Trump says Harvard deal is close, university will pay $500 million

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday (September 30, 2025) that his administration was close to a deal with Harvard University that would include a $500 million payment by the Ivy League institution, after months of negotiations over school policies.

The administration has been wrangling with several prestigious universities, threatening to withhold federal funds over issues including pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, campus diversity and transgender policies.

“We are in the process of getting very close,” Mr. Trump told reporters at an event in the Oval Office. “Linda is finishing up the final details,” he said, referring to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

“And they’ll be paying about $500 million and they’ll be operating trade schools. They’re going to be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things, engines, lots of things,” he said. He offered no further details on the deal.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard had no immediate comment on Trump’s remarks.

Rights advocates have raised free speech, privacy and academic freedom concerns over the Trump administration’s probes into universities.

Mr. Trump has said that Harvard and other universities allowed displays of antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests.

Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the government wrongly equates criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its occupation of Palestinian territories with antisemitism, and advocacy for Palestinian rights with support for extremism. The government has not announced probes into Islamophobia.

Harvard task forces said in late April that the school’s Jewish and Muslim students faced bigotry and abuse during the course of Israel’s war in Gaza after the October 2023 Hamas attack.

Actions against Harvard, other Ivy League schools

Several other Ivy League schools have made deals with the Trump administration in recent months, including Columbia University and Brown University, which accepted certain government demands. Columbia agreed to pay more than $220 million to the government and Brown said it will pay $50 million to support local workforce development.

The Trump administration zeroed in on the pro-Palestinian protest movement that roiled Harvard’s campus, moving to terminate more than $2 billion in research grant funding to the university.

It also sought to bar international students from attending the school, threatened Harvard’s accreditation status, and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.

Harvard President Alan Garber has said that the various federal actions since Trump returned to office in January could strip the school of nearly $1 billion annually, forcing it to lay off staff and freeze hiring.

Challenged in court

Harvard challenged some of those actions in court, arguing the Trump administration was retaliating against it in violation of its free-speech rights after it refused to meet officials’ demands that it overhaul its governance, hiring and academic programs to align with their ideological agenda.

Its two lawsuits were assigned to U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, a Boston-based appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, who blocked the Trump administration from closing the door to international students and on September 3 barred it from continuing to cut off Harvard’s research funding.

But the administration in the days since the ruling has continued to escalate its fight with Harvard. A day before Trump’s latest comments, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that it would start a process that could lead to the school being barred from contracts with all government agencies or receiving funding.

The government has faced other legal setbacks in its attempts to freeze federal funding to universities. Last week, a federal judge ordered Trump’s administration to restore more than $500 million of frozen federal grants to the University of California, Los Angeles.