The Trump administration last month announced it would review roughly $9 billion in federal funding allocated to Harvard University, widely seen as a symbolic cornerstone of higher education in the United States. The administration again cited a failure to handle antisemitism on campus as the reasoning. The Harvard Crimson first reported that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group responded to Trump's threat by suing the administration. In a suit filed on Friday in the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, demands an end to the funding review on the grounds that it is allegedly coercive and unlawfully undermines academic freedom. The AAUP urges the court to "permanently enjoin Defendants [the federal government] from using the power of the government to target and punish Harvard University for the viewpoints and speech of plaintiffs and their members."
Harvard is at risk of not receiving its roughly $9 billion in federal funding after the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force sent a list of demands. These demands include closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, implementing a mask ban and adopting merit-based admissions and hiring policies to end preferences based on race, color or national origin.
The Harvard faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the national arm of the academic organisation said in a lawsuit filed on April 11 in a Boston federal court that the administration was trying to unlawfully undermine academic freedom and free speech on the school’s campus. Several elite universities, including Harvard, have seen their federal funding threatened by President Donald Trump’s administration over pro-Palestinian campus protests as well as other issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and transgender policies. The US departments of Education and Health and Human Services along with the US General Services Administration on March 31 said that US$255.6 million in contracts between Harvard, its affiliates and the federal government were being reviewed, along with US$8.7 billion in multi-year grant commitments.
