Court Rules Overwhelmingly in Favor of the AAUP in Finding the Grant Terminations at Harvard Violated the First Amendment
In a case filed by the AAUP, the AAUP Harvard chapter, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s termination of grant funding violated the First Amendment and federal statutes primarily because it was retaliation for—and an attempt to suppress—the protected speech of faculty and Harvard University and replace it with a governmental orthodoxy. The case arose out of the Trump administration’s termination of federal grants and its attempt to exercise ideological control over the university and its curriculum, faculty, and students. The AAUP fought back, suing the Trump administration for suppressing speech in violation of the First Amendment as well as for violations of federal laws aimed at ensuring due process and reasoned government decision-making. Harvard later sued, raising similar claims, and the judge consolidated Harvard’s case with the case the AAUP had filed. The court ruled unequivocally in the AAUP’s favor.
From the beginning of his term in office, Trump has railed against universities and their “liberal faculty,” threatening to “bankrupt universities.” At Harvard, these threats culminated with an April 11, 2025, letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Education, which asserted that Harvard had “failed to live up to . . . civil rights conditions that justify federal investment” and laid out a list of conditions that Harvard had to satisfy to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.” Most importantly the government’s conditions included:
• “commission[ing] an external party . . . to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse”;
• “abolish[ing] all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout [Harvard’s] admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests” for departments, fields, and teaching units found to “lack viewpoint diversity”;
• “hiring a critical mass of new faculty” and “admitting a critical mass of students” to provide the government’s preferred balance of viewpoint diversity, “reform[ing] and restructuring” governance;
• “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty,” as well as “the power held by faculty . . . more committed to activism than scholarship”; and
• “shutter[ing]” all DEI programs “through structural and personnel changes.”
The final arbiter of compliance with these conditions would be the federal government, which would retain the right to audit Harvard (or review final audit reports by third parties) until at least the end of 2028.
On April 11, because faculty members were a primary target of the Trump administration’s ideological demands and grant threats, the AAUP and the AAUP Harvard chapter filed a complaint against the Trump administration. The complaint highlighted how the Trump administration’s actions violated the First Amendment: “Their demands were designed to reshape a world-renowned educational institution according to the Trump administration’s preferences and punish it for permitting members of its educational community—including Plaintiffs’ members—to speak, teach, learn, and research in ways that the President opposed.” (The UAW, which represents graduate students at Harvard, later joined in this lawsuit.)
On April 14, 2025, Harvard President Alan Garber responded to the April 11 demand by stating that the university would not “accept the government’s terms” because it was “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration” and because “neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
Later that day, the federal government “announc[ed] a freeze on $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60M in multi-year contract value to Harvard University.” In the days that followed, the government began sending out stop-work orders on certain grants, ceasing all activities related to those projects. There was also a ramping up of a public pressure campaign against Harvard and its faculty. For example, President Trump criticized Harvard for “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots,” and declared that Harvard “should no longer receive Federal Funds.”
On April 21, the Harvard Board of Visitors filed suit against the Trump administration. The primary claims of Harvard were similar to those set forth in the AAUP complaint.
In early May, Harvard began receiving termination letters from the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The court summarized the vital research that was subject to the terminations.
The terminated grants related to all manner of medical, scientific, technological, and other projects—including projects on breast cancer detection and prevention, biological threats, overcoming antibiotic resistance, improving neurologic outcomes for pediatric cancer survivors, developing drugs to treat long-term radiation exposure and for chemotherapy, studying the effects of particulate matter exposure on military veterans, and creating “technologies that provide energy-relevant minerals for economic and national security.”
The court explained that faculty and graduate students “are at least as connected to the grants and funding at issue here as is Harvard.” In ruling in favor of the AAUP and Harvard, the court first rejected the government’s procedural argument that the claims only involved contracts with the federal government and money damages and therefore belonged in the US Court of Federal Claims. The court explained,
The First Amendment claims here are about speech and whether the federal government is improperly infringing on the free speech rights of an academic institution and its employees. The resolution of these claims might result in money changing hands, but what is fundamentally at issue is a bedrock constitutional principle rather than the interpretation of contract terms.
The court also addressed the government’s attempts to dismiss the AAUP’s case based on the argument that the AAUP and UAW “lack standing [or the right to sue in federal court] as they have not shown sufficient harm.” The court had little trouble finding harm to members of the AAUP and UAW. “The professors and graduate students—who are responsible for funding their own research—apply for federal grants, are awarded the grants on the strength of their credentials and proposed research, and then build their professional reputations on those grants. . . . are at least as connected to the grants and funding at issue here as is Harvard.” The court also found that the government’s campaign against the Harvard faculty, and the attendant demands and threats, “‘have chilled some of the [AAUP] members’ protected speech and academic freedom,’ as the [AAUP] members have begun to avoid speech and subject matter[s] that might draw the wrath of the Trump administration directly or cause them to become the University’s next target in its concession to Defendants’ demands.”
