16 states back Trump in court battle against Harvard over funding freeze for antisemitism response

Bird argues there's precedent for Trump's actions, pointing to another popular Republican president who, in the 1980s, challenged a South Carolina college over its ban on interracial relationships.

The Trump-Harvard case, Bird said, "is not the first time the federal government has [altered] funding because a university wasn't following anti-discrimination laws."

"That's exactly what's happening here with Harvard; they're not following anti-discrimination laws, and they're not stopping antisemitism on campus or protecting Jewish students and Israeli students, and so, because of that, there's a big parallel."

Bird noted that Harvard has the nation's largest endowment at around $50 billion, in addition to billions more in government grants that are conditional.

"One of those conditions for that type of funding is that they're going to follow anti-discrimination-wise," she said, adding that Iowa is relevant and now involved in the case because Iowans' taxes fund those federal grants, and that if Harvard is allowed to let antisemitism run rampant, other colleges farther west may be able to do so to.

"President Trump has shown that he is leading and he is making sure that our college campuses that are funded with taxpayer dollars will not engage in discrimination against Jewish students or against people from Israel. And so I think he has taken a strong step here. And I think the law is on his side."

Like the Harvard case, Bob Jones - an Evangelical college in Greenville, South Carolina - saw its tax-exempt status stripped, which similarly affected its bottom line.

The original IRS policy change banning discrimination went into effect under former President Richard Nixon, but it wasn't until 1983 that the government - then run by former President Ronald Reagan - won a similar lawsuit.

The Supreme Court ruled there that the public interest in preventing discrimination trumped any related invocation of religious freedom.

Following the Bob Jones case, then-college president Bob Jones III went on national television in 2000 to declare the university was wrong in its prior race-based policies and officially lifted the ban on interracial dating.