Allison Burroughs, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must restore more than $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard University.
“Although combating antisemitism is indisputably an important and worthy objective, nothing else in the administrative record supports defendants’ contention that they were primarily or even substantially motivated by that goal,” the judge wrote, “or that cutting funding to Harvard bore any relationship to achieving that aim.”
She added that “it is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could, and should, have done a better job of dealing with the issue.” But, she wrote, “there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism.”
The judge added that the Trump administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
Alan Garber, president of Harvard, stated that the ruling “validates our arguments in defense of the university’s academic freedom, critical scientific research and the core principles of American higher education.”
Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the U.S. Department of Education, told JNS that the ruling was “an unsurprising turn of events.”
“The same Obama-appointed judge that ruled in favor of Harvard’s illegal race-based admissions practices, which was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, just ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to hold Harvard accountable for rampant discrimination on campus,” Biedermann said.
“Cleaning up our nation’s universities will be a long road but worth it,” she told JNS.
