A federal judge has ruled that the federal research funding freeze imposed on Harvard University is unconstitutional.
The Washington Post reports that U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs has decided that the cancellation of billions of dollars in research grants and other actions by the Trump administration amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion.”
The judge's ruling vacated the government’s freezing of grants to Harvard and barred the government from freezing or terminating grants in the future under similar reasoning.
Burroughs also granted Harvard’s request for summary judgment on civil rights law. She ruled that the administration had not followed the requirements of Title VI before terminating research grants. She also found the administration had violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), which sets out rules for how the government makes decisions.
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.”
The government's actions "reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes,” she said.
The Trump administration has frozen federal research funding at many higher education institutions and opened dozens of investigations.
Harvard has argued that the government’s efforts to coerce and control the university and suppress speech violate the First Amendment. The university’s lawyers called the actions arbitrary and capricious, and 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 has characterized the case as an argument over money and said federal courts didn’t have jurisdiction over what it described as a contract dispute. It has alleged that antisemitism has been rampant at Harvard since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war and asserted that the university’s efforts to combat it have been insufficient.
