A federal judge grilled a Trump administration lawyer on Monday during a crucial hearing on a lawsuit brought by Harvard University over the government’s decision to cancel billions of dollars in federal funds for the school.
The hearing was likely to be a milestone in a lawsuit that hinges in part on what the government’s role in higher education should be.
Harvard and the government are each asking Judge Allison D. Burroughs for an outright victory — a summary judgment in their favor that would decide the lawsuit, at least in Judge Burroughs’s court, without a trial. The judge did not rule from the bench at the hearing.
A central question in the case is whether the Trump administration ignored rules and procedures when it canceled billions of dollars in funds to Harvard. The school is also arguing that the Trump administration is trying to curb its First Amendment rights.
Judge Burroughs sided with the university in another significant case, when she ruled on several interim matters related to the government’s effort to block the school from enrolling international students. Monday’s hearing was the judge’s first substantive opportunity to signal her thinking on Harvard’s signature lawsuit against the federal government.
The fifth-floor courtroom was filled to capacity with lawyers, journalists and spectators. Robert K. Hur, a lawyer for Harvard who was the special counsel in an investigation of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents, was relegated to the second row of the gallery.
The government sent just one lawyer, Michael Velchik, to represent it before Judge Burroughs.
“Lonely over there?” the judge asked.
”The executive branch speaks with one voice,” Mr. Velchik replied lightly.
The proceeding began with the judge hearing one of Harvard’s lawyers present the university’s case.
The lawyer Steven P. Lehotsky, argued that the Trump administration had violated some of the country’s most essential legal norms in its attack on the school. Mr. Lehotsky said that the government’s moves were a “blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment, and it’s the constitutional third rail, or it should be, for the government to insist it can engage in viewpoint discrimination.”
He added that the government’s case appeared “cooked up” to provide a legal rationale for the administration’s decisions to penalize Harvard.
Many of Judge Burroughs’s questions for Mr. Lehotsky focused on the legal standard she should use to weigh Harvard’s arguments.
“What am I looking at?” she asked at one point.
In the first hour of Monday’s hearing, Judge Burroughs gave no clear indication of her thinking on the case, resting her chin on her right hand, her fingers usually covering her mouth.
But after Mr. Velchik began his presentation for the government, Judge Burroughs unleashed a flood of questions.
“Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Harvard has not covered itself in glory on the topic of antisemitism,” she said, noting her own Jewish faith. What then, she asked, was the relationship between antisemitism and cutting off, for instance, cancer research funding?
“You’re not taking away grants from labs that have been antisemitic,” she said.
Mr. Velchik replied that the Trump administration had the authority to choose to spend grant money elsewhere. “The choice was that the government does not want to fund research at institutions that fail to address antisemitism to its satisfaction,” he said.
Harvard and the administration have been at odds for months, sparring frequently over whether the nation’s oldest and richest university had tolerated antisemitism on its campus or defied a Supreme Court ruling about race-conscious admissions. Their dispute escalated in April when the government inadvertently emailed Harvard a set of demands that university leaders believed threatened the school’s independence.
The demands included a review for “viewpoint diversity” and outside scrutiny of “those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.” Some other demands were dilution of the faculty’s influence over the university and establishment of “merit based” hiring and admissions policies.
The school filed its lawsuit in April, after it rejected the demands and the Trump administration responded swiftly by saying it would cancel billions of dollars in federal funds for research.
The White House and Harvard have worked in recent weeks to reach a deal that might end the dispute, and the outcome of the proceeding on Monday is expected to shape any future talks.
Even as they have negotiated, though, the administration has continued to pursue Harvard with other tactics, like a challenge to the university’s accreditation and accusations that the school violated Title VI, a part of federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin. This month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoenaed the university for troves of information, including payroll records, years of disciplinary files and any videos Harvard had of international students protesting on campus since 2020.
The university’s lawyers argued in a court filing last month that the government’s tactics amounted to “unconstitutional retaliation against Harvard for exercising its First Amendment rights to decide what to teach, to express certain views and to petition the courts to defend itself.”
Harvard also said that the Trump administration’s hurried approach to cutting funding defied federal law and regulations, and its actions were “arbitrary and capricious.” The school has argued that the government’s decision to cancel funding across academic disciplines had little connection to the problems it wanted to address, including antisemitism.
In the Justice Department’s submissions to Judge Burroughs, officials have argued that the administration had clear authority to halt research funding to Harvard because of what it perceived as rampant campus antisemitism.
“As much as Harvard would like to receive these tax dollars with no strings attached, they are not charitable gratuities,” the government wrote in one of its filings.
The administration’s lawyers argued that its contracts with Harvard include conditions that the university has not met. And they asserted that a different court, one dealing with financial disputes, should be hearing the case instead of Judge Burroughs’s.
It is not clear when Judge Burroughs will issue a ruling.
Harvard is pressing for a decision by early September, because of deadlines for grant-related paperwork to be filed.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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