The American Association of University Professors commended the victory of its Harvard University chapter in a lawsuit against the Trump administration during a press conference Thursday morning.
A federal judge ruled Wednesday the Trump administration’s freeze of $2.2 billion in federal grant funding to the university violated its First Amendment rights.
While the Trump administration claimed the freeze came in response to Harvard’s handling of antisemitism on campus, United States District Judge Allison Burroughs determined the act was based on the president’s “power and political views.”
“This ruling underlines, once again, how higher education workers and their unions and organizations are the central force in the front to both save higher education while thereby saving democracy,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said during the press conference. “It sends a message [that] we will not allow partisan politics to dictate what we research, what we teach or what we know.”
Burroughs determined in her 84-page decision that Harvard has been “plagued” by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to combat it, but there is “little connection” between antisemitism and the research affected by the grant terminations.
“Their invocation of ‘combatting antisemitism’ was a smokescreen, a way to enforce governmental orthodoxy and suppress dissent,” Wolfson said.
Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced the multi-billion-dollar freeze in April after Harvard President Alan Garber said in an April 14 letter the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights” by agreeing to a series of demands made by the Trump administration.
These demands included cooperating with immigration authorities, adopting merit-based admissions and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The AAUP and its Harvard chapter filed a lawsuit April 11 arguing the Trump administration failed to follow the specific procedure outlined in the Civil Rights Act to terminate funding and exceeded its authority by threatening to withhold funding unless the school complied with its proposed policy changes.
Harvard followed suit, and the cases were consolidated.
President of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty chapter Kirsten Weld said the Harvard faculty, teachers and researchers held Trump and the Harvard Corporation’s “feet to the fire.”
“By filing our litigation first, we helped pave the way for Harvard University’s subsequent decision to fight rather than fold,” Weld said. “And by rooting our lawsuit in the detailed and often painful testimonies of our members, we recentered the teaching and research mission of the university, rather than the fate and prospects of its endowment as the central value to be upheld going forward.”
Veena Dubal, general counsel for the AAUP and a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the freeze attacks elite universities and disrupts economic mobility.
“It meaningfully ends the American Dream for not just this generation of college students but generationally,” Dubal said. “This is an attempt to disempower Americans so that we are more susceptible to authoritarianism.”
Andrew Crespo, general counsel for the Harvard AAUP faculty chapter and a Harvard law professor, said the ruling provides broad “prospective relief” because it orders the Trump administration to immediately cease withholding funds and places a permanent injunction barring future attempts to use the “same unlawful tactics” again.
Neal Sweeney, a member of the higher education department of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, said it’s important for students and workers to be at the table to fight “draconian attacks” by the Trump administration to prevent universities from bending to federal threats, such as in the case of Columbia University. UAW is a labor union representing graduate and undergraduate student workers, postdoctoral research scholars, research staff and other non-tenure track faculty at universities across the country, including Harvard.
Wolfson said the Trump administration’s goal is to “ideologically control higher education” and remove its status as an independent force in society.
He urged the higher education community to “exhaust every means” to fight back against federal encroachment.
“This court ruling shows that we can win, but we cannot bow the way Columbia has,” Wolfson said.