Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy said Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard and other schools have had detrimental ripple effects due to closures to labs and university-related hospitals.
In an interview with the CBS nation, the Democratic governor said the impact on Harvard is damaging “America’s competitiveness.” After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “Intellectual assets are given to us.”
Last week, the US president cut off billions of dollars in federal funds to Harvard after the university refused to grant many administrations’ demands. Trump also called on a world-renowned university in Cambridge, Massachusetts to revoke its exemption status.
Among the moves against the university, Healy said: “It’s bad for patients, it’s bad for science, it’s really bad for America’s competitiveness. There’s no way the nation can compensate for cuts from federal funds.”
She added: “I was recently at a Boston children’s hospital, where some of the nation’s sickest children are in care. The reduction to Boston children and other hospitals is a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions, as they are part of the teaching hospital system.
“The reductions to these universities have a huge, wavy impact, leading to layoffs for scientists and doctors, and clinical trials for cancer treatment are shut down.
“As governor, I want to soar to Massachusetts and America. What Donald Trump is doing is essentially inviting other countries like China to take scientists and researchers to scientists. This is frightening, especially what he’s done to the economy.
Since Trump took office, his administration has deployed an “anti-Semitism task force” to call for various policy changes at different universities across the country.
Columbia University, one of the first institutions targeted by the task force, quickly fell into the Trump administration’s demand to recover federal funds by $400 million. Some of the measures Columbia has allowed face masks to ban on campus, security guards will give people the power to arrest them, and include control of the Middle East under a new senior sub-deployment.
Former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said Sunday that the attack on the Trump administration’s academic institutions represented a serious attack on First Amendment rights.
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“This is a kind of weaponization of government power,” Bollinger told CNN, adding that “it sounds like a campaign of intimidation.”
“It’s a kind of weaponization of government force,” he said.
Earlier this month, the federal government sent two separate letters to Harvard University with specific requests. After the university publicly rejected these requests, the administration quickly frozen nearly $2.3 billion in federal funding.
The conflict between the administration and elite universities took a strange turn on Friday, with the New York Times reporting that a letter from the administration on April 11, accompanied by additional demands that escalated the showdown was “fraud.” The university disputed the letter was “fraudulent” and claimed that the federal government “doubling” the attacks.
