Harvard Sues Trump Admin
Battle heats up: Earlier this month, the Trump administration, which has declared war on elite universities and threatened to pull their funding, “sent Harvard a list of demands that included auditing professors for plagiarism, reporting to the federal government any international students accused of misconduct, and appointing an outside overseer to make sure that academic departments were ‘viewpoint diverse,'” per The New York Times. The administration has repeatedly voiced that elite schools’ failure to act to stamp out antisemitism on campus is part of the reason they’re being targeted.
Then, last week, Harvard said it would not comply with what it says are unlawful demands by the administration, which led to the Trump administration pulling its funding.
“The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants, initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status,” writes Harvard President Alan Garber. Now, Harvard is filing suit, in federal court in Massachusetts, saying the government’s punitive actions show it’s trying to wield “leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.”
“I read the Harvard lawsuit,” writes journalist Kelsey Piper on X, “and it looks like they have a slam-dunk case just in that Congress gave a bunch of specific instructions about how Title VI termination of grants was required to be conducted, which the administration just totally ignored.” Here’s Nico Perrino, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, on the lawsuit:
Harvard’s lawsuit is straightforward because the government’s actions were straightforward.
– – The government may not “interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance” (Moody v. NetChoice).
The government demanded Harvard achieve… pic.twitter.com/azvSXjGW1R
— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) April 22, 2025
Look, I’m torn here. Attacks on academic freedom are very, very wrong. But perhaps I’m most frustrated because pulling federal support for universities—especially those with $53 billion dollar endowments—is something I would love to see a Republican administration do, in the proper way and from a place of principle; it’s insane that taxpayers in Burlington, Iowa, or Killeen, Texas, are forced to subsidize Harvard.
This, unfortunately, is not the way. And it’s not likely to succeed.
Democrats growing a backbone (but what’s the point?): On Monday, U.S. Reps. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.), Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D–Fla.), Yassamin Ansari (D–Ariz.), and Maxine E. Dexter (D–Ore.) met with U.S. ambassador to El Salvador William H. Duncan, in San Salvador. The representatives, all relatively unknown on the national stage, urged Duncan to secure the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man married to a U.S. citizen, who had been living in Maryland for the last 13 years, who had received protection from deportation back to his native country due to a credible threat of persecution ther
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