The last time that US District Judge Allison Burroughs rose to Harvard’s side in a case on the alleged discrimination of the University, it ended with the Supreme Court declaring the admissions concerned with the illegal race in schools across the country. Harvard won his battle in front of the lower courtyard on the way of loss of war broader. It turns out that the same federal law in question in the affirmative case, title VI, is a basis of the Harvard challenge to freezing and at the end of the Trump administration of almost 2.2 billion dollars in university subsidies last spring. On Wednesday, judge Burroughs won a victory at Harvard that confirmed the general principles involved for universities and the rule of law. But victory will not end Harvard’s pain, and it remains to be seen if higher education can triumph at the end.
Since January, the Trump administration has threatened federal funding for hundreds of universities, in a campaign that apparently concerns the application of civil rights laws, in particular with regard to anti -Semitism on the campus, the race in admission decisions, transgender athletes and transgender athletes. Columbia, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania have concluded agreements with the administration to restore their funding, and other universities have compared to what the administration seems to want to avoid becoming targets themselves. But Harvard – with its disproportionate brand, its unmatched endowment of fifty -three billions of dollars, and the main share of federal prices for the subsidy of its researchers – is the big game in the pursuit of the Trump of Submission Administration. And, perhaps for this reason, it is the only university to continue the administration. But Harvard’s fight has come to represent much more than saving its own skin: the university is trying to assert the value of higher education in our democratic society. This value is ironically and necessarily linked to the independence of government control, even if its realization depends on the reception of huge sums of money from the government.
The legal affair began in March, when the administration announced that it was examining Federal funding from Harvard because of its alleged failure to combat anti-Semitism on the campus, in particular following the October 7 attack on Israel, when Israel began its war against Gaza, and pro-Palestine and Anti-Israeli activists launched a new protest movement. The title VI of the Civil Rights Act, promulgated in 1964, prohibited discrimination in the field of “race, color or national origin” in institutions which receive federal funding; Over the past two decades, the executive branch has interpreted these words to protect itself from anti -Semitism. In April, the administration presented to Harvard conditions that the University was to meet in order to continue to receive federal funds, such as the establishment of a privilege “on all Harvard assets” and is modifying the management of “problematic” services, or place them in “reception”.
While Harvard negotiated with the administration to preserve its financing, the administration sent an unexpected letter, on April 11, demanding additional reforms, the majority of which did not concern anti -Semitism – including an “audit” for the “diversity of points of view, so that each department, domain or teaching unit must be individually from a various point of view”; Hire and admit a “critical mass” of new teachers and students to reach the “diversity of points of view”; and restructure university governance. Harvard publicly postponed requests; University president Alan Garber said that no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, that they can admit and hire, and what areas of study and investigation they can pursue.” In a few hours, the administration announced a freeze on the existing federal subsidies of Harvard. He quickly followed arrest work orders, subsistence of grants and an opinion that Harvard would no longer receive federal funds.
The decision to arrest the flow of money led Harvard to bring federal legal action to Boston, alleging constitutional and statutory violations. This trial was combined with a similar submitted by the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and led to the clear reprimand of the district court to the administration. Judge Burroughs noted that the government had repaired Harvard unconstitutionally for showing the rights to the first amendment. In other words, Harvard had refused government attempts to “control the views at Harvard” and decided to plead, and the government had illegally punished Harvard by taking federal funding. The court was not lower than the assertion of the administration according to which the closure of funding was not reprisals but, rather, motivated by “opposition to anti -Semitism” – the requirements that Harvard had rejected linked not to anti -Semitism but rather to the reform of his ideology, his hiring, his admissions and his teaching. In addition, there was no evidence that, during the two weeks between the announcement of an anti -Semitism and freezing review, the government had in fact examined anti -Semitism at Harvard; He had only learned that “Harvard would not capulate the government’s requirements for verification, censorship or saying of the points of view of staff and students”.
The government’s inability to investigate anti -Semitism has also led the court to conclude that it has violated title VI – which explicitly does not allow the government to simply cut federal funding each time it claims a violation of title VI. The status requires rather that the government first follows specific procedures, in particular by determining that compliance cannot be carried out voluntarily, by holding an audience to the record and by sending a written report to the Congress. The administration had done nothing of these things. (He argued that the procedural requirements of title VI do not apply because a separate federal regulation allows the cessation of awards which no longer fulfill “the program’s objectives or the priorities of the agency”)))
Harvard also won on the grounds that the government violated the law on administrative procedure, which obliges federal agencies to act in a manner which is not “arbitrary and capricious”. The court observed that the government had not provided “a reasoned explanation on the way in which the agency determined that the financing will make this objective progress” to counter anti -Semitism. The judge Burroughs seemed to consider as a fact that, if the government were not arbitrary and capricious, he would have engaged in a cost-dispatches analysis, weighing “the value of the research funded by a particular subsidy in order to combat anti-Semitism at Harvard”. An interesting, controversial involvement of this reasoning is that, if the value of the research financed at Harvard is greater than the value of anti -Semitism attenuating at Harvard, it could be illegal for the government to choose to act on the latter.
In his decision, judge Burroughs was obviously convinced by Harvard’s story on the case and recited a large part. The court described Harvard’s efforts, since the beginning of 2024, to ensure that “his campus is safe and welcoming for Jewish and Israeli students” by, for example, students and teachers, promoting “ideological diversity and civil speech”, which limits protest and “expressly prophesying unauthorized camps, exhibitions and exhibitions”. The Court seemed to want to establish following the departure that Harvard acted in good faith to fight against anti -Semitism, and that it was the government’s gap for not having recognized this fact. The conclusion of the court was that the administration “used anti -Semitism as a smoke screen for a targeted and ideologically motivated attack on the first universities of this country”.
