In preparing for a Supreme Court argument on Tuesday over the role of religion in public schools, the justices and their law clerks have considered the usual pile of briefs, pleadings, declarations and exhibits. But this time the key documents in the court record are seven colorful books for young children, with sparse text and cheerful illustrations. They include “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; “Love, Violet,” about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate; “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a same-sex union; and “Born Ready,” about a transgender boy. Those books are at the center of the case, which asks whether parents’ rights to the free exercise of their faiths are burdened if public schools do not allow them to withdraw their children from classes on days that books with gay and transgender characters and themes are discussed. Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, added the books in 2022 to the curriculum for students from prekindergarten through fifth grade. The school system’s list included, its lawyers told the justices, “a handful of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the language-arts curriculum, alongside the many books already in the curriculum that feature heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.” At first, the Montgomery school system gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused from those sessions. But the school system soon eliminated the advanced notice and opt-out policy, saying it was hard to administer, led to absenteeism and risked “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.” Parents of several faiths sued, saying the books violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. The books, their complaint said, “promote one-sided transgender ideology, encourage gender transitioning and focus excessively on romantic infatuation.” The parents said they did not seek to remove the books from school libraries and classrooms but only to shield their children from having to discuss them. (The school system has since withdrawn two of the seven books, including “Pride Puppy.” In court papers, officials said the books had been re-evaluated under standard procedures but did not elaborate.) Billy Moges, a member of Kids First, an association of parents and teachers that is a plaintiff in the case, said in an interview that the books were “teaching things that are exactly in contradiction with what we believe in.”“It steals their innocence,” she said of the impact the books have on children. “It destroys the foundation that they have, the structure of who they are, in God and in our faith. And it just makes absolutely no sense. It just defies common sense.”Ms. Moges said she has withdrawn her three young children from public schools and has sent them to a private one she helped found that would, she said, “not brainwash kids with these ideas.” Still, she said, “I want to send my kids back to Montgomery County schools because we don’t have the resources that they do.” Jodie Patterson, the author of “Born Ready,” said she was flummoxed by the controversy. “My initial reaction was, ‘My little book? How is that harming anyone?’”Her book, about a transgender boy who wins a karate tournament with the support of his family and a school principal, was well received when it was published in 2021. Kirkus Reviews said it “shines with joy and affirmation” and amounted to “a triumphant declaration of love and identity.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On reflection, she said she felt the parents’ objections amounted to erasing the experiences of some families. “When certain religions and certain religious people say, ‘This is not appropriate for my religion,’” she said, “it’s problematic.” “Not because I don’t want to respect people’s religions,” she went on, “but because reading stories about children who are different is fundamental.” In recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes at the expense of other values like gay rights. The court has ruled in favor of a web designer who said she did not want to create sites for same-sex marriages, a high school football coach who said he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia that said it could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who had applied to take in foster children. Some legal scholars said that accepting the logic of the Maryland parents’ arguments would have broad consequences for the ability of public schools to manage their curriculums, citing cases in which parents unsuccessfully challenged course materials on evolution and the Big Bang theory and storybooks about wizards and giants. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The First Amendment does not shield public school students from the mere exposure to ideas that conflict with their personal views, whether secular or religious,” Justin Driver of Yale Law School and Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University wrote in a brief supporting the school system. The school system does allow parents to withdraw older students from sex education classes for any reason. Lawyers for the parents said that differing treatment by the school board was telling. “The board designed a regime where there was no notice or opt-outs only for discussions involving these storybooks — an area of curriculum that it knew was laden with religious import,” their brief said. The Supreme Court has in recent years been exceptionally wary of treating religion exemptions differently from secular ones. “The Supreme Court has adopted a very expansive notion of religious inequality,” said Zalman Rothschild, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Lower courts have ruled against the parents. “There’s no evidence at present that the board’s decision not to permit opt-outs compels the parents or their children to change their religious beliefs or conduct, either at school or elsewhere,” Judge G. Steven Agee wrote for the majority of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Judge Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added that “simply hearing about other views does not necessarily exert pressure to believe or act differently than one’s religious faith requires.” In dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who was appointed by President Trump, said the parents had made a modest request. “They do not claim the use of the books is itself unconstitutional,” he wrote. “And they do not seek to ban them. Instead, they only want to opt their children out of the instruction involving such texts.” The school board, in its Supreme Court brief in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297, wrote that the dispute was based on a misunderstanding about what lessons students are intended to draw from the books. “The storybooks themselves do not instruct about gender or sexuality,” the brief said. “They are not textbooks. They merely introduce students to characters who are L.G.B.T.Q. or have L.G.B.T.Q. family members, and those characters’ experiences and points of view.” The books supplement rather than replace other children’s stories like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Goldilocks, which, the brief noted, also depict families, communities and relationships.

