A federal judge delivered a sweeping victory for academic freedom Wednesday, ruling that the Trump administration's freeze of $2.2 billion in federal grant funds to Harvard University was illegal and unconstitutional.
The ruling vacates all freezing orders affecting Harvard and bars Trump administration officials from enforcing those orders going forward.
The administration froze Harvard's federal grants on April 14, just hours after the university rejected a list of ten demands. While only one demand related to antisemitism concerns, six others targeted ideological and pedagogical issues, including restrictions on who could lead, teach, and be admitted to the university, as well as what could be taught.
Judge Burroughs noted that the "swift termination" of funding occurred before the administration had learned anything substantive about antisemitism on campus or Harvard's response efforts, suggesting the antisemitism concerns were "at best arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual."
The funding freeze halted work on critical research projects spanning multiple fields, including studies on tuberculosis, NASA astronauts' radiation exposure, Lou Gehrig's disease, and a predictive model to help Veterans Administration emergency room physicians assess suicidal veterans. Burroughs ruled that none of these affected projects had any connection to antisemitism.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) celebrated the ruling as a landmark victory for higher education.
