By Harvard University, home to a $50 billion endowment and generations of elite privilege, has adopted a strikingly grotesque public relations strategy: threaten to euthanize lab animals unless federal funding is restored—while refusing to take basic steps to confront antisemitism on its campus.
Following a $2.2 billion freeze in federal research grants imposed by the Trump administration, Harvard scientists have taken to the media with dire warnings, wrote CNN. Research will halt. Progress on ALS and cancer detection will stall. NASA may have to wait for Mars. And most dramatically, monkeys used in tuberculosis studies—rhesus macaques—might have to be euthanized because there’s supposedly no money to keep them alive.
“The question is, could we find resources to support them, such that we don’t have to euthanize them?” asked Dr. Sarah Fortune of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It’s a question that becomes absurd the moment one remembers that Harvard’s endowment could sustain the entire federal grant freeze more than twenty times over. Yet the message from Cambridge is clear: fund us, or the animals die.
What Harvard carefully omits is that the funding freeze did not come out of nowhere. It followed the university’s open refusal to comply with civil rights directives issued by the federal government—directives aimed at curbing blatant antisemitism that has erupted on elite campuses in the wake of October 7. While peer institutions such as Columbia and Penn have made some moves toward compliance, Harvard has resisted, framing the request as an existential threat to academic freedom.
Harvard's literally taking the National Lampoon approach to try and save their federal funding. https://t.co/f35Cs9YiSa pic.twitter.com/CvgAA4lmky
— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe) April 17, 2025
In truth, the government has asked only what Title VI of the Civil Rights Act already requires: that schools receiving federal dollars not discriminate. That includes Jews. Yet Harvard, already reprimanded by the Supreme Court in 2023 for racially discriminatory admissions practices, seems untroubled by the civil rights implications of allowing open Jew-hatred to fester under the banner of campus activism. Instead, it has dug in, shielding faculty and students behind the rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity” while refusing to enforce its own codes of conduct.
President Alan Garber insists that Harvard must retain control over hiring, admissions, and curriculum, including their power to discriminate. But what he really means is that Harvard will not be told—even by the federal government—that it must treat Jewish students with the same protections it affords other minority groups. In effect, the university is asserting a novel interpretation of academic freedom: the freedom to take billions in taxpayer funds while ignoring basic anti-discrimination laws.
And now, having refused to meet the minimal obligations of civil rights compliance, Harvard is staging a moral hostage crisis. Instead of confronting antisemitism, it holds up a rhesus monkey and says: “Pay us, or this dies.”
It is a gross calculus—one that reveals the priorities of a university more concerned with federal cash flow than with upholding its own ethical responsibilities. If Harvard’s leadership believes it has the legal and moral right to flout civil rights law, fine. But let it do so on its own dime. And spare us the performative anguish about the fate of lab animals when the solution is sitting in its own investment portfolio.
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