Xiaofeng Wan, a former admissions officer at Amherst College, now works as a private consultant to international students who want to come to the United States. This week, as he held meetings in China with prospective students, he sensed a deep uncertainty among their parents. “They really don’t know whether they should send their children to a country where they don’t welcome Chinese students or they see China as a hostile competitor,” Dr. Wan said by telephone from Beijing. “It’s an unprecedented situation that we’ve never seen before.” For years, American colleges and universities have attracted growing numbers of international students who often pay full tuition, effectively subsidizing domestic students. But the Trump administration’s recent move to deport hundreds of students here on visas, and his trade war with China, have stoked fears that the United States is no longer a welcoming place for international students. This week, the administration also asked Harvard to hand over lists of foreign students, adding to a sense of panic on campuses. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said the chaos of visa terminations had fueled concerns among many students. “I think it sends a powerful signal to friends and family at home that the U.S. is not a safe place to be anymore,” she said. If the nation gains a reputation for being hostile to international students, it could be devastating for many American colleges and universities. There were more than 1.1 million international students in the United States during the 2023-24 academic year, according to a recent report released by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education. The number includes students who remain in the country briefly after graduation to gain work experience. The report identifies New York University, Northeastern University and Columbia University as the three largest host schools for international students. At N.Y.U., their enrollment has increased nearly 250 percent over the last decade. Losing foreign students could also be bad for the broader economy, experts say. International students pumped nearly $44 billion into the American economy and generated 378,000 jobs last year alone, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which promotes international education.Moody’s, the bond rating agency, downgraded the higher education outlook to “negative” last month, citing federal policy changes as a threat. The Trump administration has said that it is targeting international students who have broken the law or pose a threat to its foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued that “no one has a right to a visa.” In remarks last month, he said that in giving and revoking visas, “we’re going to err on the side of caution.” “We are not going to be importing activists into the United States,” he added. “They’re here to study. They’re here to go to class. They’re not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine the — our universities. I think it’s lunacy to continue to allow that.” International student enrollment had been on an upward trajectory for decades. Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied foreign students, said the revenue they bring in helped some public universities weather the Great Recession. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Dr. Khanna’s research found schools that could attract students from abroad were often able to avoid raising in-state tuition for domestic students and major research and instructional cuts. “To keep doors open for local students, you need to let in more international students,” he said. Beyond the economic effects, leaders in higher education worry that decreases in international enrollment will deter the world’s top minds from coming to the United States. International students accounted for nearly 6 percent of the total higher education population in the United States, according to the I.I.E. report. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where more than one in four students hail from abroad, the president, Sally Kornbluth, said on Monday that the university would be “gravely diminished without the students and scholars who join us from other nations.” “The threat of unexpected visa revocations will make it less likely that top talent from around the world will come to the U.S.,” Dr. Kornbluth said in a message to campus. “That will damage American competitiveness and scientific leadership for years to come.” Chris R. Glass, a professor at Boston College who studies international enrollment, estimates that 50,000 to 75,000 international graduate students in science and technology fields could be affected by federal grant cuts. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Overall, he said the number of international students could fall below 1 million for the first time since the 2014-15 academic year. An analysis by The New York Times found that the Trump administration has canceled more than 1,500 visas at 222 schools nationwide. Immigration agents have also sought to detain and deport a number of students and researchers. Some of the visa revocations appear to be related to legal infractions in students’ pasts, a few are related to activism, and in some cases students do not know why they have lost their visas. One international student from London, Patrick, who is 22, described a huge amount of fear among his fellow students. He asked that neither his last name nor his university in New York be identified for fear of repercussions. He said that he had recently deleted all of his text messages because he was worried about surveillance when he re-entered the country. Still, he said, he plans to finish his senior year in the United States and stay for a year after graduation. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT President Trump’s first term also brought a chill to international student enrollment. In 2017, Mr. Trump banned travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and many colleges reported dips in foreign applicants. A larger decline occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Certain universities probably can weather the storm. But other universities don’t have the resources,” Dr. Khanna said. “If they get cut off from a lot of their funding and at the same time get cut off from revenue from international students, they’re in trouble.” Many of the students arriving from outside the United States view their degrees as paths to employment in the country. But as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on immigration, some students could be deterred over the anxiety that studying in the U.S. and joining the domestic labor force no longer “guarantees you the things you thought it did,” Mr. Khanna said. It was already a particularly perilous time for American schools, who are facing a decline in students as birthrates dip. Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics predicts that the annual number of graduating high school seniors, which peaked this year at more than 3.8 million, will decline to 3.5 million by 2032. During President Trump’s first term, some American universities tried to persuade foreign students to come in spite of concerns about a hostile administration. Now universities are scrambling to help the international students already enrolled who have been forced to leave. After the State Department canceled the visas of 40 students and recent graduates of Northeastern University in Boston, the school said that it would offer some of those students remote learning opportunities or transfers to its international campuses. Dr. Khanna said it wasn’t clear what might happen long term, this time. “There’s a question of ‘will the U.S. lose this comparative advantage?’”

