Harvard has been extraordinarily badly-behaved for decades. The state is applying what pressure it can to force the Harvard administrators to reconsider such behavior. I fail to see what’s so revolting about such a strategy.
Off the top of my head: Harvard has been ranked last in FIRE’s freedom of speech rankings; has allowed an authoritarian intellectual monoculture to calcify over the past 2 decades; has allowed its administration to balloon in cost, headcount, and power relative to its students and faculty; has repeatedly allowed (and even supported) violent and disruptive protests on its campus; has elected an unqualified plagiarist to its office of president due to her group affiliations rather than her merit and qualifications; has allowed that same (thankfully now ex-)president to clandestinely attempt to destroy the career of a faculty member whose research findings she disliked; has discriminated against students of a particular group in terms of admissions; etc.
I don’t particularly want to be funding an institution which behaves like that, so I’m glad this administration is pressuring it to do better in order to enjoy the public’s largesse.
