Hardening soft power: US President Donald Trump is undermining the US

The taskforce, which meets each week to supposedly discuss discrimination on college campus and reviewer grants, was ostensibly set up to counter anti-Semitism in universities

Harvard University, America’s oldest and wealthiest university, has offered the Donald Trump administration a salutary lesson in constitutional safeguards by invoking its First Amendment rights in rejecting sweeping demands to align its practices to a specific federal agenda. As part of a larger programme linked to federal funding in universities, a multidepartment taskforce pressured the university to end its initiatives on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), restrict the say of student and faculty members in university affairs, and institute systematic screening of student organisations. The university has responded by unequivocally refusing to comply, stating that the administration’s demands contravened guarantees