On Tuesday the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over whether public elementary schools violate parents’ religious rights by compelling their children to be present in class when storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. characters are read or discussed. The hearing in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, comes after an era of furious protest and counterprotest, fiery school board meetings and mutual accusations of bigotry in our schools in Montgomery County, Md. The case is freighted with important questions about religious freedom, L.G.B.T.Q. and parental rights and the role of public schools. Still, as a parent in the school system now under examination, I deeply resent the whole mess. I begrudge the public money wasted on expensive lawyers. I can’t fathom that we squandered so much energy fighting over storybooks even as our kids’ test scores foundered, absenteeism soared and student mental health slumped in the wake of the pandemic. I can’t decide which conceit is more delusional: The school district grandstanding about social tolerance while forcing a minority of religious families to engage with books they consider immoral or the religious parents claiming that they can’t properly rear their children in faith if the kids get exposed to a few picture books. Both positions, it seems to me, rest on a cartoonishly inflated sense of school’s influence on children. And both seek an ideologically purified classroom while underestimating the sweep of ideas and information kids absorb simply by existing in our world. Most of all, I feel that our community’s failure to resolve a thoroughly predictable tension with the time-tested tools of straight talk, compromise and extending one another a little grace has made for a demoralizing spectacle. And I can’t help but notice that our district, in its clumsy efforts to force tolerance, might have given the Supreme Court an opening to repress L.G.B.T.Q.-related speech in the nation’s schools. There wasn’t much fanfare or outcry when, just as a school year began in 2022, the district added a handful of L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive storybooks to the elementary English curriculum. For example, “Pride Puppy!,” an alphabet book in which a pet dog gets lost at a Pride celebration, includes a search-and-find list for incipient readers with words like “leather,” “[drag] queen” and “intersex.” In the fairy tale “Prince & Knight,” a handsome prince rejects a parade of princesses before realizing that he would rather marry a knight. “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope” was written by the mother of a trans boy. Many of us were oblivious to the whole thing and — in my case, anyway — wouldn’t have complained about the books even if we’d known. Some parents who paid closer attention could and did opt out, but that didn’t draw much attention, either. That’s probably because there is nothing very remarkable about the subtle but widespread use of opting out in American schooling. Our district (in accordance with state law, like most in the United States) has long allowed parents to opt their children out of health classes about sex and what the county calls “family life.” Even the most liberal U.S. enclaves (San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Boston; Minneapolis) let parents excuse their kids from sex education. Giving parents the chance to opt out has, in fact, prevailed as the more open-minded approach; some states (Utah, Nevada, North Carolina) require parents to opt kids in before they are taught about sex. Editors’ Picks His Life Savings Were Mailed to Him by Paper Check. Now, It’s Gone. Timothée Chalamet Is Living a Knicks Fan’s Dream It’s Time to Put Away Your Winter Clothes. Here’s How to Store Them Safely. But a few months after introducing the books at the county’s elementary schools, the district announced, for reasons that remain unclear, that families would no longer be allowed to opt out when the books were taught. In its legal filings, the district explained that there were simply too many parents trying to opt out, causing complicated logistics, driving absenteeism, and creating a risk of “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”Hisham Garti, who met with district officials as a Muslim community representative, said he was told that the decision to end opt-outs came about after L.G.B.T.Q. families reported that their children’s feelings were hurt when their classmates left the room to avoid the books. He told me that he was sympathetic to the students but that religious pupils had also suffered stigma. Some of them, he said, were shamed over their families’ request to opt out. Whatever the reason, once the opt-out was gone, everything heated up. A diverse group of parents — including Muslims, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Jews and Catholics — demanded the opt-out’s restoration. They railed at school board meetings. They held street protests. Their numbers grew. Meanwhile, the district refused to budge. “It was extremely poorly handled by one of the biggest school districts in the U.S.,” Mr. Garti told me recently. “They allowed it to be politicized. I feel like, in the end, they knew they were wrong. But they wouldn’t back down.”It didn’t have to go this way. The district could have added the books, maintained the right to opt kids out and gotten on with running our many schools. In that alternative universe, most of the students get to hear the stories, religious parents are mollified, and the Supreme Court doesn’t have yet another case that could make life worse for L.G.B.T.Q. families across the land. Because make no mistake: Opting out is the real sticking point. There is a persistent misapprehension that this case is about book banning. But these parents haven’t sought to ban the books or tried to stop teachers from reading them aloud. They have fought energetically for the right to exempt their own kids from the instruction. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT I first heard about the books in the spring of 2023, when a mother I knew through kids’ sports asked if I was also bothered. (I wasn’t.) She wasn’t thrilled about the books, she said, but mostly she didn’t like the way they’d been brought into the classroom. The school was inserting itself between her and her children, she said, and imposing a view. She was not religious. But after fleeing Iran with her family as a child, she retained a revulsion at anything that reminded her of the ways power worked in Iran. I remember listening to her, not quite getting it, unable to follow the line between the events she described and her reactions to them. It strikes me that many of the protesters are immigrants with similar feelings — an indignation at the suggestion of their rights being infringed by the very country that was supposed to be their escape from repression. Peel away the Trump-tinged distractions of Moms for Liberty (which joined in the protests) and supporting briefs from the political organizations of Mike Pence and Stephen Miller, and there remains a substantial group of local families who believe their rights were violated. “The opt-out option was a fair approach,” a father named Wael Elkoshairi told the board during a contentious 2023 meeting. “Listen, I realize that my religion and my beliefs are not mainstream and that we’re a minority in this country. However, I stand by my God-given right and constitutional right to practice, promote and raise my children on those beliefs.” The opt-out is the kind of accommodation that keeps our public schools thrumming along, a social force at once ephemeral and fundamental. Montgomery County sprawls from crowded urban enclaves pressed against the northern edge of Washington, D.C., to sleepy farmlands out toward the Pennsylvania border, with a whole lot of suburbia in between. With about 160,000 students, the district is among the nation’s largest. It’s also one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse. My family moved to these suburbs specifically because we wanted to enroll our kids here, lured by the promise of Chinese immersion in the public schools. The