Trump unlawfully cancelled $2.2bn in Harvard research grants, judge rules | Trump administration
On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the administration of Donald Trump illegally dismissed approximately 2.2 billion dollars in subsidies granted to Harvard University and can no longer reduce the funding of research at Ivy League school.
The decision of the American district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a great legal victory for Harvard when she seeks to conclude an agreement which could end the multi-pont conflict in the White House with the oldest and richest university in the country.
The school based in Cambridge, in Massachusetts, has become a central objective of the vast administration campaign to take advantage of federal funding to force change in American universities, which, according to Trump, are seized by anti -Semitic and “radical” ideologies.
Three other Ivy League schools have concluded agreements with the administration, including Columbia University, which, in July, agreed to pay more than $ 220 million to restore federal research money that had been nixed due to allegations that the university has enabled anti -Semitism to flow on the campus.
As with Columbia, the Trump administration has taken measures against Harvard linked to the pro-Palestinian protest movement which turned its campus and other universities after the attack on October 7, 2023 against Israel and the War of Israel against Gaza.
Trump at a meeting of the cabinet on August 26 demanded that Harvard pay “nothing less than $ 500 million” as part of a regulation. “They were very bad,” he told the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.”
Among the first actions taken by the administration against Harvard, there was the cancellation of hundreds of subsidies granted to researchers on the grounds that the school did not do enough to meet the harassment of Jewish students on its campus.
The Trump administration has since sought to prevent international students from frequenting school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; And opened the door to cut more funds by finding it the federal law on civil rights.
Harvard said he had taken measures to ensure that his campus is welcoming for Jewish and Israeli students, of which he recognizes “vicious and reprehensible” treatment after the start of the War of Israel in Gaza.
But Harvard president Alan Garber said that the administration’s requests went far beyond the fight against anti-Semitism and illegally sought to regulate the “intellectual conditions” on his campus by controlling who he hires and who teaches.
These requests, which came to a letter of April 11 of an administrative working group, included calls for private university to restructure its governance, modify its hiring and admission practices to ensure an ideological balance of views and put an end to certain academic programs.
After Harvard rejected these requests, he said that the administration had started to fight against it in violation of the protection of the freedom of expression of the first amendment to the American Constitution by suddenly reducing the funding that the school said it is essential to support scientific and medical research.
Burroughs, appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, in a separate case, has already prohibited the administration from ending its ability to welcome international students, who include approximately a quarter of the Harvard student body.
