(RNS) — By almost any measure, Harvard University and Bob Jones University are very different schools.
Harvard is a nearly 400-year-old Ivy League school outside of Boston with a $53 billion endowment and a reputation as a bastion of progressive politics. Bob Jones, less than a century old, is a Southern school with about $20 million in investments and a legacy of fiery conservatism.
The two schools do overlap on a few points: Both were named for ministers — Harvard for Puritan minister John Harvard, the school’s first benefactor, and Bob Jones for a segregationist evangelist. And if President Donald Trump has his way, Harvard and Bob Jones will be the only universities in U.S. history to have their tax exemption revoked for allegations of violating public policy.
CNN has reported that Trump has reportedly asked the IRS to strip Harvard of its tax exemption for its handling of protests against the war in Gaza, which the president claims targeted Jewish students. Speaking with reporters on Thursday (April 17), Trump confirmed that his administration was looking at Harvard’s exemption.
When asked why, Trump, who has clashed publicly with Harvard’s leaders, told reporters, “Because I think Harvard is garbage. I think what they did was a disgrace. They’re antisemitic.”
Trump’s comments followed news that his administration has frozen about $2 billion in federal funding to the school after its leaders rejected a series of demands from the administration.
President Donald Trump arrives at Miami International Airport, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Miami. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
In any actions against Harvard, the IRS would likely rely on a 1976 decision and subsequent Supreme Court ruling that stripped Bob Jones University of its tax exemption. At the time, Bob Jones’ administrators barred interracial dating, which the IRS claimed was a violation of the public interest. The school sued on religious freedom grounds but lost its case at the Supreme Court in 1983.
But Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at the Catholic University of America who specializes in nonprofit law, doubts the gambit would work against Harvard. The Bob Jones ruling was based on the principle that “tax exemption may not be contrary to fundamental public policy,” said Colinvaux in an email.
“That doctrine, however, has always been narrowly construed, and rarely used, appropriately so in my view,” he said.
Revoking Harvard’s exemption “would also open up a Pandora’s box and make tax exemption subject to the whims of whatever admiration was in power. This would be hugely problematic for the independence of civil society organizations and raise a host of First Amendment issues as well,” he said.
Bob Jones and Harvard have handled the respective accusations of discrimination differently. When the IRS confronted Bob Jones about its policies on race, the university doubled down, saying they were based on the Bible. Harvard, facing allegations of antisemitism, has decried the Trump administration’s insistence that it submit to extensive government oversight and other demands, but has agreed to adopt a more expansive definition of antisemitism and take other steps after Jewish students sued the school, alleging it failed to keep them safe during the Israel-Hamas war protests.
The seminary building at Bob Jones University during a class change in 2012. (Photo © Bob Jones University)
Sam Brunson, a professor at Loyola University Chicago’s law school and an expert on tax law, summed up his reaction to Trump’s threat in three words: “It is absurd,” he said.
“Harvard is not going to lose its tax exemption. In the same way, churches don’t lose their tax exemptions, Harvard isn’t going to lose it.”
Brunson said the Bob Jones decision likely doesn’t help Trump. “I’m sure that Trump is trying to take a Bob Jones approach, one way or another, about this,” Brunson said. “But Bob Jones isn’t broad enough, I don’t believe, to be any threat to Harvard.”
The law professor also pointed to a different issue for the administration: A 1998 law passed by a Republican-led Congress that bars the president from, among other things, requesting that the IRS audit a group or otherwise investigate them.
That law was passed to counter a history of presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Bill Clinton, using the IRS to go after their political enemies. President John F. Kennedy had the IRS set up an “Ideological Organizations Audit project” to go after conservative groups, while Richard Nixon wanted the IRS to audit political rivals.
The 1998 law, Brunson said, was written specifically to prohibit “what Donald Trump is doing.”
Trump’s threats against Harvard are also an about-face from his first term, when then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions condemned the idea that the IRS could be used for political purposes, saying such an “abuse of power will not be tolerated.”
In 2017, after the Justice Department settled with Tea Party groups that alleged their tax exemptions had been delayed on political grounds under the Obama administration, Sessions said, “There is no excuse for this conduct.”
The lawyer for one of the Tea Party groups was Jay Sekulow, long-time conservative Christian activist and head of the American Center for Law and Justice, a prominent evangelical legal group. Sekulow called the settlement “a historic victory for our clients and sends the unequivocal message that a government agency’s targeting of conservative organizations, or any organization, based on political viewpoints, will never be tolerated.”
David French, a former constitutional lawyer turned author and New York Times columnist, worked with Sekulow on the Tea Party lawsuit. He said the episode affirmed that using the IRS for political ends violated the First Amendment. “One thing that was very, very clear is that you absolutely cannot deny a tax exemption as an act of political reprisal,” he said. “You just cannot do it.”
In a meeting with reporters Thursday, Trump also suggested the IRS investigate Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, a group that has criticized him. He also claimed that the IRS had investigated churches during the Biden administration, citing complaints he heard from pastors who attended this week’s White House Easter dinner.
Among the ministers at the dinner was Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and a longtime supporter of Trump. Jeffress confirmed to Religion News Service that he told Trump that his church had been investigated by the IRS under Biden for allegedly violating the Johnson Amendment, a measure that prohibits nonprofit entities such as houses of worship from endorsing political candidates.
“The case was ultimately resolved in our favor,” Jeffress told RNS in an email.
A complaint was filed against Jeffress’ church by the Freedom From Religion Foundation during the final year of the first Trump administration, but documentation proving if or when the IRS conducted an investigation was not immediately available.
Some evangelical Christians worry Trump’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption could backfire. Conservatives have long voiced concerns that Christian groups that oppose marriage for same-sex couples and LGBTQ+ rights on religious grounds might find their tax exemptions at risk.
A student protester stands in front of the statue of John Harvard, the first major benefactor of Harvard College, draped in the Palestinian flag, at an encampment of students protesting against the war in Gaza, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., April 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
That worry was prompted by the 2015 Obergefell decision, in which the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. During oral arguments for that case, then-U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said faith groups who opposed could find their tax exemptions at risk if it were legalized.
Chief Justice John Roberts cited those remarks in his dissent. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.”
Those concerns led Christian groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Family Association to oppose the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, a federal law that recognized same-sex marriages. When that law was signed by President Joe Biden, Alliance Defending Freedom said it “intentionally threatened free speech and religious liberty.”
French said the IRS’ Bob Jones ruling to punish nonprofits over LGBTQ+ rights has long been the Christian right’s “nightmare scenario.”
He warned that if Harvard loses its tax exemption, that could open the door for the Christian right’s nightmare to become reality. The Trump administration would likely take aim at the tax exemptions of many other groups on political grounds, he said, and that could open the door for a Democratic administration to do the same thing in the future.
“That would then result in this absurd scenario where, when Republicans are in power, their friendly groups get tax exemptions,” he said. “And then when Democrats are in power, their friendly groups get tax exemptions.
“The whole thing is just utter constitutional nonsense.”
…