US judge overturns Trump cuts to Harvard University

NEW YORK: A US judge has overturned President Donald Trump’s funding cuts to Harvard University, ruling that the move was more about politics than protecting students of the Ivy League institution.

Harvard had sued in April to restore more than $2 billion in frozen funds. The administration argued its move was legally justified due to Harvard’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, particularly during campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The cuts to Harvard’s funding stream forced it to freeze hiring and pause major research programmes, especially in public health and medical fields — delays that experts warned risked American lives.

“The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment,” Boston federal judge Allison Burroughs said in her ruling.

“All freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025 are vacated and set aside.”

Burroughs noted Harvard’s own admissions in court filings that there was an issue of anti-Semitism on campus — but said the administration’s cuts had little relevance to the problem.

‘Smokescreen’ for university ‘assault’

“It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by anti-Semitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue,” she wrote.

“That said, there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and anti-Semitism.”

The judge, appointed by Democratic former president Barack Obama, said the evidence suggested Trump “used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Cases brought by both Harvard and the American Association of University Professors against the Trump administration’s measures were combined.

Trump has sought to move the case to the Court of Federal Claims rather than leave it in the federal court in Boston, just miles from Harvard’s Cambridge campus.

The Ivy League institution has been a key target in Trump’s campaign against elite universities after it resisted his demands to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”

Trump and his allies accuse Harvard and other top universities of being unaccountable bastions of liberal, anti-conservative bias and anti-Semitism, particularly around protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The government has also gone after Harvard’s ability to host international students, a vital source of income, who made up 27 percent of total enrolment in the 2024-2025 academic year.