A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must restore nearly $2 billion in frozen federal funding meant for Harvard University, saying it’s the duty of the judiciary to “safeguard academic freedom.”
US District Judge Allison Burroughs did not buy the Trump administration’s argument that its ongoing attacks on universities were motivated by a need to fight antisemitism on college campuses. In her ruling, she said that President Donald Trump and his appointees were using the idea as a “smokescreen” to hide a “targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
The Trump administration issued a freeze order in April, pausing billions in grants as part of a larger fight against notable colleges that were the site of protests against the ongoing war in Gaza. Burroughs ruled that the protection of free speech must be weighed against the “fight against antisemitism…and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other.” She added that the funding freeze made no distinction between the projects it halted and whether there was antisemitic activity occurring in those labs.
“The funding freezes could and likely will harm the very people Defendants professed to be protecting,” she wrote.
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The appointee of former President Barack Obama called on her fellow judges to hold the line on campus speech protections.
“It is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to 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,” she wrote.
A defiant statement from White House spokesperson Liz Huston made it clear that the Trump admin plans to continue their fight against the Ivy.
“Just as President Trump correctly predicted on the day of the hearing, this activist Obama-appointed judge was always going to rule in Harvard’s favor, regardless of the facts,” she said. “Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future.”
