Harvard faculty members who fear school's destruction urge Trump deal

Increasingly vocal academics agree reform is needed to address issues like anti-Semitism

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WASHINGTON - Dr Kit Parker is used to being an anomaly on Harvard University's campus. The physicist - an army reserve colonel who served in Afghanistan - is a long-time critic of the school's hiring practices and what he sees as liberal biases.

For months, he has urged the university to address criticisms from the White House, even as the vast majority of his colleagues applauded Harvard's decision to resist President Donald Trump's efforts to reshape higher education.

These days, in Dr Parker's telling, he finds himself less isolated as Harvard confronts the harsh realities of a sustained fight with the US government.

Three months after university president Alan Garber struck a defiant tone by vowing not to "surrender its independence or its constitutional rights", an increasingly vocal group of professors across schools, including engineering, law and medicine, say Harvard should reach a deal.

Faculty such as Dr Parker and Dr Eric Maskin, an economics and mathematics professor who won a Nobel Prize in 2007, want Harvard to resolve the clash with Mr Trump before punishing financial penalties cause irreparable damage to the school and the US. They and other faculty agree that reform is needed to address issues including anti-Semitism, political bias and academic rigor. Harvard declined to comment on negotiations with the government.

The stakes for Harvard were set to be in focus on July 21, when a federal judge in Boston was to hear arguments on whether the Trump administration illegally froze more than US$2 billion (S$2.57 billion) in research funding, as the university claims.

In a sign that the Trump administration is not running out of ways to challenge the school, government agencies in July threatened Harvard's accreditation and subpoenaed data on its international students.