Free speech advocate says Harvard doesn't have 'clean hands' but opposes Trump pressure campaign

One of the heads of a prominent free speech advocacy group called out the Trump administration on Wednesday for the way it has gone after Harvard University.

Nico Perrino, the executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), declared that though Harvard has a bad track record of protecting free speech on campus, the Trump administration’s push to punish the institution tramples on its rights. 

"This is a loaded gun. These same tools that the presidential administration is using right now to get some outcomes that maybe conservatives like, are the same tools that can be used by a liberal administration to get outcomes they don’t like once the power changes hands," Perrino told CNN host Audie Cornish.

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The Trump administration this week said it was freezing more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard after the institution refused to comply with a set of terms set forth by the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration last week. 

The administration asked the university to make changes to adhere to "merit-based" hiring and admissions practices and reform its recruitment of international students to "prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."

President Donald Trump threatened to take the school’s punishment further, posting to TRUTH Social on Tuesday, "Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax-Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!"

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Before critiquing Trump's actions, Perrino admitted that Harvard is facing consequences for a decade of censorship. 

"I believe these colleges and universities don’t have clean hands," he said. "Over the last decade, they have censored, they have deplatformed speakers, they’ve implemented microaggression policing, they’ve violated academic freedom rights, and they didn’t reform themselves."

He noted that following the October 7 Hamas massacre and the anti-Israel college campus protests, schools like Harvard have had to commit to political neutrality in response to public backlash. 

Still, Perrino argued that Trump’s efforts to get Harvard to be less political are overstepping.

"But yes, when the federal government comes in and tells an institution like Harvard, a private university, that it has to adopt speech codes, it has to censor faculty, that it has to reform its disciplinary processes to punish students and faculty – some who have already been tried for alleged violations, so this risks double jeopardy issues – it essentially federalizes these universities, makes them vassal institutions," he said.

"It installs the federal government as provost and president of these universities," Perrino added. 

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board was critical of the Trump administration's stance on Harvard, saying some of its demands were untenable.

"Its biggest overreach is requiring 'viewpoint diversity,' which it doesn’t define. Does this mean the English department must hire more Republican faculty or Shakespeare scholars?" the board wrote. "Must Harvard ask applicants if they support Mr. Trump and impose ideological quotas in hiring and admissions?"

The White House did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital's request for comment.