Students walk up the steps of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library on the campus of Harvard University.
Elissa Nadworny/NPR
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Elissa Nadworny/NPR
A federal judge in Boston handed Harvard University a legal victory on Wednesday. It’s the latest in a high-profile legal fight over whether the Trump administration acted illegally when it froze more than $2.2 billion in Harvard research funding in response to allegations of campus antisemitism.
In her ruling, Judge Allison D. Burroughs said the administration’s funding freeze was issued without considering any of the steps Harvard had already taken to address the issue.
Burroughs said she found it “difficult to conclude anything other than that [the Trump administration] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of [federal law].”
White House spokesperson Liz Huston said after the ruling: “We will immediately move to appeal this egregious decision, and we are confident we will ultimately prevail in our efforts to hold Harvard accountable.”
The more than $2 billion in federal funding that the administration had frozen supported more than 900 research projects at Harvard and its affiliates. That includes research into the treatment and/or prevention of Alzheimer’s, various cancers, heart disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease and autism. Burroughs also highlighted a program through the Department of Veterans Affairs “to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized.”
The case has been the subject of intense focus as Harvard has stood largely alone in pushing back against the Trump administration’s efforts to use funding cuts as leverage to win vast ideological and financial concessions from other elite institutions, including Columbia and Brown University.
In a July hearing, a lawyer for the Trump administration said Harvard’s funding had been frozen because the school had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin, by failing to address antisemitism on campus.
But Burroughs ruled that it was the administration that had run afoul of Title VI by quickly freezing funding without first following a process clearly laid out in law.
Harvard’s attorneys had argued that the cuts imposed by the Trump Administration threatened vital research in medicine, science and technology.
Burroughs wrote in her decision that, “research that has been frozen could save lives, money, or the environment, to name a few. And the research was frozen without any sort of investigation into whether particular labs were engaging in antisemitic behavior, were employing Jews, were run by Jewish scientists, or were investigating issues or diseases particularly pertinent to Jews (such as, for example, Tay-Sachs disease), meaning that the funding freezes could and likely will harm the very people Defendants professed to be protecting.”
Burroughs underlined that antisemitism is intolerable, and criticized Harvard, saying it “has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue.” But, the judge concluded, “there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism.”
President Trump has previously been outspoken in his criticism of Burroughs, writing on Truth Social earlier this year that she is a “Trump-hating Judge,” and “a TOTAL DISASTER.”
Following Wednesday’s ruling, White House spokesperson Liz Huston again criticized Burroughs and said “It is clear that Harvard University failed to protect their students from harassment and allowed discrimination to plague their campus for years. Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future.”
“This ruling is huge. It is a big, decisive victory for academic freedom,” said Harvard history professor Kirsten Weld, who is also president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which was a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Even though the White House plans to appeal, Weld says she hopes this ruling sends the message “that you cannot break universities in this fashion and that it is worth standing up and fighting back.”
