WASHINGTON ― The National Science Foundation has terminated dozens of active grants with Harvard University for reasons that NSF employees told HuffPost can only be viewed as punishment for the university refusing to cave to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian efforts to dictate what it can teach and who it can hire or admit as students.
NSF last week quietly ended 196 grants with Harvard, which amounts to a collective loss of nearly $46 million that hasn’t yet been paid out to the university for various research projects already underway. HuffPost obtained a copy of the full list of these canceled awards, but isn’t printing it at the request of the NSF staffer who shared it.
Jamie French, a division director in NSF’s Division of Grants and Agreements, last Monday sent a “notice of termination” letter to Harvard president Alan Garber along with a list of all the canceled grants.
“The agency has determined that termination of certain awards is necessary because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals,” reads French’s letter. “NSF understands that Harvard continues to engage in race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life, as well as failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias.”