longer we’ve lived here, the more I’ve noticed how the area’s cosmopolitan bonhomie is facilitated by small, easily overlooked accommodations woven carefully through the system. Religious holidays, for example, are not listed on our secular-by-decree school calendar. Still, the district carefully avoids holding classes on Rosh Hashana, Eid al-Adha or Eid al-Fitr by scheduling teacher workdays or some such. I’ve listened to hours of public testimony at school board meetings. Over and over, I heard pleas for mutual respect: We get why these books matter, and we want to support the L.G.B.T.Q. community, many of the parents said, but we’d also like to be respected and accommodated. Keep the books; read the books; just send our kids out of the class. The district did not answer questions I sent it for this article. (In October it was reported that two of the controversial books had been removed from the curriculum, but the decision was not publicly explained.) In a brief filed in the case, the school board argued that the district had no legal obligation to offer an opt-out, because the storybooks were part of the English curriculum, not health. That’s technically true: The Maryland law specifies that the opt-out is for sex education in health classes. The district also argued in court that the books told “archetypal stories that touch on the same themes introduced to children in such classic books as ‘Snow White,’ ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Peter Pan.’” The characters happened to be L.G.B.T.Q., the argument went, but their sexuality and gender identity were not the point of the book. School board members have also made this argument. I don’t believe it’s true — and I say that as someone who’d like to keep the books around. Some of the books in question are stories specifically about the revelation of gender identity or sexual orientation. It’s disingenuous to pretend that a roomful of very young readers won’t end up grappling with the very topics of sexuality that parents can opt out of in health class. The elementary school principals didn’t buy it, either. After reviewing the books, the association of unionized principals sent an alarmed letter to top Montgomery County Public School district officials. It reminded them that the county had described the books as promoting inclusivity by showcasing L.G.B.T.Q. characters. “It has been communicated that M.C.P.S. is not teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity as stand-alone concepts in elementary school,” the letter said. “However, several of the books and supporting documents seem to contradict this message.” The principals warned that the books might not be appropriate for primary school, that the teachers didn’t have proper training to present them and that some parents were concerned about hidden agendas and indoctrination. The letter noted that principals were facing parents who “vehemently” wanted the books kept from their children, as well as parent groups with “strong support” for the books. In short, decisions about the books could “significantly damage school-community relationships.” Nevertheless, after listening to a student tell the school board the topics were “unsettling” because they contradicted her religious beliefs, a board member, Lynne Harris, told a reporter she felt “kind of sorry” for the girl and speculated that she may be “parroting dogma.” Other times Ms. Harris, who was not re-elected last fall, accused the parents of “hate” and ascribed to them “a judgmental view and a belief that not everybody is OK.” (Ms. Harris didn’t reply when I emailed her for comment.) Another politician who angered the religious parents was a County Council member, Kristin Mink, who said the picture book controversy had put “some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” Ms. Mink’s words echoed among the outraged parents, were documented in their legal filings and were invoked as a reminder of nasty smears. It’s too bad, though, because her full statement had a nuance that was lost when it was trimmed to the line about bigots and racists. She started by saying she’d been having good conversations with the protesting parents. “It’s more complicated than, I think, than a lot of people would like to — than a lot of people would like to think it is,” Ms. Mink said, faltering. She allowed that the parents — “not all, of course, but some” — had taken the side of the bigots. “However,” she added quickly, “the folks I talked to today, I would not put them in the same category as those folks.” She said that many of the protesting parents sincerely wanted the books to remain in the schools and that they wished “to not do harm to members of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community.” Ms. Mink then articulated what is, I think, the county’s cleanest, strongest defense of the books: L.G.B.T.Q. people exist. “M.C.P.S. has the responsibility to include and reflect that reality in our curriculum the same way we have a responsibility to teach about evolution,” Ms. Mink said. “There are religions that don’t believe in evolution, and we don’t allow them to opt out of those portions of our science curriculum.” This is where I, too, feel cold toward the parents’ complaints. Texas educators have pushed to conceal the historical truths about slavery in children’s history texts, proposing to call the slave trade “involuntary relocation.” (In 2015 a Texas textbook was revealed to have referred to slaves as “workers.”) I’ve wondered how different these revisionists are from the Montgomery County parents demanding their primary school children be shielded from stories about gay couples and trans kids. Both, at heart, demand the schools filter out objective truths. After all, gay and trans kids, families and teachers don’t just exist; they exist within the halls of the schools. Why shouldn’t they appear in the books? The only available answer is that — for whatever religious reason or instinctive impulse — society has walled off questions of sex and sexuality and left them, largely, in the hands of parents. But there’s another way to think about the ineffaceable existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people: It underscores the futility of this entire debate over opting out. Because here’s the secret about opting out: It doesn’t really matter. As a kid in Connecticut during the tail end of the AIDS epidemic, I was opted out of AIDS education. My parents were observant Catholics who taught their children about sex but also told us to wait until we were married. My mother phoned the school and announced that she didn’t want her daughter to participate in AIDS prevention classes. The school agreed, and I was herded elsewhere while everyone else, presumably, learned about condoms. My mother did not have a good case, given the severity of the public health crisis. But the school accommodated her, and it didn’t matter. I already knew about condoms. I already had the knowledge my mother was trying to stave off. I knew because the world existed around me, unfiltered by adults. I had countless sources of information, almost all of which I (being a teenager) considered more reliable than my parents or teachers. The internet wasn’t even a part of our lives yet, but I had friends, I dated boys, and I spent time at the homes of kids whose parents were far more libertine than mine. I watched TV, I saw billboards, I read books that were packed with sex, I heard conversations, and I thumbed with interest through the Playboys one friend kept stuffed under his bed. My mother had a preference. The school accommodated her. In the words Mel Robbins has launched into our self-help zeitgeist, the school let her. Here in Montgomery County, everyone went to war, and nobody has moved on. Either the school district or the religious parents will prevail at the Supreme Court. And one group of families — either the pious or the L.G.B.T.Q. — will feel the judgment as a disenfranchisement and a sign that people like them are not wanted at school. And that’s a shame because, agree with them or not, they all stood up for their values. Whatever the justices think, it’s already too late for our community to win.

