Education Secretary Linda McMahon said on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s goal is not to engage in a prolonged legal battle with Harvard University and expressed hope that the federal government would be able to reach a settlement that delivers meaningful reforms to the elite campus. 

McMahon made the comments while appearing at the Federalist Society and the Defense of Freedom Institute’s annual Education Law & Policy Conference on Wednesday morning, after being asked during a moderated conversation with Washington Examiner news editor Marisa Schultz where negotiations between Harvard and the administration stand. 

“I’m certainly hopeful on the settlement. I have spoken to Alan Garber, their very good president, at the very beginning of this. I haven’t spoken to him since, but I do think that with the idea that Harvard has already started to take certain measures to change what they were doing, I certainly hope that there will be an agreement,” McMahon said. “It’s not our goal to have to go to court to make people abide by the law, to make universities abide by the law.”

Getting specific, the education secretary explained that, “Harvard has already started to put in place some of the things we wanted them to do. They reassessed their Middle East policies. They actually fired a couple of their professors. They are looking at having safe measures on campus, and so without even admitting any guilt in any way, they have started to change their policies, and that is the ultimate goal of our investigation, of making sure that things are proper on campus.”

Asked by Schultz about the ongoing negotiations with the University of California, Los Angeles and other schools, and how the settlements fit into the Trump administration’s “big picture mission for elite universities and colleges in America,” McMahon said that their “goal is really not to be punitive necessarily, but to have universities, I think, return to what we all believe that universities started out to be.”

“It’s not to be punitive. That’s really not the goal. The goal is to make them change their policies and practices, and if they are not in compliance with the law, then surely we’re going to insist they are, or they won’t receive federal funding,” she said.

The education secretary said she believed it was in the best interest of all parties to reach settlements rather than risk upending the more than $2 billion in research grants that Harvard receives from the federal government. “The federal funding for Harvard, not only for students who attend, for their tuition, but also the amazing amount of research funding — they get over $2 billion, almost $3 billion — is very significant to those scientists and professors who were there, who have grants and who are working on their own projects,” McMahon said. 

“They can take that grant money and go somewhere else, if it’s a grant directly to them, so I think it’s in Harvard’s interest to continue to negotiate. I think it’s in all of our interests for Harvard and for all of the other universities that we are sending letters to, that we are investigating, and there are others. Hopefully there will be these settlements with all of them, because basically, we just want them to do right,” she explained.

McMahon made a similar remark about the importance of protecting research grants while discussing the administration’s settlement with Columbia University reached over the summer, which followed a protracted legal battle.

“We eventually reached an agreement with Columbia,” McMahon said. “They will pay a fine back to the United States government. Their funding will be released again, and it’s primarily research funding. I believe our universities do some of the most incredible research in the country. We want them to be able to do that, but they have to abide by the law. They have to abide by Title VI, they have to abide by Title IX. They have to be worthy to receive the funds that they are receiving from the United States government.”

The comments mark the first time McMahon has publicly shared her thoughts on what outcome she would like to see from the federal government’s negotiations with Harvard University amid an ongoing dispute between different factions within the Trump administration over the effectiveness of the ongoing negotiations and settlements with universities. 

While some officials are focused on any deal that would secure strong reforms to address antisemitism and other civil rights issues, others are looking for securing large payouts to appease President Donald Trump. 

“There’s growing dissatisfaction with the White House letting universities buy their way out of accountability with no meaningful change. It’s clear they’ve been totally out-negotiated,” one source familiar with the negotiations told JI earlier this month of the situation.

Trump said late last month that he expected Harvard to pay at least $500 million to restore its more than $2 billion in federal funding. “We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard. Don’t negotiate, Linda. They’ve been very bad. Don’t negotiate,” Trump said while addressing McMahon at a Cabinet meeting. (McMahon acknowledged Trump’s remarks in the moment but did not respond further.)

Pressed on Wednesday about Trump’s comments and the fact that a federal judge in Boston blocked the administration’s freeze on Harvard’s research grants earlier this month, McMahon noted that they plan to appeal the ruling and said the government was in a strong position in its fight against the university.

