Only a few hours after the Trump administration announced another round of cuts to Harvard University — $450 million in grants on top of the $2.2 billion already frozen — the institution amended its lawsuit against them.
The lawsuit was originally filed on April 21. The institution argues in the amended lawsuit that its constitutional rights have been violated by the government’s threats to pull billions of dollars in funding if the school does not comply with demands for an overhaul.
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told the institution last week that the federal government would be barring Harvard University from acquiring new federal grants while the university continues to refuse to comply with the administration’s demands for change on its campus.
In the amended complaint, Harvard states that it began, on May 6, receiving “institution-wide termination notices for various agencies,” including from the National Institutes of Health, terminating all of Harvard’s grant funding based on “the University’s unwillingness to take corrective action or implement necessary reforms.”
At the same time, NIH said that “no corrective action is possible here.”
Harvard states that the Trump administration’s actions “threaten Harvard’s academic independence and place at risk critical lifesaving and pathbreaking research that occurs on its campus.”
“They are part of a broader effort by the Government to punish Harvard for protecting its constitutional rights,” it said.
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Eight federal agencies are involved in the termination of the $450 million in grants. The federal government pointed to “pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment” as continuing reasons for cutting federal funding.
“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it‘s not academic freedom; it‘s institutional disenfranchisement. There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support,” the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said.
The announcement comes after Harvard University President Alan Garber wrote in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon that they share the same “common ground,” but the university “will not surrender its core, legally-protected principles out of fear.”
Garber pushed back on the administration through a lawsuit in April.
“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,” the suit read.
On April 29, Harvard published two long-awaited reports from Harvard’s task forces on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.
Each detailed community feelings of hurt and alienation inflicted by peers and Harvard officials.
The Tuesday letter, from the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, pointed to the report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias published by Harvard, laying out the way Israel, Jewish and Israeli Harvard University students and faculty felt shunned and silenced, regardless of which side they supported.
The federal task force didn’t mention the other report, which was focused on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.
“Jewish students were subjected to pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation, with no meaningful response from Harvard’s leadership,” the federal task force said.
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The federal task force also pointed to the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, investigating the Harvard Law Review, based on reports of “race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the journal.”