The sentence, dull but clear, was buried 158 pages into Wisconsin’s budget. “For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year,” the sentence read when it was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, “add $325” to the amount school districts could generate through property taxes for each student. But by the time Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his veto pen were finished, it said something else entirely: “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325.” It was clever. Creative. Perhaps even a bit subversive, extending the increase four centuries longer than lawmakers intended. But was it legal? On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said yes. In a 4-to-3 ruling in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Evers’s use of his partial veto authority, the court’s liberal majority said the governor had acted legally. The three conservative justices on the court dissented. “We uphold the 2023 partial vetoes, and in doing so we are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” Justice Jill J. Karofsky wrote in the majority opinion. “However, our Constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”Wisconsin has a long, bipartisan history of inventive vetoing that has led to intermittent outrage from whichever party does not hold the governorship. Though many states give their governor the right to veto parts of bills, Wisconsin governors have long wielded a distinctly expansive veto authority in which they can cross out words or numbers, sometimes changing the meaning of a bill. That authority has been reined in over the decades, but not eliminated. After Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, deployed the so-called “Vanna White veto” to nix individual letters in the 1980s, voters amended the Wisconsin Constitution to say a governor could not make new words in an appropriation bill by simply erasing letters. But that amendment did not explicitly ban crossing out individual numbers, an opening (or, some say, a loophole) that Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, used to change “December 31, 2018” to “December 3018” in a law involving school districts and energy efficiency projects.That episode, which became known in Madison as the “Thousand-Year Veto,” was also challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In that case, the court found that the lawsuit had not been brought in a timely manner and allowed the veto to stand. In the case decided on Friday, the court’s conservative justices described a “fantastical state of affairs” in which a governor “takes the collection of letters, numbers and punctuation marks he receives from the Legislature, crosses out whatever he pleases, and — presto! — out comes a new law never considered or passed by the Legislature at all.” “One might scoff at the silliness of it all, but this is no laughing matter,” Justice Brian Hagedorn added in that dissent. “The decision today cannot be justified under any reasonable reading of the Wisconsin Constitution.” Mr. Evers’s four-century veto was challenged by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a business group, on behalf of two Wisconsin residents who argued that the governor had exceeded his constitutional authority when he nixed numbers to extend the school funding limit. In oral arguments last year, Scott Rosenow, a lawyer for those residents, told the justices that “this 400-year veto approaches the absurd, and this partial veto power is corrosive to democracy.” But lawyers for Mr. Evers insisted that the veto, even if unusual, was well within his authority under Wisconsin law. Numbers, they argued, were not letters, and thus could be deleted individually under the Wisconsin Constitution. “I can understand the initial skepticism that one may have upon seeing the veto that was exercised here,” Colin Roth, an assistant attorney general, told the justices when he presented Mr. Evers’s case. But he argued that “the governor here very reasonably relied on the case law.” “Perhaps if this law had been drafted differently,” Mr. Roth said, “the governor could not have achieved this result, so the Legislature has tools when drafting.” In a statement on Friday, Mr. Evers said the court’s “decision is great news for Wisconsin’s kids and our public schools, who deserve sustainable, dependable and spendable state support and investment.” “I exercised the same line-item veto authority that has been used by decades’ worth of Wisconsin governors,” the governor said. Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, criticized the ruling as “a tortured reading of our Constitution that will hurt Wisconsin taxpayers for hundreds of years to come.” “Is any Wisconsin citizen surprised that the liberals on the Wisconsin Supreme Court are now a rubber stamp for liberal ally Tony Evers?” Mr. Vos said in a statement. The case put the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the middle of another battle over partisanship and power in the closely divided state. The court, which flipped from conservative to liberal control in 2023, has heard pivotal cases in recent years over election results, redistricting and abortion. Earlier this month, a liberal judge, Susan Crawford, was elected to the court over a conservative jurist supported by President Trump and Elon Musk. Her victory preserved a narrow liberal majority on the court just months after Mr. Trump carried Wisconsin. The election was the most expensive judicial race in American history.

A 20-year-old student at Florida State University in Tallahassee shot and killed two people on Thursday and injured six, the police said. The gunman was identified as the son of a deputy in the local sheriff’s department, and was taken into custody after being shot by the police, law enforcement officials said. Officials said that the gunman, identified as Phoenix Ikner, was armed with a former service revolver of his mother, a deputy who has worked at the Leon County Sheriff’s Office for 18 years and was allowed to keep the gun for personal use. Mr. Ikner had been involved in training programs at the Sheriff’s Office and was a member of its youth advisory committee, Sheriff Walter McNeil told reporters. “He has been steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family,” the sheriff said. “It’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Chief Lawrence E. Revell of the Tallahassee Police Department said Mr. Ikner also had a shotgun with him, but Chief Revell said he was not sure that gun was used in the attack. The two people killed in the shooting were not students, law enforcement officials said. They had not been identified as of Thursday evening. Mr. Ikner was shot and wounded by responding officers after he did not obey their commands, officials said. Chief Revell said he believed that Mr. Ikner acted alone. “There is no further threat to our community,” he said. He added that Mr. Ikner had “invoked his right not to speak to us.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The shooting occurred shortly before noon, sending students and staff to seek cover on a warm and sunny day in Tallahassee when many were outside. The university soon issued a shelter-in-place alert, and officers raced to the campus and began escorting people out of academic buildings.Television footage captured the chaotic aftermath of the shooting: shoes scattered on the lawns of the campus; chairs in one classroom piled in a makeshift barricade against a door; students leaving the campus with their hands raised in the air. Students and a professor in an environmental science class sprang into action when an alarm went off, said Will Rhoades, one of the 135 students in the class. The students barricaded the classroom doors with tables and used sweatshirts to tie the door handles together, he said. Victor Castillo, who was in the student union, near the shooting, said he had been momentarily confused by the sound of gunfire but quickly took cover. “All of a sudden, I hear boom, boom, boom,” said Mr. Castillo, 20, a sophomore studying business management. “My ears started ringing. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t think it would happen here.”Mr. Castillo said he sheltered in place until the police evacuated the building. Ilana Badiner, 21, said she huddled in the student union basement with about 30 people during the shooting. In 2018, she was a student at a school adjacent to the high school in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were shot dead. “It was the same situation today, where people were just on the phones calling everybody and there were people crying,” she said, adding, “It’s terrible that this keeps happening.” President Trump said that he had been briefed on the shooting. “It’s a shame, a horrible thing, it’s horrible that things like this take place,” he said. Some gun-control advocates said the attack illustrated the need for more firearms restrictions, though with a Republican governor and legislature supporting gun rights, any such moves were unlikely in Florida. “Today, students at FSU sheltered in place during a shooting on their campus,” read a post on X by Giffords, the organization founded by the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was seriously wounded in a 2011 assassination attempt. “Seven years ago, some of these same students survived the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS. Our children are being traumatized over and over again. It doesn’t have to be this way.” University officials canceled all classes, events and business operations for the rest of the week. All athletic events were canceled through the weekend. The last day of classes is next Friday. Florida State was also the scene of a deadly shooting in 2014, when an alumnus of the university shot three people at a campus library before being killed by the police. A student who was left paralyzed reached a $1 million settlement with the university, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.

