Harvard University has secured an initial victory in its closely watched lawsuit against the Trump administration, with a federal judge finding that the government’s actions to freeze more than $2 billion in research grants violated the institution’s First Amendment rights as well as procedural requirements under civil-rights law.
While the administration is almost certain to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, legal experts said the district court’s Wednesday decision provides a strong foundation for the university’s case going forward.
Here are four key excerpts signaling how one court reacted to the Trump administration’s strategy for overhauling Harvard’s policies — a playbook that’s been used nationwide.
[The Trump administration] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.
Throughout her ruling, Judge Allison D. Burroughs criticized the administration’s initial explanation for freezing Harvard’s funding: Namely, that the university had violated Title VI, the civil-rights law, by doing too little to respond to antisemitism on campus during the protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
In announcing the grant terminations to the university, federal officials provided no specific evidence of antisemitism, how the university’s response actually violated Title VI, or how the grants that were cut were at all related to antisemitism, Burroughs wrote.
The idea that fighting antisemitism is [the Trump administration’s] true aim is belied by the fact that the majority of the demands they are making of Harvard to restore its research funding are directed, on their face, at Harvard’s governance, staffing and hiring practices, and admissions policies, which have … everything to do with [the administration’s] power and political views.
Instead of battling antisemitism, Burroughs concluded, the government’s actions to cancel research grants amounted to retaliation against the university for actions that are protected under the First Amendment: filing a lawsuit and rejecting the White House’s demands to provide broad oversight of the institution.
Congress has, however, passed a law that explicitly provides for when and how an agency can terminate federal funding to address this type of discrimination — and that law is Title VI, which dictates that ‘no such action shall be taken until the department or agency’ has gone through the appropriate procedures.
Burroughs ruled that even if the government was seeking to penalize the university for violating federal antidiscrimination law, it failed to take the proper procedural steps before making funding cuts, including an opportunity for a voluntary resolution agreement, an administrative hearing where the university could appeal the government’s findings, and a notice to Congress.
The judge also dismissed the government’s last-minute explanation that it was canceling grants not because of a Title VI violation, but because its new funding priorities excluded institutions that allowed antisemitism. That’s not allowed, Burroughs wrote, because it would give the government the power to use a regulation to avoid the requirements of the exact law that addresses antisemitism.
Consistent with these obligations, this Court (and likely all district courts) endeavors to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings, ‘no matter how misguided [it] may think [them] to be.’
The juiciest part of Burroughs’s ruling was contained not in the main body of her decision but in a lengthy footnote exploring the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket ruling that said challenges to research-grant cancellations had to be made in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which handles contract disputes.
Burroughs concluded that Harvard’s case was different because the grants were canceled as a result of the government’s actions that violated the university’s constitutional rights. But she wrote that the “Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket rulings regarding grant terminations have not been models of clarity.”
Burroughs also responded directly to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s warning to the district courts not to defy Supreme Court orders on this issue. “It is unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for ‘defy[ing]’ the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape.”
