Washington — The Trump administration filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard University on Friday, alleging that it violated federal civil rights law by failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack by Hamas.
In a 44-page suit, the Justice Department asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to find that Harvard unlawfully discriminated against those students through what it said was the school’s “intentional conduct and its deliberate indifference to discriminatory harassment of Jewish and Israeli students and creation of a hostile educational environment” after Oct. 7. The administration said it is seeking to recover billions of dollars in taxpayer money that Harvard has received from federal agencies.
The lawsuit is the latest front in the Trump administration’s ongoing battle with Harvard. Since President Trump returned to office, his administration has attempted to cancel billions of dollars in federal funding to Harvard because of what it said was its failure to address antisemitism on campus.
The school sued the Trump administration over the funding freezes, and a federal judge ruled last September that the government violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights and federal law when it halted the nearly $2 billion in federal grants.
Mr. Trump has also pushed the Internal Revenue Service to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status, and moved to bar most international students from traveling to the U.S. to study at the school, but a judge blocked that effort.
The Harvard lawsuit
In its lawsuit, the Justice Department alleged that Harvard defied federal law repeatedly by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students “without remorse.” Those students, government lawyers said, were subjected to “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive harassment” on campus, including during protests against Israel, because of their race or national origin.
The Justice Department accused Harvard of knowing about the harassment of Jewish and Israeli students, but doing nothing to stop it, including by failing to enforce its campus rules.
“Harvard remained deliberately indifferent to a level of hostility on its campus so well-known across the nation that members of Congress were writing about it,” administration lawyers wrote. “Harvard also intentionally refused to enforce its campus rules — rules it enforced against others — when the victims were Jews or Israelis. This sent the clear message to Harvard’s Jewish and Israeli community that the indifference was not an accident; they were being intentionally excluded and effectively denied equal access to educational opportunities.”
A Harvard spokesperson said the school “has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.”
“We will continue to prioritize this important work and will defend the University against this lawsuit, which represents yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump administration opened an investigation into Harvard’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act last April, and determined last June that the elite school had violated that law through its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus.
It warned that a failure by the university to enact certain changes would lead to a loss of federal financial resources. The school is set to receive more than $2.6 billion through federal grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the Justice Department.
Many of the administration’s actions targeting Harvard stem from what it said is the school’s failure to condemn antisemitism and protect Jewish students on campus. But the Trump administration has also taken aim at its admissions and hiring practices.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-lawsuit-trump-administration-jewish-israeli-students/