The New York Times is looking to hear from high school and college students in the United States who are considering changing their college plans as a result of the Trump administration’s policies. We want to hear how the recent shifts in higher education may have affected your plans to pursue an undergraduate or graduate degree at a school in the United States, and if you may be considering a university in another country instead. We want to hear both from students who plan to start programs in the fall and those who will be applying in the next admissions cycle. We will reach out if we’re interested in learning more for our story. Any information you provide will not be used without your permission, and we will not share your contact information outside the newsroom.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense’s education agency on Tuesday, arguing that the removal of books in response to Trump administration orders infringed on the First Amendment rights of students. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, centers on a school system for children of military families run by the Defense Department. The school system has faced pushback and student walkouts in response to a number of changes under the Trump administration, including the pausing of student affinity clubs focused on race and gender and the removal of Pride decorations at some schools. The schools, which routinely produce some of the top reading and math scores in the country, educate more than 67,000 students in preschool through high school on military bases in the United States and abroad. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Because Defense Department schools are run by the federal government, they have been uniquely subject to President Trump’s executive orders on education, such as an order “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” that criticized teaching about concepts like white privilege and rejected policies supporting transgender students’ preferred pronouns and bathrooms, for example. Mr. Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, also called for an end to cultural awareness months in the military, such as those for Black history or women’s history, a change that applied to its schools. “We think of the changes in these schools as the canary in the proverbial coal mine for the changes this administration would like to see throughout the country,” said Emerson Sykes, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.Though military members give up certain rights while on the job, he said, their children are civilians. “These are American kids, like any other American kids, and these are public schools,” Mr. Sykes said. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six families whose children attend schools in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan.It asserts that Defense Department schools removed books touching on race and gender identity not because of their educational value, but “simply because a new presidential administration finds certain viewpoints on those topics to be politically incorrect.” According to the lawsuit, removed books included the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee; “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini; “Both Sides Now,” a book about a transgender teen participating in a national debate competition; and “A Queer History of the United States,” about L.G.B.T.Q. figures throughout American history. A spokesman for Department of Defense schools said he could not comment on the lawsuit. Officials have previously said that they were making changes in compliance with the orders from the Trump administration and Mr. Hegseth, who was also named in the lawsuit. The Pentagon declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. The lawsuit also argues that students were denied the opportunity to learn about Black history and the contributions of Black Americans after the cancellation of Black History Month. And it contends that students are being denied access to certain topics that they need to learn to navigate the world and do well on future tests. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT According to the lawsuit, Department of Defense schools have removed certain chapters from health education textbooks, including those on sexually transmitted diseases, sexual harassment and the human reproductive system. And students enrolled in Advanced Placement psychology are no longer being taught certain material on gender and sex, which may appear on the Advanced Placement exam, the lawsuit said.

Matthew Meyers and Colin Williams became best friends over a semantic argument about the word “homicide” in a freshman history class. Three years later, the wiry-thin, floppy-haired seniors at Sprague High School in Salem, Ore., remained inseparable when they competed as a pair in Constitution Team, a debate-style contest where teams answer questions about constitutional law. In January, they won second place at the state-level competition, earning themselves a spot at the national finals. Occasionally, an undersize team of nine to 15 students reaches nationals, where the average team size is 21 students. But a team of two had never made it, much less won, according to the Center for Civic Education, which organizes the event, formally known as “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution National Finals.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It would be like a baseball team winning a game with four players. And yet, for four magical days, Mr. Williams and Mr. Meyers basked in the glow of that improbable achievement. On Friday night, after three days of dazzling the judges with their answers to penetrating questions about the Articles of Confederation and obscure Supreme Court decisions, the young men sat at the award ceremony with tempered expectations. They hoped for seventh place. When their names still had not been called as the fifth-, fourth- and third-place finishers were announced, they wondered if there had been a mistake. When the two were handed their championship medals, the hall erupted. “They are gods tonight,” a rival team’s coach said. But on Monday, the head coach of the third-place team was reviewing the score sheet from the event when he saw that something didn’t add up.The Road to Nationals On a brisk February evening, in a windowless classroom, Mr. Williams and Mr. Meyers, both 18, began preparing for nationals. Unable to out-memorize the much-larger teams they would face, the two delved deeper into the philosophies underpinning the Constitution. “We didn’t really have a huge evidence base,” Mr. Williams said. “But what we did have was a really strong conceptual understanding.” For instance, they argued over a Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oregon city’s ban on sleeping and camping in public spaces that critics said effectively punished people for being homeless. “If a burglar broke into someone’s house because they were hungry,” Mr. Williams asked, “does punishing them for that violate the Eighth Amendment?” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT No, the hungry burglar could be punished, Mr. Meyers said. He paused and then added, “Get ready to hear a really, really, really stupid response.” According to a theory from the philosopher John Locke, he said, it would be less wrong if the thief stole from a grocery store than someone’s house.On their way up the competition ladder, their insight about the nation’s founding documents made an impression. “My mind was kind of blown,” said Darin Sands, a lawyer and national champion coach who judged the pair at the Oregon state competition. “It was just clear that they had not only studied the material but engaged with it in a very deep level.” A Convincing Performance On April 9, the first day of the national competition at the National Conference Center in Lansdowne, Va., the teenagers were being grilled by judges when something unusual happened. “I just forgot my train of thought,” Mr. Meyers said. “I just knew we were talking about something related to judicial supremacy.