CAMBRIDGE, MA — Harvard treasurer Margaret Voss spent Tuesday at her standing desk in Massachusetts Hall explaining, mostly to a printer, that the university’s $53.2 billion endowment and the $2.2 billion in federal grants frozen by the Trump administration are, in accounting terms, “two completely different buckets, almost philosophically.”
The position, articulated in a 14-page memo set in Garamond and stapled twice, holds that while Harvard does technically possess fifty-three billion dollars, that money is “structurally unavailable” to cover the federal grants, which fund things like biology lab freezers, postdoc stipends, and one centrifuge that nobody has been able to explain since 2011.
“The endowment is a long-term, professionally managed pool of restricted assets,” said Devon Carmichael, a higher-education finance consultant at Atlantic Heartland Group. “The grants are a short-term, federally restricted pool of restricted assets. The two are not interchangeable, except in the trivial sense that they are both money.”
Carmichael noted that the endowment returned 10.4% in fiscal 2025, a figure he described as “a strong year for a school that suddenly cannot afford anything.”
A separate document obtained Tuesday — a one-pager titled “FY26 Bridge Scenarios” — outlines the university’s options, which include drawing on a $400 million revolving credit facility, raising tuition by an unspecified amount, and a third option that has been redacted with what appears to be a Sharpie. The Sharpie did not fully take.
White House officials have indicated that the freeze will remain in place until Harvard complies with a list of demands that begins with “viewpoint diversity” and ends, nine pages later, with the phrase “and other items to be determined.” An aide confirmed Tuesday that the items remain to be determined.
Reached for comment, Harvard Management Company chief executive N.P. Narvekar said only that the endowment was “performing as designed” and that the firm had no plans to liquidate positions to backstop the freeze, citing an unrelated 1962 stipulation from the estate of one Atherton Beale that he said “really did tie our hands here.”
A first-year graduate student in molecular biology, who asked not to be named because her stipend is now technically a question, said she received an email Tuesday morning informing her that her March payment would be “honored on a best-efforts basis.” She was eating a Trader Joe’s burrito at the time, on a bench, in the rain.
The Atherton Beale fund, meanwhile, returned 11.1%.