Harvard President Says Any Move to Revoke Tax-Exempt Status Would Be ‘Highly Illegal’

Alan is going to get a broomstick shoved up his ars. Who cares what's legal? Lord Voldemort, the GOP and the Justice Department want to make an example out of you.

Garber will be resigning soon and his successor will pick up the pieces of a bludgeoned Harvard and kiss the ring. Besides who likes Harvard? Trump is scoring a massive political win by targeting a bunch of folks who are perceived by most Americans as stuck-up, entitled, and condescending. Ouch!

Harvard President Says Any Move to Revoke Tax-Exempt Status Would Be ‘Highly Illegal’

Alan Garber was responding to Trump’s latest threat to remove the university’s tax-exempt status

By Douglas Belkin, Gareth Vipers and

Richard Rubin, WSJ

Updated May 2, 2025 3:59 pm ET

• Harvard filed a federal lawsuit, arguing the government violated its constitutional rights.

• Trump has targeted universities, investigating schools that he says have failed to protect Jewish students.

• Harvard University President Alan Garber fought back against President Trump’s renewed threat to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, saying in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the move would be “highly illegal” and “destructive to Harvard.”

“The message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one, which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be an existential threat to so many educational institutions,” Garber said.

Garber’s comments came after Trump doubled down on his campaign against the Ivy league university.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Friday.

An administration official said the president’s post wasn’t a formal directive to the Internal Revenue Service to take action.

Garber said: “If the government goes through with a plan to revoke our tax exempt status, it would…be highly illegal unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move.”

He added: “Tax exempt status is granted to educational institutions to enable them to successfully carry out their mission of education and, for research universities, of research. Obviously that would be severely impaired if we were to lose our tax exempt status.”

Harvard filed a lawsuit last month against the Trump administration, setting up a legal showdown between America’s most prominent university and the White House. The suit argues the government has violated the university’s constitutional rights by freezing billions of dollars in federal funding and imperiling its academic independence.

The IRS didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday.

Trump has targeted Harvard and other top universities, pausing or freezing billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts. A new government task force says it is investigating schools that the administration deems has failed to adequately protect Jewish students following pro-Palestinian protests that disrupted campuses last year. The administration is also seeking to exert greater control over Harvard and other schools as part of its mission to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Trump’s repeated comments about Harvard’s tax-exempt status breach a norm that attempts to insulate political officials from decisions about specific taxpayers, including tax-exempt groups.

Legally, the tax code prohibits the president and other senior officials from directly or indirectly asking the IRS to conduct or stop an audit or other investigations and that is a crime punishable with a fine and prison time. Prosecuting such a case, however, would require federal prosecutors, and Supreme Court decisions about executive power and presidential immunity could be high bars to clear.

The tax law also prohibits federal employees from disclosing internal IRS information about particular taxpayers. It wasn’t clear from Trump’s post whether he has any actual information about an IRS inquiry into Harvard.

Harvard has 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as an educational institution, which means it doesn’t pay income taxes on net earnings and that its donors get income-tax deductions. That status can be revoked after an audit that examines whether a tax-exempt entity violates the rules.

It isn’t clear what argument the administration could make against Harvard. One possibility is that its admissions policies or approach to antisemitism violate fundamental public policy. That is the standard that the Supreme Court set more than 40 years ago, when it upheld an IRS decision to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over the school’s racially discriminatory policies.

Harvard would be able to challenge any revocation of its tax-exempt status in court.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Friday asked the IRS inspector general to investigate whether Trump has violated the law and if the IRS has begun auditing nonprofits based on White House requests.

Write to Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com and Richard Rubin at richard.rubin@wsj.com