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT He asked the judge to repeat the question — a rare slip. To be among the 10 teams to advance to the final round on Friday, Mr. Williams and Mr. Meyers needed a flawless Thursday. They delivered a convincing performance, and word quickly spread. “I can’t wait, we’ve heard so much about you,” a judge said before questioning the two. That the duo made it to the state-level competition was a huge accomplishment. Going to nationals? Unheard-of. And when they clinched a spot in the Top 10? Well, that made them legends. People even lined up to take their photograph.The final round on Friday in the National Union Building in Washington, D.C., brought the toughest, most combative line of questioning. Early in the day, one judge found a gap in their knowledge. “They were asked about a specific court case that the boys did not know,” said Jacqueline Pope Brothers, their coach and a social studies teacher at their high school. “That kind of shook them.” But the stumble only sharpened their focus. Sean McClelland, a judge who said he was “philosophically opposed to giving out perfect scores,” asked them whether judges find or make laws. The boys delivered an esoteric and deeply informed answer that earned them Mr. McClelland’s only perfect score. At the award ceremony that night, they watched as fourth place went to Denver East High School in Colorado and third place went to Lincoln High School in Portland, Ore. Fishers High School in Indiana took second. With championship medals draped around their necks, the boys savored a standing ovation from hundreds of admiring students and coaches. Finding an Error On Monday, Patrick Magee-Jenks, a social studies teacher and the head coach of the Lincoln High School team, was reviewing the scorecards when he noticed that Lincoln had been awarded 15 fewer points than it should have received. On Wednesday, the organizers announced that, after “a thorough audit,” mistakes had been discovered on Lincoln and Denver East’s scorecards. In issuing an apology to the students and teachers, the Center for Civic Education said that Sprague and Lincoln — the two Oregon schools — would share first place. The Colorado and Indiana schools would share second place. Mr. Magee-Jenks said in phone interview on Wednesday that he “felt really bad” for the Center for Civic Education but added that he was pleased with the fix. “Overall, the big winner is the state of Oregon,” he said. As Mr. Williams drove to school on Wednesday morning, he seemed unbothered by the scoring change, and perhaps even a little upbeat about it. “It’s really cool to be able to be co-champions with Lincoln,” he said. Long before nationals, Mr. Meyers had joked with rivals from the competing Oregon school about a fairy tale finish that seemed impossible: What if two Oregon schools tied for first?

As President Trump flexes his power over universities, law firms, media companies and more, some of the country’s most powerful institutions have faced a choice, to cut a deal with the White House or fight back. In recent weeks, an increasing number are choosing to do battle with the president. Harvard University refused this week to cave to what its president called “assertions of power, unmoored from the law.” More than 500 law firms have thrown their support behind some of their embattled peers as Mr. Trump seeks retribution against lawyers who represented or helped his political foes. The country’s oldest news wire fought Mr. Trump in court after it was banned from the Oval Office. The new face of resistance is not like the one of Mr. Trump’s first term, when officials who opposed his agenda from inside the government tried to establish guardrails to prevent some of the president’s more radical ideas. Now the fight is out in the open. The guardrails are gone, in large part because Mr. Trump demands loyalty from everyone around him. With almost no opposing voices inside the White House, the president’s campaign against the institutions of government, society and law have been more intense and have played out faster than they did during his first term. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And while Mr. Trump has succeeded in wrenching enormous concessions through threats, lawsuits and coercion — and he has shown no signs of stopping — there are hints of a shift in strategy among some of his targets. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said a buzz began building among the faculty as Mr. Trump turned his focus to the university in recent weeks. “It was probably the main topic of conversation,” Mr. Tribe said. “When will the university finally stand up? When will the endowment, which is supposed to be there partly for extreme emergencies, be part of what Harvard looks to in order to basically reinforce its spine?” The initial response by some organizations to Mr. Trump’s political assault was to try to appease the president. Several elite law firms decided to settle with the White House in order to maintain their ability to do work with the government. Columbia University relented in the face of the president’s threat to cancel $400 million in federal support. The “flood the zone” strategy inside the White House has left many Democrats and others opposed to Mr. Trump’s policies resigned to the fact that they control few centers of power with which to fight back.Harvard’s decision to reject the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum could embolden other universities across the country to push back. The erstwhile leader of the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, called on other institutions to “follow suit” after Harvard. There were already some rumblings of resistance in recent weeks, with the mass “Hands Off” protests in cities across the country. Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, have also drawn significant crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. “Those rallies have built momentum by just showing that there are lots of people who don’t like what he is doing,” said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor who has urged the university’s administration to resist the demands. “Even though Trump is kind of picking people and individuals and institutions off one by one, for everyone to just see, ‘Oh, we all think what’s happening is wrong,’ is important.” Leah Greenberg, a founder of the progressive group Indivisible, which helped organize the Hands Off rallies, said momentum had been building for months as outrage grew, from activists in the streets to the halls of elite institutions. Harvard’s stance is “crucial and important,” Ms. Greenberg said. “I say that as someone who doesn’t spend a ton of time praising Harvard,” she added. “There was a sense that American society is folding to Trump’s will. Saying, ‘Oh, hell no, we aren’t,’ it’s helpful for a lot of people.” At Harvard, hundreds, including Mr. Bowie, rallied to call on the school to stand up to the Trump administration’s demands, while hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to condemn Mr. Trump’s attempt to remake higher education. At Yale, nearly 1,000 faculty members signed a letter calling on their leaders to resist Mr. Trump’s demands. And the president of M.I.T. spoke out against the Trump administration’s treatment of its international students. The Trump administration has argued that its goal in going after elite universities is to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses. But its demands are much broader, including audits of staff members to prevent Harvard from considering racial diversity in hiring decisions and audits of the student body’s ideological views. The administration also demanded that the university reduce the “power” on campus held by certain students, faculty members and administrators. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that Harvard “has not taken the president or the administration’s demands seriously.” “Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already?” she asked. “And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists.” Refusing the demands came with a cost. Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract. And then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, even though federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations. Much of federal funding for universities is for student aid and research. Harvard revamped its website to emphasize the importance of its research, highlighting its work aiding stroke survivors, treating sickle cell disease and combating chronic absenteeism in schools. Mr. Tribe said he had heard colleagues worry about how the funding cuts could affect their research, but not as much as they were concerned about the larger principle at stake. “I know people at the medical school and elsewhere who are cheering what Harvard did,” Mr. Tribe said, “although they are at the same time grieving for the likelihood that their clinics will end up being closed and that the lifesaving research they’re doing will either be discontinued or put on indefinite hold.”

President Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status on Tuesday after the school rebuffed his administration’s demands for a series of policy changes, a dramatic escalation in the feud between the president and the nation’s richest and oldest university. The threat came a day after the Trump administration halted more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard because the university rejected changes to its hiring and admissions practices and curriculum. Mr. Trump decided to ratchet up his pressure campaign after watching news coverage of Harvard’s resistance on Monday night, according to a person with knowledge of the president’s deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “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?’” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” White House officials said Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service would make its decision about Harvard’s tax-exempt status independently, but the president has made clear in private that he has no intention of backing down from the fight with the university. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Losing its tax-exempt status could over time cost Harvard billions of dollars. It’s the latest turn in a battle between Mr. Trump and academia more broadly, in which the Trump administration threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from various colleges and universities, ostensibly as a way to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. Trump officials have suggested that schools like Harvard have been hotbeds of antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech. Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations, and it is unclear whether the agency would actually move forward with an investigation. A spokeswoman for the I.R.S. declined to comment.“Selective persecution of your political adversaries through the tax system is the stuff of dictatorship,” said Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard. “This is unconscionable and wrong but a continuation of trends we have seen in President Trump’s approach both to universities and to tax enforcement.” Officials at Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. Organizations have to apply to become tax-exempt. The I.R.S. will conduct audits and in some cases revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status if, for example, the I.R.S. finds that the group is engaging in too much political or commercial activity. Entities can appeal such a decision in court or enter into a settlement to try to preserve their status, former I.R.S. officials said. John Koskinen, a former I.R.S. commissioner, said that it was unlikely that the I.R.S. could successfully revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, given its array of research and teaching functions. Still, having to litigate the question in court could be its own form of intimidation for Harvard. Editors’ Picks His Life Savings Were Mailed to Him by Paper Check. Now, It’s Gone. Timothée Chalamet Is Living a Knicks Fan’s Dream It’s Time to Put Away Your Winter Clothes. Here’s How to Store Them Safely. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The chances of getting the I.R.S. to actually revoke the 501(c)(3) status of a major university is almost nonexistent,” Mr. Koskinen said, referring to a tax-exempt category of organizations. “The problem is you’re causing people to spend a lot of time and money responding and defending their actions.” Because of its exempt status, Harvard for the most part does not have to pay taxes, though Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax bill instituted a tax on large university endowments that Republicans now want to substantially increase. Moreover, donations to the research university are tax deductible. That helps draw gigantic donations from ultrawealthy donors who want to choose how to spend their earnings rather than give their money to the federal government. Some prominent Republican donors, like the billionaires John Paulson and Ken Griffin, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Harvard. Tax-exempt organizations have long been a political minefield for the I.R.S. During the Obama administration, Republican lawmakers accused the agency of unfairly targeting conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status, though a watchdog later concluded that the agency had improperly scrutinized both conservative and liberal organizations. “Economists have extensively studied and documented that tax deductible charitable contributions have a massive effect on support for universities,” Mr. Summers said. “Removal of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) status, which won’t happen because we are a nation of laws, would, if it did happen, devastate progress in medical and scientific research, maintenance of American and Western values, opportunity for the next generation of Americans and an important magnet for the United States in the world.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to turn the I.R.S. into a political tool, upending longstanding protections of sensitive taxpayer information by pushing the I.R.S. to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement deport undocumented immigrants. Administration officials have also dramatically cut the I.R.S. work force and moved to install Billy Long, a former Republican congressman with little background in tax, beyond promoting a fraud-ridden tax credit, to lead the historically apolitical agency. Nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats and liberal causes are bracing for the I.R.S. to scrutinize their tax-exempt status under the Trump administration. Last week, Trump officials sent Harvard a letter demanding changes at the university and routine progress reports on how they were being put in place, in order to continue to “maintain” the financial relationship with the government. Harvard rejected the demand. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said in a statement to the university on Monday. The Trump administration responded by instituting a funding freeze of more than $2 billion, though details of the funds were unclear. Harvard receives some $9 billion in federal funding, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis. Harvard is uniquely positioned to withstand the funding loss, with an endowment of more than $50 billion. By contrast, Columbia University, which has a far smaller endowment, settled with the Trump administration when it was pressed to make changes to its policies and programs. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, deferred questions about Harvard’s tax-exempt status to the I.R.S. “All the president is asking: Don’t break federal law, and then you can have your federal funding,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “I think the president is also begging a good question. More than $2 billion out the door to Harvard when they have a more than $50 billion endowment: Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already? And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists.”