WASHINGTON: A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that US President Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2 billion in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the prestigious Ivy League school.
The decision by US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the nation’s oldest and richest university.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school became a central focus of the administration’s broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and “radical left” ideologies.
The administration cancelled hundreds of grants awarded to Harvard researchers on the grounds the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.
Harvard sued, arguing the Trump administration was retaliating against it in violation of its free-speech rights after it refused to meet officials’ demands that it overhaul its governance, hiring and academic programs to align with their ideological agenda.
Court rebuke
Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, agreed, saying while Harvard had tolerated hateful behavior for too long, the Trump administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
She said the administration’s pressure campaign resulted in it terminating Harvard’s grants without complying with the law and retaliating against the school in violation of its free speech rights under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
Burroughs said it was the job of courts to safeguard academic freedom and “ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.”
She barred the administration from terminating or freezing any additional federal funding to Harvard and blocked it from continuing to withhold payment on existing grants or refusing to award new funding to the school in the future.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston in a statement vowed to appeal the ruling by an “activist Obama-appointed judge,” saying Harvard “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future.”
Harvard President Alan Garber in a message to the campus community said the ruling “validates our arguments in defense of the University’s academic freedom, critical scientific research, and the core principles of American higher education.”
Garber did not mention the status of settlement talks with the administration, which Trump during a cabinet meeting last week said he wanted to see result in Harvard paying “nothing less than $500 million” as it had “been very bad.”
Garber said that even as the school acknowledged the key principles Burroughs’ ruling affirmed, Harvard was going to be “mindful of the changing landscape in which we seek to fulfill our mission.”
Three other Ivy League schools have made deals with the administration, including Columbia University which in July agreed to pay $220 million to restore federal research money that had been denied because of allegations the university allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.
As with Columbia, the Trump administration took actions against Harvard related to the pro-Palestinian protest movement that roiled its campus and other universities in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza.
Harvard has said it has taken steps to ensure its campus is welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students, who it acknowledges experienced “vicious and reprehensible” treatment following the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The administration’s decision to cancel grants was one of many actions it has taken against Harvard.
It has also sought to bar international students from attending the school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.
Academic Protest
Burroughs in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting Harvard’s ability to host international students, who comprise about a quarter of the school’s student body.
Harvard litigated the grant funding case alongside the school’s faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which opposes the idea of the institution cutting a deal with Trump.
“We hope this decision makes clear to Harvard’s administration that bargaining the Harvard community’s rights in a compromise with the government is unacceptable,” the group’s lawyers, Joseph Sellers and Corey Stoughton, said in a statement.