“We’re still in the throes of negotiating with Harvard. They filed a lawsuit, they won the first round, and one of the things they were claiming was that the steps that we were asking of them would violate First Amendment rights, and that’s just not true. I think that we have a really good case against Harvard,” McMahon said.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers wrote to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday, again demanding that Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, be dismissed from her position.

Albanese, despite alleged private criticism of her by Guterres and public opposition from U.S. and allied officials, recently had her employment and mandate extended. 

“This extension sends a signal to the world that the United Nations tolerates and even promotes those who spew antisemitic hatred and harbor long-standing prejudice against Israel,” the letter reads. “This pattern of the United Nations allowing employees to direct vile hatred towards the Jewish people and the obsession with the world’s only Jewish state must end now. Every day that the UN fails to address this systemic bias within its organization, its credibility is undermined.”

The lawmakers argued that dismissing Albanese would be a step to show that the U.N. can address antisemitism in its own ranks.

“We’ve seen over and over again the deadly consequences of this noxious rhetoric like Ms. Albanese’s that crosses the line from criticism of Israel into antisemitic demonization,” the letter reads, linking Albanese’s long history of antisemitic comments to the recent antisemitic terrorist attacks in Washington and Boulder, Colo., as well as the global surge of violent antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023.

The letter was signed by Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA), Dan Goldman (D-NY), Jefferson Shreve (R-IN), Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Laura Gillen (D-NY), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY).

“Special Rapporteur Albanese has a vile and extensive history of outlandish antisemitic statements and an extreme bias against Israel,” the lawmakers wrote. “Ms. Albanese consistently uses offensive and dangerous rhetoric to absurdly compare Israel’s war on Hamas to the systematic extermination of Jews in the Holocaust … She has also outrageously stated that Israel doesn’t have the right to defend itself and has refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.”

“She has had plenty of opportunities to take responsibility for her dangerous and misguided rhetoric but instead continues to double down every time she has been called out publicly and states that she has been ‘wrongly mischaracterized as antisemitic,’” the letter continues.

It also highlights that she has accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of free travel from pro-Hamas groups in Australia and New Zealand.

Sherman, who led the letter, recently said that Albanese’s rhetoric and activity had eroded U.S. support for the U.N. and foreign aid in general and would contribute to deaths around the world.

“Instead of demonstrating that the UN can address issues such as antisemitism from within and prevent continued efforts to undermine the UN’s credibility, Secretary General Guterres extended Ms. Albanese’s employment,” Sherman said on X.

Democratic Majority for Israel helped organize the letter.

“Ms. Albanese — whose mandate as Special Rapporteur was recently and inexplicably extended — is an extreme anti-Israel activist pretending to be a neutral UN official,” DMFI CEO Brian Romick said. “She regularly spews antisemitic conspiracy theories and attempts to downplay the horrors of October 7th — all completely at odds with the values of impartiality and human rights the UN is supposed to uphold. This week she even encouraged unauthorized flotillas to enter an active war zone, putting lives at risk in a reckless political stunt. Keeping her in this role further damages the UN’s credibility. We’re proud to back this effort to hold both her and the institution accountable.”

Only in a family where nearly everyone is a rabbi does becoming a Cabinet secretary in one of the largest states in the nation make you a black sheep. 

That’s the joke that Uri Monson, Pennsylvania’s budget secretary, likes to make when describing his career as a public servant in the context of his family — a brother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather who were rabbis; a stepmother who was a lifelong Jewish nonprofit professional; and a mother who was a renowned Jewish academic and university administrator.

But coming out of that kind of lineage (his great-grandfather was the first person to certify Coca-Cola as kosher!), choosing a career in public service was Monson’s act of “pseudo-rebellion,” he said in an interview with Jewish Insider earlier this month. He didn’t stray that far from his Jewish values, though — during his first internship, at city hall in Philadelphia, he helped draft the mayor’s speech for Israeli Independence Day.

