Judge rules Trump administration cannot withhold funding from Harvard

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration violated the Constitution by freezing federal research funding at Harvard University, dealing the White House a setback in its efforts to force change at the country’s oldest university and higher education nationwide.

U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs said freezing and canceling more than $2 billion in research grants and other federal actions violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights and amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion.”

Her ruling, which is likely to be appealed, vacated the government’s funding freeze and barred it from using similar reasoning to block grants to Harvard in the future.

The government’s actions had terminated nearly a thousand federal grants at Harvard, threatening cancer research and innovations in multiple fields such as quantum computing and efforts to lessen the consequences of battlefield injuries. The Trump administration had said its actions were necessary to compel the university to do more to combat antisemitism.

Burroughs also granted Harvard’s request for summary judgment on civil rights law, ruling that the administration had not followed the requirements of Title VI, which bars discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, before terminating the research grants. She also found that the administration had violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which sets out rules for how the government makes decisions.

Citing federal law, Burroughs wrote that her review of the administrative record “makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants 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 the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI.”

“Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes.”

The White House and Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“It is a decisive win for Harvard, and the faculty we represent,” said Corey Stoughton, an attorney for the plaintiffs who separately sued the administration to restore the frozen funding, a case heard concurrently with Harvard’s.

Her clients called the ruling a victory for academic freedom and research in the public interest. “The court affirmed that the President cannot retaliate against universities, faculty, or researchers for their ideas,” and the American Association of University Professors and UAW members now have protections from ongoing attacks, they said in a written statement.

David P. Corey, a neurobiology professor at Harvard Medical School who had about $1 million in federal grants terminated, said he welcomed the news but is bracing for an appeal and prolonged legal fight.

“There’s a moment of relief and a second later, we say this isn’t the end of it,” said Corey, whose research aims to figure out how the cells in the inner ear convert a sound wave into an electrical signal that the brain can understand.

But conservatives who have been buoyed by the White House’s aggressive stand against universities were disappointed.

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a 2024 Harvard graduate who sued the university over accusations of antisemitism on campus, called the ruling infuriating. He noted that the judge affirmed that there were problems with antisemitism on campus and questioned why the government should be forced to fund a university that tolerated discrimination.

He said he immediately texted people he knows at the White House to urge them to fight the ruling.

Burroughs wrote that the Trump administration was right to use all legal means to combat antisemitism, and that “Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.” But the record does not reflect that fighting antisemitism was the Trump administration’s true goal, she wrote, and even if it were, it should not be done “on the back of the First Amendment.”

She said that according to the administrative record, before freezing nearly $2.2 billion in federal grants, “the agencies considered little, if any, data regarding the antisemitism problem at Harvard, disregarded the substantial policy and other changes Harvard had taken and was continuing to take to address the issue, and failed to weigh the importance of any particular grant or to evaluate whether a particular grant recipient had engaged in antisemitic behavior before cutting off critical research.”

The case has pitted the country’s oldest university against the Trump administration, which has sought to force sweeping changes in higher education. President Donald Trump and his allies have argued that they must take strong action against colleges they say are dangerously antisemitic and liberal, and they have identified Harvard as a primary target.

Harvard fought back. It has brought two lawsuits that are being closely watched as an indicator of whether higher education can resist the administration’s many demands related to alleged antisemitism, diversity, admissions, hiring and governance.

The Trump administration has frozen federal research funding at multiple schools and opened dozens of investigations. Three Ivy League schools – Columbia and Brown universities and the University of Pennsylvania – reached agreements with the Trump administration, while Harvard alone pursued a path of confrontation in court.

Marco Simons, a lawyer who graduated from Harvard in 1997, helped organize an amicus brief in the case on behalf of more than 12,000 of the university’s alumni.

“Harvard was taking a risk in fighting back here,” Simons said.

Simons said he and other graduates feel “immensely proud” of Harvard’s stance. Other universities should follow Harvard’s lead, he added. “We’re hopeful that many backbones will be stiffened by this decision.”

Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s former president, has been critical of the university’s approach to issues of antisemitism but hailed Wednesday’s ruling.

“Harvard has much work to do, but none of that justifies the Trump administration’s extralegal approach,” Summers said. “Whatever you think about issues that have been divisive on our campus, this is a day to be proud.”

Summers added that the road ahead remains long for Harvard and other universities: Not only is the ruling likely to be appealed, but “new authoritarian acts are taking place every day.”

Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, said the ruling showed that “our federal government cannot use civil rights laws as a pretext for violating the First Amendment.”

“We said from the beginning it was going to take a big institution like Harvard or Columbia to stand up for its rights, and if they failed to do so – if they capitulated to unlawful demands from the administration – there was little hope for smaller institutions down the line,” Coward said. FIRE filed an amicus brief supporting Harvard.

The decision was also welcomed by Peter McDonough, general counsel for the American Council on Education, an association that represents colleges.

“We are pleased to see a federal court affirm what we always knew to be true: the Trump Administration has ignored the law in pursuing politically motivated attacks on Harvard and other institutions,” he said in a statement. “We urge the administration to abandon these harmful attacks and instead work to restore the partnership that has made colleges and universities the engine of American innovation for decades.”

In July, the federal judge in Boston heard arguments from a lawyer for the government and attorneys for Harvard and its chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which had filed the separate lawsuit.

Harvard argued that the government’s efforts to coerce and control the university and suppress speech violated the First Amendment. The university’s lawyers called the actions arbitrary and capricious, and they said federal officials had not followed the procedures of the civil rights law they invoked as a reason for the funding cuts and other demands.

The administration cast the case as an argument over money and said the federal court didn’t have jurisdiction over what it characterized as a contract dispute. It alleged that antisemitism has been rampant at Harvard since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war and that the university’s efforts to combat it have been insufficient.

Both sides asked the judge to issue a ruling without a trial.

By the day of the hearing, Trump had indicated on social media that he expected Burroughs to rule in Harvard’s favor and vowed to appeal.

It has been a bruising fight, with the administration wielding the full power of the federal government in blow after blow designed to force the Ivy League school to submit to changes and governmental oversight to squash antisemitism as well as diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus.

In April, a federal antisemitism task force sent the university a letter demanding changes to the school’s governance, admissions, hiring and student discipline.

Harvard refused to comply.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” the university’s president, Alan Garber, wrote in a letter to the campus community.

Within hours, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars of research funding to Harvard. Harvard responded by suing.

The cuts were only one front: The Trump administration has unleashed a volley of attacks including multiple investigations, efforts to block international students and scholars from Harvard, and threats to revoke its nonprofit status.