The Trump administration acted quickly Monday to punish Harvard University after it refused to comply with a list of demands from the federal government that the school said were illegal.

Monday afternoon, Harvard became the first university to refuse to comply with the administration’s requirements, setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university. By the evening, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard, along with a $60 million contract.

Other universities have pushed back against the administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure.

A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to control the range of viewpoints in each academic department.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard President Alan Garber said Monday in a statement to the university.

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has aggressively targeted universities, saying it is investigating dozens of schools as it moves to eradicate diversity efforts and what it says is rampant antisemitism on campus. Officials have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds for research at universities across the country.

The administration took aim first at Columbia University, then at other members of the Ivy League, including Harvard. The announcement of the funding freeze was issued by members of a federal antisemitism task force that has been behind much of the effort to target schools.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” said a statement from the task force, posted by the General Services Administration.

Harvard, for its part, has been under intense pressure from its own students and faculty to be more forceful in resisting the Trump administration’s encroachment on the university and on higher education more broadly.

The Trump administration said in March that it was examining about $256 million in federal contracts for Harvard, and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.”

Last month, more than 800 faculty members at Harvard signed a letter urging the university to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”

The university appeared to take a step in that direction Monday. In his letter rejecting the administration’s demands, Garber suggested that Harvard had little alternative.

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he wrote. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Government’s demands

The government’s letter to Harvard on Friday demanded an extraordinary set of changes that would have reshaped the university and ceded an unprecedented degree of control over Harvard’s operations to the federal government. The changes would have violated principles that are held dear on college campuses, including academic freedom.

Some of the actions the Trump administration demanded of Harvard were:

• Conducting plagiarism checks on all current and prospective faculty members.

• Sharing all its hiring data with the Trump administration, and subjecting itself to audits of its hiring while “reforms are being implemented,” at least through 2028.

• Providing all admissions data to the federal government, including information on both rejected and admitted applicants, sorted by race, national origin, grade-point average and performance on standardized tests.

• Immediately shutting down any programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

• Overhauling academic programs that the Trump administration says have “egregious records on antisemitism,” including placing certain departments and programs under an external audit. The list includes the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Public Health and the Medical School, among many others.

In Harvard’s response Monday, it said it had already made major changes over the last 15 months to improve its campus climate and counter antisemitism, devoting resources to programs that promote ideological diversity, and improving security.