By Nate Raymond, Reuters
Part of the Harvard University campus in Boston. Photo: AFP/Maddie Meyer
A federal judge on Wednesday (US time) ruled US President Donald Trump's administration unlawfully terminated about US$2.2 billion (NZ$3.7b) 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 Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and "radical left" ideologies.
Three other Ivy League schools struck 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 October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and Israel's war in Gaza.
Trump during a Cabinet meeting on 26 August demanded Harvard pay "nothing less than $500 million" as part of a settlement. "They've been very bad," he told Education Secretary Linda McMahon. "Don't negotiate."
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.
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 antisemitism 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 11 April 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.
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.
-Reuters
