Harvard University won a crucial legal victory in its clash with the Trump administration on Wednesday, when a federal judge said that the government had broken the law by freezing billions of dollars in research funds in the name of stamping out antisemitism.
The ruling may not be the final word on the matter, but the decision by Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston was an interim rebuff of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake elite higher education by force.
Harvard’s case centered on its research funding, and the university contended that the administration had compromised its First Amendment and due process rights when it sought to strip it away. The judge’s decision could give Harvard new leverage in its settlement talks with the White House.
Although the ruling was a milestone for Harvard, the only university to sue over the administration’s assault on its research funding, President Trump had vowed to appeal any decision that went against him. His administration has spent months seeking to pressure Harvard in ways beyond research money, and while Judge Burrough’s ruling may not put an end to that campaign, her opinion was a bracing rebuke.
“We must fight against antisemitism, but we equally need to protect our rights, including our right to free speech, and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other,” Judge Burroughs wrote in an 84-page ruling. “Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be.”
She added, “Now it is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.”
As a part of the decision, Judge Burroughs said the Trump administration could not issue new blockades on Harvard’s federal research funding “in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights, or on any purported grounds of discrimination without compliance with the terms” of civil rights law.
Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House, however, condemned the ruling.
“To any fair-minded observer, it is clear that Harvard University failed to protect their students from harassment and allowed discrimination to plague their campus for years,” said Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman. “Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future.”
She added that the government would “appeal this egregious decision, and we are confident we will ultimately prevail in our efforts to hold Harvard accountable.”
Judge Burroughs’s decision came after both the government and the university asked her to issue what is known as summary judgment — a ruling on the case’s claims without a trial. She largely ruled for Harvard, relying on voluminous filings, a select batch of evidence and oral arguments in her Boston courtroom on July 21 to reach a decision.
Harvard brought the case in April, after the Trump administration insisted that the nation’s oldest university had became a wellspring of bigotry. On April 11, it sent the school a letter trying to condition Harvard’s access to federal research money on its acquiescence to a range of demands.
Those terms included audits, the establishment of “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies, the shutdown of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and an examination of “programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.”
Harvard refused on April 14. The administration took only hours to announce it would begin cutting off funding that Harvard, like other prominent universities, had long relied on to pay for research. The university sued a week later, accusing the government of ignoring its First Amendment protections and hastily barreling past the thicket of laws and regulations that govern how federal funding can be revoked.
“All told, the trade-off put to Harvard was clear: Allow the government to micromanage your viewpoints and your academic institution or jeopardize your ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries and innovative solutions,” lawyers for Harvard wrote in a court filing in June.
They added that the administration’s “content- and viewpoint-based attempt to coerce and control Harvard is blatantly unconstitutional.”
The Trump administration had insisted that it had the authority to cancel grants and contracts because, in its view, Harvard had not done enough to counter what it argued was rampant campus antisemitism. Federal research funds, the Justice Department asserted in one of its submissions to Judge Burroughs, were “not charitable gratuities.”
“Rather, the federal government grants funds to universities through contracts that include explicit conditions,” the Justice Department wrote, adding: “If they fail to meet these conditions, the grants are subject to cancellation.”
But the administration also hoped that Judge Burroughs would not issue much of a ruling at all. Its lawyers argued that an 1887 law meant that the suit, which the Justice Department depicted as a contractual matter, needed to be heard by a specialized court in Washington.
More recently, it urged the judge to consider the implications of an August decision by the Supreme Court in a different case. In that case, which also concerned federal grants, the court ruled that challenges to individual terminations should be brought in the Court of Federal Claims. But it was a muddled ruling that left the door open for policy challenges in federal district courts.
Judge Burroughs acknowledged the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday and said she was “endeavoring” to follow it, but she largely asserted her own court’s jurisdiction.
“The First Amendment claims here are about speech and whether the federal government is improperly infringing on the free speech rights of an academic institution and its employees,” she wrote. “The resolution of these claims might result in money changing hands, but what is fundamentally at issue is a bedrock constitutional principle rather than the interpretation of contract terms.”
And Judge Burroughs, as she had in her courtroom in July, resisted the government’s efforts to tie research money to accusations of civil rights violations.
Judge Burroughs wrote on Wednesday that it was “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.”
But Harvard leaders have privately fretted over the potential fallout of a protracted fight with the federal government, even if they won in Judge Burroughs’s court, and chose months ago to start parallel settlement talks.
That did not keep the government from intensifying its pressure campaign against the school, including by issuing cumbersome subpoenas and opening new investigations, like one focused on Harvard’s patents.
The New York Times reported in July that the university was open to spending $500 million to resolve the matter, but that Harvard was seeking an array of provisions to protect its independence.
Although the university and the administration have continued to move toward a potential agreement, they have not reached a settlement. Mr. Trump, who has taken a special interest in the financial terms of pacts his administration has reached with universities, said last week that he wanted “nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.”
“They’ve been very bad,” Mr. Trump told the education secretary, Linda McMahon, during a televised cabinet meeting. “Don’t negotiate.”
But Harvard officials had anticipated that a favorable decision from Judge Burroughs could help the university’s approach to the negotiations in two essential ways.
Such a ruling, they have reasoned, gives them a new way to pressure a government that might not wish to fight the university all the way to the Supreme Court.
And school officials, ever mindful of the university’s internal politics, have hoped that a legal victory would help them to portray any deal with the White House as part of a surrender by the administration.
Judge Burroughs’s decision arrived at a moment of high tension for Harvard. Federal regulations had the university preparing to submit “closeout” paperwork for some terminated grants on Wednesday.
Without a ruling by Wednesday, the university had warned the judge, it feared that “the government will take the position that no restoration of funds is possible.”
Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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