednesday, the University announced the appointment of Rabbi Getzel Davis as director of Interfaith Engagement, a new role created as part of a presidential initiative that will promote religious literacy and dialogue across faith and non-faith traditions. This fall, Davis will launch a 10-session program—the First-Year Religious Ethical and Spiritual Life Fellowship—intended to help students learn skills to navigate complex differences and combat religious prejudice, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. (Afterward, students will be able to apply for grants to start their own campus interfaith initiatives.)
Harvard will also add programming during pre-orientation and orientation to promote religious pluralism, the University announced.
Davis first came to Harvard Hillel as an intern in 2012 and went on to serve as its director of graduate programming and as chair of University programs for Harvard chaplains. He left his post at Hillel in March 2025.
Davis’s new position answers a need within University life, says Matthew Potts, the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and Plummer professor of Christian morals. “Unlike many other similar universities, Harvard does not have an office of religious life,” Potts said in an interview. The Interfaith Engagement position does not precisely fill that role, he adds, “but one of the things that a lot of the folks who work with religious communities at Harvard have realized over the past couple of years is that we need more structural supports for students, and especially across student communities. Within communities, we have great supports, but we need more structure around bridging relationships and creating useful dialogue between communities.”
Potts said he and other colleagues began speaking with the Harvard president’s office a few years ago about launching an initiative, and over the past year, the need became even clearer. “This position is really dedicated to thinking about how religion—and religious identity and religious traditions, and the complexity of religious identity—affects the larger community,” Potts said. “And how it affects our relationships with each other.”
Earlier this week, Harvard announced two new exchange programs with Israel. A partnership with Ben Gurion University will give College students opportunities to study abroad year-round starting in 2026. Ben Gurion operates three campuses in Israel, with research institutes specializing in biotechnology, solar energy, desert research, and Jewish and Israeli culture. The University also runs study abroad programs at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, and the University of Haifa.
In addition, Harvard Medical School announced the Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will train scientists from Israel in basic biomedical research at the medical school or one of the University’s affiliated hospitals. The fellowship, which will host scientists for two to three years, will be coordinated by Harvard’s chapter of the Kalaniyot Foundation, a national organization that seeks to deepen ties between American and Israeli researchers. The fellowship is the most recent addition to several existing exchange programs that host Israeli scholars—including at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as the medical school.
All this intramural news came as U.S. President Donald Trump continued to drop hints that the University would settle with the government, and The New York Times reported that Harvard was open to spending up to $500 million to reach a deal. Those reports, closely watched within and beyond the Harvard community, prompted some impassioned responses.
On Friday morning, Axios reported that a group of House and Senate Democrats who are Harvard alumni threatened the University with a “rigorous” investigation if it settles with the Trump administration. “We are alarmed that Harvard would contemplate a settlement of this magnitude under apparent political pressure,” the lawmakers wrote, according to Axios, in a letter that was led by California Congressman Sam Liccardo, M.P.P. ’96, J.D. ’96; California Senator Adam Schiff, J.D. ’85; and Maryland Senator Chris Van Holler, M.P.P. ’85.
On Tuesday, leaders of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors—a national group that has sued the Trump administration over its treatment of international students and scholars with pro-Palestinian views—sent a letter urging its members to contact President Alan M. Garber to advocate against a deal with Trump. Alternately, the letter advised, members should demand that any agreement adhere to a set of “red lines,” including shielding students from harsh discipline for protesting government activities; refusing information-sharing with the government beyond what is legally required; and rejecting any third-party compliance monitor other than the federal district court judge who is overseeing multiple Harvard-related lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Separately, on July 26, the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard—a group of nearly 3,000 alumni, students, faculty, staff, and administrators—sent a letter to Garber, Provost John F. Manning, and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker denouncing the University’s recent decisions to dismantle or rebrand DEI offices, take down DEI-related websites, and “eliminate public-facing commitments to historically marginalized communities.” The coalition’s leaders criticized the lack of transparency and community input in the decisions as “a profound betrayal of Harvard’s stated values and a dangerous capitulation to external political pressure.” These actions, they said, send “a chilling message: that Harvard is willing to sacrifice its moral leadership and the well-being of its most vulnerable students, faculty, and staff in exchange for political expediency.”
