Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university, sued the Trump administration on Monday, fighting back against its threats to slash billions of dollars from the school’s research funding as part of a crusade against the nation’s top colleges.
The lawsuit signaled a major escalation of the ongoing fight between higher education and President Trump, who has vowed to “reclaim” elite universities. The administration has cast its campaign as a fight against antisemitism, but has also targeted programs and teaching related to racial diversity and gender issues.
Earlier this month, it sent Harvard a list of demands that included auditing professors for plagiarism, reporting to the federal government any international students accused of misconduct, and appointing an outside overseer to make sure that academic departments were “viewpoint diverse.”
Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, accused the government in a statement on Monday of trying to wield “unprecedented and improper control.” Dr. Garber said the consequences of the government’s actions would be “severe and long lasting.”
The Trump administration has claimed that Harvard and other schools have allowed antisemitic language and harassment to remain unchecked on their campuses. Monday’s lawsuit noted that the government had cited the university’s response to antisemitism as justification for its “unlawful action.”
Dr. Garber, in his statement, said that “as a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism.” But he said that the government was legally required to engage with the university about the ways it was fighting antisemitism. Instead, he said, the government has sought to control “whom we hire and what we teach.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, accuses the government of unleashing a broad attack as “leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.” It also references other major universities that have faced abrupt funding cuts.
The lawsuit names as defendants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary; Linda M. McMahon, the education secretary; Stephen Ehikian, acting administrator of the General Services Administration; Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi; and several other administration officials.
White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the past week, the Trump administration has also threatened to eliminate visas for international students at Harvard after the university refused to accede to administration demands.
And government officials are planning to freeze an additional $1 billion in research funding to Harvard, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The officials said the funding was mainly from the National Institutes of Health, which is the nation’s primary agency for biomedical and public health research.
Harvard officials have said the funding freeze will have a significant impact on the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which receives nearly half of its total budget from federal research grants. The school announced major budget cuts this past week.
Using claims of antisemitism as a cudgel, the Trump administration has threatened to investigate dozens of colleges, and has already moved to withhold billions in federal funding from several of them, including Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and Princeton.
Harvard notified the administration in a letter on April 14 that it would refuse to comply with demands that it said were unlawful. That prompted the Trump administration to impose a funding freeze. The freeze resulted in immediate stop-work orders, affecting the school’s federally funded research projects studying tuberculosis, A.L.S. and radiation poisoning.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Dr. Garber wrote in a message to the community this month.
Harvard’s letter on April 14 was in response to a list of demands that an antisemitism task force, appointed by the Trump administration, had submitted to Harvard three days earlier. Some members of the administration had said that the list of demands was sent by mistake. But on Monday, Dr. Garber said that “their actions suggest otherwise.”
The 51-page lawsuit accused the Trump administration of flouting the First Amendment by trying to restrict what Harvard’s faculty could teach students. “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that the First Amendment is designed to safeguard,” the complaint argues, quoting from a 1969 Supreme Court opinion upholding the First Amendment rights of high school students.
The complaint also argues that the government “cannot identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, science, technological and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives.”
Some faculty members who had urged Harvard to resist the administration’s encroachment expressed elation at the university’s decision to sue.
Ryan Enos is a political science professor who helped to write a letter, signed by more than 800 faculty members, imploring the university to fight Mr. Trump’s demands in court. He said Harvard’s decision to sue “should be a larger signal not just to education but civil society that what the Trump administration is doing is unlawful.”
On campus, students reacted ecstatically to Dr. Garber’s email announcing the lawsuit.
Lorenzo Ruiz, a sophomore from Texas, said the level of school spirit matched the pride that Harvard students show during the school’s annual football game against Yale. “The university has really managed to tap into and inspire not only the support of students, but a massive segment of the nation that is deeply concerned by federal meddling,” he said.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, a large association of universities, said: “We applaud Harvard for taking this step and look forward to a clear and unambiguous statement by the court rebuking efforts to undermine scholarship and science.”
To represent the university, Harvard turned to two lawyers with ties to Mr. Trump and the administration. One of them, William A. Burck, has served as an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization. The other, Robert K. Hur, worked in the Justice Department during Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Hur was also appointed as special counsel to investigate President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents.
Harvard’s litigation matched the approach that many higher education officials and lawyers unaffiliated with the university had expected in recent days.
In many respects, and beneath lofty language about First Amendment protections, Harvard’s complaint can be boiled down to its view that the Trump administration plowed past longstanding timelines and procedures for disputes about civil rights issues.
Harvard officials appear to be banking on the hope that the government’s tactics will steer the case toward a speedy resolution. The university’s lawsuit included a plea to the Federal District Court in Massachusetts for an order “expediting the resolution of this action.”
Reporting was contributed by Vimal Patel, Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder and Miles J. Herszenhorn.
