Claim:
Harvard University responded to a May 2025 letter from U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon ending grants to the institution by marking spelling and grammar errors in the text and posting it on social media.
Rating:
Context:
Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted the letter on her X profile on May 5, 2025. Another X user added corrections the next day. There is no proof Harvard University posted the “corrected” letter on its socials.
In early May 2025 claims (archived) circulated that Harvard University responded to a letter (archived) from U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon ending grants to the institution by marking spelling and grammar errors in the text and posting it on social media.
One X user, whose post had more than 4 million views at the time of this writing, posted screenshots of the corrected letter with a caption reading: “HARVARD WON THIS ROUND! Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote a letter to Harvard. The university responded by marking up the letter for spelling and punctuation mistakes- and then shared it on social media. Your thoughts?”
However, while the letter and corrections (archived) were both real (in the sense that they weren’t generated by artificial intelligence), there is no evidence Harvard University created or shared the “corrected” version of McMahon’s letter. Rather, an X user added the corrections that then circulated across social media, falsely attributed to Harvard University.
The X user confirmed to Snopes via email that he had added the corrections. The “corrected” version of the letter also did not appear on Harvard University’s official social media profiles as online claims said. Therefore, we rate this claim false.
Harvard University declined to publicly comment on whether it added corrections to McMahon’s letter or posted it online.
Meanwhile, X user Daniel Luo, who uses the handle @danielluo_pi, confirmed over email that he personally added the corrections and posted the marked up screenshots. Luo also claimed ownership of the “corrected” letter in an X post, writing (archived) in part, “I filled it with inside jokes for economists that are now going to go unappreciated.”
McMahon’s letter, posted to X on May 5, 2025, was the latest development in Harvard’s ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration over issues including anti-Semitism, merit-based admissions and diversity, equity and inclusion measures.
Harvard University sued the Trump administration on April 21, 2025, after it froze billions of dollars worth of federal funding to the institution as part of the ongoing conflict.
McMahon wrote in her May 5 letter that Harvard was engaging in a “systemic pattern of violating federal law.” As a consequence, McMahon doubled down on the government’s funding freeze, saying the government would no longer provide grants to Harvard:
The above concerns are only a fraction of the long list of Harvard’s consistent violations of its own legal duties. Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni.
The Trump administration has frozen federal funding for several other universities, including some in the Ivy League, due to reasons including alleged civil rights violations, allegations of anti-Semitism on campus and failure to comply with the administration’s demands to discontinue diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT YAHOONEWS