The White House stepped up pressure against Harvard Friday, adding a new investigation into the university’s patents and renewing a host of claims that the university is unfit to host international students.
The two sides have been working to resolve their differences in recent weeks, but a court motion filed by the government on Friday in a dispute over international students suggested there is still deep acrimony. The motion accuses Harvard of failure to control crime, and claims that Harvard’s leadership has “shown itself to be incapable of properly hosting, monitoring, disciplining, and reporting on its foreign students.”
On the same day, Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick sent a letter to Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, claiming that the university had not lived up to its obligations surrounding federally funded patents, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the letter, the agency will begin a comprehensive review of Harvard’s compliance with federal law.
The additional pressures on Harvard come during a week when the government had also taken significant steps to bring other schools into line with its agenda. President Trump issued a directive that would require colleges and universities to submit reams of new data on students to check whether they are complying with a Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action. The White House also intensified its campaign against the University of California, Los Angeles, which it stripped of hundreds of millions in research funds over a list of issues.
In the court case involving Harvard, the Justice Department was asking a judge to throw out one of two pending lawsuits filed by Harvard against the administration, this one involving the right of the nation’s oldest university’s right to host international students.
Earlier in the year, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, moved to end Harvard’s right to host the students. Harvard sued. When Judge Allison Burroughs of federal court in Boston temporarily blocked the administration action, the White House countered in June by issuing a proclamation blocking international students that invoked a different provision of law.
Judge Burroughs, who has expressed skepticism of the Trump administration’s crusade against Harvard from the bench and also in written orders, also blocked that effort, issuing a preliminary injunction.
On Friday, the government moved to dismiss the lawsuit entirely. (The government’s motion on Friday applied only to the case involving international students. It has no effect on the university’s lawsuit against the administration about research funding cuts, a case that focuses heavily on constitutional and procedural concerns.)
The government’s effort could have disrupted the lives of about 5,000 international students attending Harvard last spring, another 2,000 recent graduates, as well as a new cohort of students who plan to arrive this fall.
“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the lawsuit said. The university has accused the government of retaliating against it for its refusal to bend to the White House’s efforts to control the university’s “governance, curriculum and the ideology of faculty and students.”
In its filing Friday, the administration denied that contention. Instead, it listed a number of accusations it has made in previous filings and statements about the school, including that violent crime has increased on campus.
Harvard pointed to reporting showing its campus has very low-crime overall. The university’s student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has reported that the campus police responded to nearly twice as many crimes on campus in 2023 as in 2021, mostly over reports of stolen electric bikes and scooters.
There was no evidence that international students were involved in the crimes.
In a statement, Harvard said the motion on Friday “has no impact on Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and scholars.”
“The university will continue to defend its rights — and the rights of its students and scholars,” the statement added.
In a separate move on Friday, the administration added to its pressure campaign against Harvard when the Commerce Department said it would investigate whether the university was complying with federal laws and regulations around intellectual property that emerge from government-backed research.
The investigation is expected to examine whether Harvard complied with myriad requirements related to how the university procures and maintains patents for its ideas and research.
In his letter to Dr. Garber, Mr. Lutnick said that his department “places immense value on the groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements from the government’s partnerships with institutions like Harvard.” But, Mr. Lutnick warned, Harvard was also required to follow rules designed to maximize “the benefits to the American public.”
Mr. Lutnick did not include any evidence showing that Harvard, whose researchers generally secure scores of patents each year, had violated the law, but he said that the Commerce Department thought that the university had “failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer.”
Patents can be extraordinarily lucrative for research universities, with their collective values climbing far into the millions of dollars. But if a university does not follow an array of regulatory requirements, the government can essentially dilute or strip a school of its financial stake.
Mr. Lutnick said the government was “initiating” that process. His department asked Harvard to provide a range of records to the government by Sept. 5.
In a statement on Friday, Harvard blasted the Commerce Department’s letter as “unprecedented” and “yet another retaliatory effort targeting Harvard for defending its rights and freedom.”
“Technologies and patents developed at Harvard are lifesaving and industry-redefining,” the university said, adding that it was “fully committed” to complying with federal law.
Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.