Also this week, Harvard’s human resources department sent an email to employees, announcing that the government had requested I-9 tax forms, which are completed for every person hired and provide verification of an employee’s identity and legal eligibility to work in the United States. The University received a subpoena and Notice of Inspection from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on July 8 and initially interpreted it as applying only to a “few dozen” employees, the email said. But the government later clarified that it applied to all current employees, as well as “any individual employed by the University in the last 12 months.”
The email, sent Tuesday afternoon, said that the University has not yet sent the government the I-9 records of students currently or recently employed in Harvard jobs that are open only to students. “We are evaluating the government’s position on whether the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) permits disclosure of those records,” the email stated. In place since 1974, FERPA is a federal law that protects the privacy of student records and personally identifiable information.
The email added, “We have asked DHS to confirm that the records produced in response to this notice for any individual will be securely maintained by DHS and not shared outside DHS, that the documents will only be accessed by DHS personnel authorized to inspect such records, and that DHS will only use these records for the purposes authorized by law.”
These announcements and disclosures came on the heels of last week’s news that Columbia University, another major Trump target, had signed a settlement with the Trump administration to restore more than $400 million in federal grants that had been frozen (in addition, the government had put on hold most of the $1.3 billion that Columbia receives annually in federal funding). A week later, Brown University announced its own deal to settle three open investigations into the university. According to the terms of the deal, Brown will pay $50 million over 10 years to state workforce development organizations in Rhode Island and agreed to “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in admissions or university programming.” Brown also agreed to give the federal government access to its admissions data, pledged to adhere to Trump’s prohibition on transgender athletes, and promised not to perform gender-affirming surgeries for minors or provide puberty-blockers at Brown-affiliated hospitals. In addition to making demands about gender and racial policies, the Trump administration had accused both Columbia and Brown of violating the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students.
Also on Wednesday, the University of California, Los Angeles reached a $6 million settlement with three Jewish students and a Jewish professor. The group’s lawsuit, which the Trump administration joined in March, claimed that that the university had violated their civil rights in 2024 by allowing pro-Palestinian protesters to block access to classes and other areas of campus.
The past week also brought news about two new Trump targets in higher education: Duke University and George Mason University. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced it was opening an investigation into the Duke Law Journal, alleging race-based discrimination in the law review’s selection of new members. Separately, the Trump administration told Duke officials on Tuesday that it was freezing $108 million in federal research funding, accusing the university’s medical school of racial discrimination.
And in early July, the Trump administration opened an investigation into antisemitism and DEI at George Mason University—which was later expanded to a total of six federal investigations, including one launched by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
Beyond individual universities, recent developments have also revealed new threats to federal research funding as a whole. On Wednesday, news broke about a footnote in a document issued by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to immediately halt the release of billions of dollars in funding to researchers around the country. Hours later, after protests from members of Congress and patient advocacy groups, the OMB publicly reversed the decision. Then on Thursday, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee rejected a Trump plan to drastically shrink the NIH—the administration had called for a 40 percent budget reduction for fiscal year 2026. Instead, the committee voted overwhelmingly to endorse a measure that would increase the agency’s budget by $400 million.
Yet recent reporting from Stat News suggests that the Trump administration is beginning to chart a new and more “legally robust” strategy for cancelling research funding, following a series of defeats in court.
According to Stat’s reporting, a nine-page internal memo from the Office of the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offers guidance on five different methods for terminating grants. One of the document’s recommendations advises the government to establish a more thorough “administrative record” of reasoning behind each termination, including publicly announcing the department’s research priorities.
In an interview with Stat, Scott Delaney, a research scientist at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health who launched a database this past spring to document research grant terminations, said the changing tactics will make it more likely that the government’s federal funding cuts will survive legal challenges. “I’ve said before the administration was likely to lose its arguments in court,” Delaney, a former practicing lawyer, told Stat, “not because they’re trying to burn down the large domains of health science research, but because they burned it down the wrong way.”
