The federal District Court in Massachusetts (Allison D. Burroughs) has ruled that the U.S government’s attempts to force Harvard University to give the government control over many of its academic procedures in order to save its federal funding are illegal. The opinion governs two separate suits, one by the University and one by the American Association of University Professors, the United Auto Workers, which represents Harvard’s graduate teachers and nontenure-track faculty, and others (called the Organizational Plaintiffs in the opinion).
The opinion spells out at length the government’s demands on the University, the University’s reactions, and the immediate freeze of $2.2 billion in multi-year grants following the University’s refusal to accept the demands. The government justified its action in large part by saying that Harvard had failed to curb antisemitism.
Harvard argued that the government’s actions “violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights in at least two ways; 1) by retaliating against Harvard based on the exercise of its First Amendment rights, and 2) by imposing content- and viewpoint- based burdens on those rights through the imposition of funding conditions that are unrelated to any legitimate government interest in combating antisemitic harassment or otherwise.”
The Court agreed that “the government-initiated onslaught against Harvard was much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism.” It also found that the government had tried to impose unconstitutional conditions on its government funding.
The Organizational Plaintiffs argued separately that the government violated the First Amendment by unconstitutional coercion to punish or suppress disfavored speech. The Court granted the Organizational Plaintiffs a summary judgment on the claim.
The government had based its actions in part on the argument that Harvard had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in a program receiving federal funding. “Congress has, however, passed a law that explicitly provides for when and how an agency can terminate federal funding to address this type of discrimination,” the Court said. Since the government did not follow those procedures, the Court granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs and denied summary judgment to the government on the issue.
The Court also found that the government’s actions were arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedures Act for a variety of reasons.
The Court summarized its opinion as follows: “A 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. Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes.” (President and Fellows of Harvard College v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, D. MA, No. 25-cv-11048 and No.25-cv-10910, 9/3/25.)
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