President Donald Trump's administration has battered the nation's oldest and wealthiest university with sanctions for months as it presses a series of demands on the Ivy League school, which it decries as a hotbed of liberalism and antisemitism.
Harvard has resisted, and the lawsuit over the cuts to its research grants represents the primary challenge to the administration in a standoff that is being widely watched across higher education and beyond.
The case is before U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, who who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
At Monday's hearing Harvard asked her to reverse a series of funding freezes. Such a ruling, if it stands, would revive Harvard’s sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.
A lawyer for the government, Michael Velchik, said the government has authority to cancel research grants when an institution is out of compliance with the president's directives. He said episodes at Harvard violated Trump's order combating antisemitism.
Burroughs pushed back, questioning how the government could make “ad-hoc” decisions to cancel grants and do so across Harvard without offering evidence that any of the research is antisemitic.
Velchik said the case comes down to the government’s choosing how best to spend billions of dollars in research funding.
“Harvard claims the government is anti-Harvard. I reject that,” Velchik said. “The government is pro-Jewish students at Harvard. The government is pro-Jewish faculty at Harvard.”
Harvard’s lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university after it rejected a series of demands in an April 11 letter from a federal antisemitism task force. A second lawsuit over the cuts filed by the American Association of University Professors and its Harvard faculty chapter has been consolidated with the university’s.
The April letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. For example, the letter told Harvard to audit the viewpoints of students and faculty and admit more students or hire new professors if the campus was found to lack diverse points of view.