“I grew up a mile from Independence Hall. I’ve always been an American government junkie, and fascinated by and love[d] government and its ability to really help,” said Monson, 56. “I felt, even at 18, that I could make it better, that it had to be able to be done better, and that started me on that path to public service.” 

Even if Monson didn’t follow his family members into the Jewish professional world, growing up immersed in deep conversations about the weekly Torah portion over Shabbat lunch and spending his summers at Camp Ramah in the Poconos shaped his approach to public service just as much as his wonky fascination with fiscal policy and his master’s degree in public administration.

“What we’ve seen all along is that that Jewish perspective has shaped his commitment to what government can do and the way that society should work,” said Rabbi Chaim Galfand, the head rabbi at Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia and a close friend of Monson’s. 

Monson attended the joint program at List College at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and another, in midrash, from  JTS. The intellectual curiosity and creativity that comes from his expertise in interpreting the Torah — Monson calls himself a “midrash parsha junkie” — colors the way he approaches everything from budgetary policy to his weekly Settlers of Catan board games with Galfand each Shabbat. 

The biblical stories about Joseph are his favorite; Joseph’s “rise in the political world,” from slave to advisor to the Egyptian pharaoh, is particularly resonant for Monson. But he doesn’t think there is only one way to engage with these stories, and that’s a lesson that guides his approach to public policy, too.

“When you make that jump to learning that the Talmud is not a book of law, but that it’s a book of how to think about law, it’s a major change. It’s a major jump in thought,” Monson said. “To realize that you had people disagreeing over really complex issues of Jewish law — that’s how they lived their lives, and what they actually record [in the Talmud] is the discussion and the back-and-forth and the debate. They were able to do it while living civilly together.”

Monson started his career in Washington as a policy advisor at the Department of Education during the Clinton administration. He has friends from that era who have lost their jobs as the Trump administration slashes the federal workforce. Monson does not reflexively believe all public employees have a right to keep their jobs; his former boss, President Bill Clinton, also stressed efficiency and shrunk the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of people. But he does think those workers should be respected.

“There are few of us who have a mantra, and I share this with the governor, that [we] cannot stand the phrase, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it.’ There are always opportunities for change,” he said, referring to Gov. Josh Shapiro. “The biggest difference for me between what I was a part of and what the current administration is doing is that that change was all about employee empowerment.” Shapiro has made a play for laid-off federal workers, encouraging them to apply to fill vacancies in Pennsylvania.

Monson’s time in Washington got him started on his path to Harrisburg — both because it was his first full-time gig in the government, and also because it was in this era that he reconnected with Shapiro, who was working on Capitol Hill at the time. 

“Like most expatriate Eagles fans, we would find each other to watch games, that kind of thing,” said Monson. But their relationship goes back decades: Shapiro and Monson’s younger brother, Ami, were in the same grade at Akiba Hebrew Academy, a pluralistic Jewish day school in the Philadelphia suburbs. (CNN anchor Jake Tapper was another classmate.) Shapiro’s parents and Monson’s were active in the Soviet Jewry movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

“Uri and I both lean on our family and our faith as motivation to serve the good people of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro told JI in a statement last week. “We are both driven by the same Jewish principle of tikkun olam, and from the passage from the Talmud that teaches us that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it.”

Shapiro’s first video ad in his 2022 gubernatorial campaign showed him, his wife and their children celebrating Shabbat. Monson, who observes Shabbat and does not work or travel from sundown Friday until Saturday night, receives weekly “Shabbat shalom” emails from Shapiro.

“When he offered me the job, I said, ‘I’m not going to be in Harrisburg on Fridays in the winter’” — when Shabbat begins in the late afternoon — “and he said he understood,” Monson recalled. Over the years, his colleagues have gotten used to Monson’s Shabbat observance, sending emails on Saturdays with the subject line “read me first” to try to capture his attention after Shabbat ends.

