Trump unlawfully cancelled Harvard’s research grants, US judge rules

BOSTON - A federal judge on Sept 3 ruled US President Donald Trump's administration unlawfully terminated about US$2.2 billion (S$2.83 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 Mr Trump says are gripped by anti-Semitic and “radical left” ideologies.

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.

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 cede control over who it hires and who it teaches.

Judge Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said the Republican President was right to combat anti-Semitism and that Harvard was “wrong to tolerate hateful behaviour as long as it did”.

But she said fighting anti-Semitism was not the administration’s true aim and that officials wanted to pressure Harvard to accede to its demands in violation of its free speech rights under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

She 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”.

The judge 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 called the judge an “activist Obama-appointed judge” and said Harvard “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future”.

“We will immediately move to appeal this egregious decision, and we are confident we will ultimately prevail in our efforts to hold Harvard accountable,” Ms Huston said.

The decision comes a week after Mr Trump during an Aug 26 Cabinet meeting demanded Harvard pay “nothing less than US$500 million” as part of a settlement.

“They’ve been very bad,” he told Education Secretary Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.”

Three other Ivy League schools stuck deals with the administration, including Columbia University, which in July agreed to pay US$220 million to restore federal research money that had been nixed 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 Oct 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and

Israel's war in Gaza.

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.

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.

But Harvard President Alan Garber has said the administration's demands went far beyond addressing anti-Semitism and unlawfully sought 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 programs.

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.

Judge Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting its ability to host international students, who comprise about a quarter of Harvard's student body.

Harvard litigated the grant funding case alongside the school’s faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which has voiced opposition to the idea of the institution cutting a deal with Mr 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. REUTERS