On May 5, 2025, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon sent a letter to Harvard University notifying it that it would no longer receive federal funding. The purported letter subsequently began circulating on social media, along with annotations and the following text:
“The university responded by correcting the letter with spelling and punctuation marks… and then shared it on social media.” However, this claim is false.
The university did not correct the letter; rather, the viral image is a joke by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student that later went viral. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a corrected version of McMahon’s letter on Harvard’s official channels.
This misinformation had over 275,000 likes on X as of May 14, 2025.
Why This is Misinformation
Chequeado, co-founder of Factchequeado, conducted a search for the alleged letter with corrections from the university and found it on an X account of a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Daniel Luo, who claimed – in another post – that he had made the corrections.
“I posted this at 12:16 am, a little groggy after having friends over and before going to sleep,” he wrote on May 6, 2025. Luo also said in another post that he had no connection with Harvard University.
Finally, Luo noted in a retweet of the viral letter that “the saddest part about this post going off-base is that I filled it with local jokes for economists that will now go unnoticed.”
The Donald Trump administration and Harvard University are engaged in a legal dispute after the university challenged the president’s announced cuts in federal court for refusing to comply with his demands, including demands for government oversight of its admissions, hiring practices, and academic advising.
Harvard responded to the U.S. government’s letter with a statement on its website denouncing the Trump administration’s “doubling down on its demands, imposing unprecedented and undue control” over the university, “with devastating consequences for higher education.”
“The letter presents new threats to unlawfully withhold funding for vital research and innovation in retaliation against Harvard for filing its lawsuit on April 21,” it states.
(Source: Factchequeado)