“Once in a while they’re like, ‘Maybe I want to be Jewish too,’ because they need a break,” Monson said, laughing. 

Monson returned to Philadelphia in the late 1990s for the first in a series of increasingly powerful jobs dealing with municipal and school district budgets. In 2012, when Shapiro was chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, he tapped Monson to serve as chief financial officer of the commonwealth’s third most populous county. Monson then spent seven years as chief financial officer of the School District of Philadelphia, which has a budget of $4.6 billion, helping shepherd the district through the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. He joined Shapiro in Harrisburg in early 2023.

“Uri had a very calming presence of being able to lead with certainty in very uncertain times,” said Larisa Shambaugh, the former chief talent officer in the Philadelphia school district, where she worked closely with Monson. She saw him take a forward-looking approach to budgeting, thinking not just about cost but about how to advance the interests of the school district.

“What was truly a joy about working with Uri is that he wasn’t a CFO that was focused only on finances and only on the bottom line,” Shambaugh explained. “When we would be thinking about proposing a new initiative or a new policy or a new staffing structure, the first question wasn’t, How much would this cost and can we afford it? It was, Why is this best for students?”

Shambaugh also benefitted from another skill Monson brought with him to his next job: his baking skills. He baked lemon squares for a meeting with new school board members. When he found out Shambaugh loved challah, he baked her one. In his new job, he’s baked cranberry walnut muffins twice — once to relax before a budget hearing and once to get rid of flour before Passover — and brought hamantaschen to the capital during Purim. (“We’ve all been on the receiving end of his largesse,” said Galfand.)

Monson has spent the spring testifying at Statehouse hearings about Shapiro’s $51.5 billion budget proposal. This is the forum where he allows his Torah discussion skills to shine: keeping his cool under sometimes hostile questions from Republicans, and disarming them by actually being willing to engage. (When he sat down at this year’s budget hearings, he wore a custom kippah showing the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, made by an artist his wife found on Etsy.)

“I will never claim to have a monopoly on good ideas, and I think that’s something I certainly learned from around the table and from growing up among the rabbis,” said Monson. “I want to learn from everybody, because you can learn from everybody, and be open to the discussion.”

The U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, told reporters at a roundtable on Tuesday — her last before departing her role — that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres had condemned Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation on human rights in the Palestinian territories, who the U.S. has repeatedly criticized for antisemitic comments, in a one-on-one conversation with her.

Lipstadt also spoke about her hopes for the Trump administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism, internal issues among some State Department staff relating to her office’s mission, China’s role as a driver of global antisemitism and her most important accomplishments in office.

The outgoing envoy said that, during an event at a synagogue during the Munich Security Conference, she had spoken to Guterres about the U.S. government’s concerns with Albanese. In Lipstadt’s retelling, Guterres responded, twice, “She’s a horrible person.”

U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly pressed Guterres and the U.N. to dismiss Albanese, whose position is unpaid, but those calls have gone unanswered.

Lipstadt declined to comment on some of the controversial names, such as Shmuley Boteach, Alan Dershowitz and Dov Hikind, who’ve been floated to replace her, but said that she hopes President-elect Donald Trump will nominate “someone who will be a barn-builder, not a barn-burner,” and can build on the progress she has made.

“I would hope it would be someone who would command the respect and the attention of the foreign governments with which they’ll be dealing,” she continued. Lipstadt said she “certainly hope[s]” that the incoming administration is up to the task of combating the global surge in antisemitism.

She said that, based on conversations with Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio during her confirmation process, she is confident that the Florida senator “takes this issue very seriously” and “gets it 100%, just as Secretary [Tony] Blinken got it, so that gives me direct hope on this issue.”

Lipstadt said she’d be willing to offer advice to the Trump team or her eventual replacement if they ask, explaining that refusing to do so “would be a dereliction of duty and everything I’ve said.”

Since the Oct. 7 attacks, several mid-level State Department staffers have publicly resigned in protest of the U.S.’ support for Israel. While Lipstadt said that the issue had not impacted the senior policy-making levels of the State Department, some individual mid-level staff had expressed issues with her office’s work because they did not understand that combating antisemitism and support for Israel are separate issues.