On the primary basis for the AAUP and Harvard’s lawsuits, the court found that the government trampled on their First Amendment rights. “In brief, the April 11 Letter purported to require Harvard to overhaul its governance, hiring, and academic programs to comport with the government’s ideology and prescribed viewpoint.” And “Harvard’s rejection communicated that it would not tolerate the government’s attempt to control ‘who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study,’ and that unequivocal expression of core First Amendment values in the face of government overreach constitutes protected speech.”
The court rejected the government’s claim that protected speech was not the reason it terminated the grants. As the court pointed out, the April 11 letter conditioned the grants on Harvard “acceding to the government’s demands for ideological control.” The court also highlighted “the government’s ideological disagreements with Harvard, calling attention to, among other things, Harvard’s decision to hire ‘failed Mayors Bill [d]e Blasio and Lori Lightfoot, perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history,’ and to allow ‘strongly left-leaning Obama political appointee Penny Pritzker, a Democrat operative,’ to manage the Harvard Corporation.” And it pointed out that many of the termination letters reiterated that the impetus for the terminations was Harvard’s refusal to adopt the ideological “reforms” that the government deemed “appropriate.”
The court also addressed “Harvard’s unconstitutional conditions-based theory, that is, its claim that Defendants impermissibly imposed on Harvard content- and viewpoint-based funding conditions that were unrelated to any legitimate government interest.” In ruling in favor of Harvard, the court pointed out “the impropriety of conditioning Harvard’s federal funding . . . on Harvard’s realigning its campus to better reflect a viewpoint favored by the government.”
The court ruled in favor of the AAUP and UAW on their First Amendment claim based on a theory of unconstitutional coercion. The court found that “Defendants unconstitutionally sought to force Harvard to better manifest the government’s favored worldview” and “urged and threatened Harvard . . . to hire faculty and make curricula and research choices that better aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints, to the detriment of professors and researchers with competing views.” Therefore, “because the Defendants required the [AAUP and UAW] members to rebalance and alter their speech to save Harvard’s funding, the Court finds the [AAUP and UAW] are entitled to summary judgment on their unconstitutional coercion claim.”
The court next addressed the arguments by the parties regarding Title VI, which prohibits discrimination based on race and national origin. The court rejected the government’s arguments that Harvard had violated Title VI and that the government had the right to terminate grants based on antisemitism in general, finding antisemitism was “at best a post hoc rationalization for its attempts to impose governmental orthodoxy.” The court also agreed with the AAUP and Harvard’s argument that the government had violated Title VI by failing to meet the procedural requirements for terminating grants based on Title VI.
The court also agreed with the AAUP’s contention that the defendants violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), finding that the Trump administration’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious,” as the government did not have a “reasoned” explanation, and it failed to consider the costs, benefits, and consequences of its actions. The court again emphasized the benefits of groundbreaking and vital research conducted by faculty and graduate students: “Research that has been frozen could save lives, money, or the environment, to name a few.”
The court vigorously rejected the Trump administration’s primary defense that its actions were based on fighting antisemitism, noting that “the government-initiated onslaught against Harvard was much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism.” The court pointed out that the government “specifically conditioned funding on agreeing to its ten terms, only one of which related to antisemitism, while six related to ideological and pedagogical concerns, including who may lead and teach at Harvard, who may be admitted, and what may be taught.” The court concluded that the Trump administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI.” The court also dismissed or did not rule on other claims brought by the AAUP and Harvard, primarily because the court had addressed and remedied them in its other findings.
Having found that the administration violated the First Amendment, Title VI, and the APA, the court fashioned a remedy. To undo the grant terminations, the court vacated and set aside the Trump administration’s freeze orders and termination letters. The court also granted an injunction forbidding future violations:
Given the First Amendment violations, the harms to Harvard’s research, and the benefit to the public of that research continuing, the Court grants Harvard’s request for a permanent injunction that prevents Defendants reimposing any unconstitutional conditions imposed to date, and enjoins Defendants from issuing any other termination, freezing of funds, stop work orders, or withholding of payment on existing grants or other federal funding, or refusal to award future grants, contracts, or other federal funding to Harvard in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights, or on purported grounds of discrimination without compliance with the requirements of Title VI.
While the court ruled unequivocally in the AAUP’s favor and crafted a remedy that should undo much of the harm caused by the Trump administration, the fight is far from over. The Trump administration will certainly appeal. Furthermore, the Harvard administration could settle with the Trump administration, and if the terms are anything like those at Columbia, Brown, or University of Pennsylvania, that would threaten academic freedom and the rights of faculty and students.
The Trump administration’s use of threats to grant funding to compel universities to “promote a governmental orthodoxy” is widespread. This decision should provide ammunition for opposing such threats and hopefully give administrations at Harvard and elsewhere some backbone in standing up to the Trump administration.