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A group of US professors has sued Donald Trump’s administration over its threat to withhold $8.7bn in federal funding from Harvard University.
The lawsuit, filed by the American Association of University Presidents and its Harvard affiliate, is one part of a growing effort by faculty, students and alumni to push back against attacks by the Trump administration on US higher education institutions.
“Eliminating discrimination and protecting all students is important. But Trump is defying the Civil Rights Act, terrifying students, and illegally holding hostage grants for hospitals and scientific research so he can accomplish his real goal of punishing academics for our politics,” Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor supporting the lawsuit, said in a statement.
Seven elite US universities have so far had their federal grants frozen by the government in large-scale targeted attacks to pressure them into making reforms to their governance and student discipline sparked by what the US says are failures to tackle antisemitism on campus or to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Leaders at the institutions have failed to mount legal challenges to the orders and few criticised them publicly, which insiders say is out of fear they will be subject to additional measures that could threaten their financial stability.
Ahead of grant freezes on Princeton this month, its president, Christopher Eisgruber, compared attacks on Columbia University, which has had more than $400mn in grants cut, to the McCarthy era of the 1950s. “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights,” he wrote.
Columbia’s cuts have come even though it has carried out a number of the administration’s demands. Reports suggest that it now faces the prospect of a consent decree to impose court-supervised federal oversight of its operations.
A lawyer advising higher education leaders said the university’s apparent acquiescence had been “a prudent course of action”. He added: “Columbia decided there’s too much discretion in the federal government and even if they had the opportunity to be heard in judicial review, that would be long and expensive, with collateral damage.”
But the university’s employees, students and graduates are stepping up calls for action. “It’s happened so fast, everyone is shocked. But universities have to stand up. We should use our endowment to weather the storm,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist on Columbia’s faculty.
We Are Higher Ed, a network of educators, has tracked thousands of signatures across petitions calling on college leaderships to defend academic freedom and resist “the unethical, irresponsible and frequently illegal demands of the Trump administration”.
One petition signed by Harvard alumni warns: “Unless the presidents of US colleges and universities speak out and stand together for their students and faculty, the Trump administration will feel no limits in going after those institutions.”
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, which previously launched a legal action against the grant freezes at Columbia — which the university refused to join — said: “The presidents disappoint me. If a thousand signed a critical public letter, they would have protection. Our members are going to stand up and put pressure on our elected leaders.”
An indication of the Trump administration’s intentions was revealed before the president took office by Max Eden, then employed at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank and now in the White House, in a hit list sent to the incoming US education secretary Linda McMahon.
He called for “a never-ending compliance review to ensure that Harvard follows the law” banning positive discrimination. He also wrote: “To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University” by freezing research grant funding or preventing it receiving subsidised student loans.
His tactics have since been implemented: from withdrawing government grants and revoking visas of foreign students protesting on campuses, to deploying artificial intelligence and “control-F” text searches to identify diversity, equity and inclusion projects to shut down.
The administration has singled out Columbia and Harvard, while cutting funds at another four elite institutions — Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern — on a list of 60 to be investigated for a range of violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination, according to a document unveiled last month by the Department of Justice.
The University of Pennsylvania has separately had $175mn in funding frozen for allowing a transgender athlete to participate in a swimming championship, although this complied with national rules at the time.
In a sign of other possible measures to come, Eden also called for a 37 per cent tax on university endowment income, and — in line with parallel recommendations from the right-wing Project 2025 group — an overhaul of the country’s accreditation systems.
He also singled out other universities that could be targeted, including Stanford, University of Washington, University of Illinois Chicago and the University of California system.
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