Harvard, Trump administration to face off in court over cancelled funding

BOSTON – Harvard University will urge a federal judge on July 21 to order US President Donald Trump's administration to restore about US$2.5 billion (S$3.2 billion) in cancelled federal grants and cease efforts to cut off research funding to the prestigious Ivy League school.

The court hearing before US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marks a crucial moment in

the White House's escalating conflict with Harvard

, which has been in the administration's crosshairs after it rejected

a list of demands to make changes to its governance, hiring and admissions practices in April

.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university says hundreds of research projects including ones concerning cancer treatments, infectious diseases and Parkinson's disease will be in jeopardy unless the judge declares the grant cancellations unlawful.

The country's oldest and richest university has become a central focus of the administration's broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which Mr Trump says are gripped by anti-Semitic and "radical left" ideologies.

"The Trump administration's proposition is simple and commonsense: Don’t allow anti-Semitism and DEI to run your campus, don't break the law, and protect the civil liberties of all students," said White House spokesperson Harrison Fields in a statement.

Among the earliest actions the administration took against Harvard was the cancellation of hundreds of grants awarded to researchers on the grounds that the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.

The Trump administration has since

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.

As part of Mr Trump's spending and tax Bill, the Republican-led Congress increased the federal excise tax on Harvard’s income from its US$53 billion endowment to 8 per cent from 1.4 per cent. Income from the endowment covers 40 per cent of Harvard's operating budget.

Harvard president Alan Garber said last week that the various federal actions since Mr Trump returned to office in January could strip the school of nearly US$1 billion annually, forcing it to lay off staff and freeze hiring.

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 against Hamas in Gaza in October 2023.

But Mr Garber has said the administration's demands have gone far beyond addressing anti-Semitism and unlawfully seek to regulate the "intellectual conditions" on its campus by controlling who it hires and who it teaches.

Those demands, which came in an April 11 letter from an administration task force, included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints and end certain academic programmes.

After Harvard rejected those demands, it said the administration began retaliating against it in violation of the free speech protections of the US Constitution's First Amendment by abruptly cutting funding the school says is vital to supporting scientific and medical research.

Ms Burroughs, an appointee of former Democratic president Barack Obama, in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting the university’s ability to host international students.

Mr Trump has expressed optimism that Harvard will eventually settle with his administration. Mr Fields on July 18 said a good deal was more than possible and that the administration is “confident that Harvard will eventually come around and support the President’s vision”.

In court, the administration has argued that Ms Burroughs lacks jurisdiction to hear the challenge and that the grant contracts made clear they could be cancelled if the funded projects do not carry out federal government policy objectives. REUTERS