“For some of them, I think it spilled over into thinking, ‘Well, if they fight antisemitism, they must support Israel 120%,’ or something like that,” she said. “It wasn’t resistance to the work that we’re doing but I think there were some people, misinformed people, who thought [they knew] what our particular views were without ever asking us.”

Lipstadt said that State Department officials also still had yet to identify who scrawled a swastika inside an elevator in the State Department headquarters several years ago.

She also noted that China has been a significant driver of global antisemitism in recent years, which she described as a form of “utilitarian” antisemitism, employed for political gain, rather than ideological reasons.

“It seems to have been … a way of signaling that ‘We are with the global south. We’re with you and not with them,’” Lipstadt said.

She said that such discussions have made a particularly strong impression on foreign officials with whom she has met, and helped some better understand the nature and importance of combating antisemitism.

U.S. intelligence and security agencies are “very aware” of the Chinese government’s amplification of antisemitism and the “global implications” of that, she added.

Reflecting on the rise of antisemitism since Oct. 7, Lipstadt said she believes that the organized Jewish community overlooked and underestimated the extent to which anti-Israel and pro-Hamas groups had built up support on college campuses. She said she’s “glad the organizations are re-assessing” and are adapting to the new landscape.

She also emphasized that antisemitism is now impacting individual Jews’ “personal lives in a way that we haven’t seen since the ‘50s and early ‘60s.”

The spike, she said, has brought antisemitism issues “into sharper focus than I ever imagined,” and the global landscape has “changed tremendously,” with antisemites becoming more emboldened and brazen.

She noted that it’s been “frustrating at times” to be restricted, because of her international remit, in her ability to address domestic antisemitism on college campuses, where she spent most of her career before the State Department.

Lipstadt did say she was struck by how “heated and extreme” rhetoric on college campuses became, including overt support for terrorism and denial of Hamas’s atrocities, “in a way that I had never seen before in relation to other kinds of tragedies.” She said that “struck me as something really significant.”

Lipstadt said that one of her early goals in office was making progress on fighting antisemitism in Gulf states, and convincing them to separate the issue from geopolitical issues with Israel. Her first foreign trip in her role was to Saudi Arabia to pursue this goal.

She said those efforts were stalled as a result of the Oct. 7 attack, but said she hopes that the next administration is able to advance them.

“I think that could have a very big impact in terms of the power of those countries, the importance of those countries, but also in terms of antisemitism within the Muslim world, the Arab world,” Lipstadt said.

Lipstadt said she believes she has helped raise the prominence of antisemitism as a foreign policy concern issue both within the State Department and with partner governments abroad, even in countries without substantial Jewish populations.

One key signal of this, she said, is that the State Department distributed the global guidelines for combating antisemitism, which the U.S. and other partners developed, as a démarche to a range of U.S. partners, formally asking other nations to sign express their support for the guidelines and making them a formal part of the State Department’s global human rights agenda.

Lipstadt said another major success was overhauling the structure of the office, which had just two full time and one part-time permanent staff members when the Trump administration left office and effectively shut down in the transition period between presidential administrations.

Now, the office will have approximately 20 full-time non-political staff who will continue on into the Trump administration and will be able to keep the office’s work moving ahead even before a new special envoy is nominated or a deputy special envoy is appointed.

Those staff, she said, will continue to work on recruiting additional countries to sign the global guidelines, participate in international conferences and continue to advise other State Department personnel and policymakers on antisemitism.

Lipstadt, who was a frequent social media user in her pre-government life — a fact that caused issues with some Republicans during her confirmation process — said she’s still deciding how best to speak out in her post-government life.

She said that she’s also found, in government life, that not speaking out, or acting quietly, can be more effective in the long-run than public condemnations.

“I’ll have to decide,” she said. “Also, if you speak too much on everything, at some point you’ll just be dismissed as a partisan hack.”