Harvard University sued the Trump administration Monday in an attempt to stop the government from freezing billions in federal funding to the elite institution.
The scathing lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, accused the White House of using the funding “as leverage to gain control of academic decision making at Harvard.”
Last week, the Trump administration announced that it would freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding and another $1 billion in grants, and demanded a wide array of concessions, claiming that the measures were necessary to fight antisemitism on campus.
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Trump himself also threatened to use the IRS to revoke the university’s tax exempt status.
The letter Harvard received—which included a series of demands regarding the school’s hiring policies, admissions, and curriculum—was apparently never meant to be sent in the first place, The New York Times reported last week.
The requests were so extreme that Harvard felt it had no choice but to publicly defy Trump.
“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," Garber said at the time.
Despite the apparent mistake, Trump and his White House team were so incensed by the defiance that they doubled down on the demands anyways, threatening the school’s federal funding if they refused to comply.
In its lawsuit Monday, Harvard accused the administration of violating its First Amendments rights—and claimed that officials did not follow federal administrative procedures and regulations when stripping the institution of its funding.
The complaint was filed against the National Institutes of Health, departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, and Defense, among others.
Harvard’s president Alan M. Garber said in a message to staff and students Monday that “as a Jew and as an American,” he understood the “valid concerns about rising antisemitism.”
He added that Harvard “will continue to fight hate with the urgency it demands.”
The institution was under review by Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which has condemned “the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges.”
The administration originally announced that it would be reviewing almost $9 billion in federal funding to Harvard in its effort to crackdown on antisemitism at higher institutions.
Trump has also called out the university on Truth Social, saying: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”
Two of Harvard’s attorneys said that the university would not accept the administration’s demands but “remains open to dialogue.”
Harvard has received support from other universities, as well as Harvard Law School graduate and former President Barack Obama.
