By Jan Wolfe
Oct 5 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump’s administration will ask an appeals court on Monday to revive his effort to terminate more than $2 billion in grants awarded to Harvard University, a centerpiece of his broad campaign against the nation’s richest and oldest university.
The oral argument before the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, slated for 9:30 a.m. ET (1330 GMT), will help determine whether Trump can leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which the Republican president has said are gripped by “radical left” ideologies.
Trump, since returning to the White House, has used civil rights investigations, deportations of non-citizen students, accreditation threats and other tactics to reshape elite and public universities.
Harvard, a major target of that campaign, has fought back aggressively in court and has secured several victories, including another ruling the appeals court will review separately on Tuesday that barred the administration from preventing the school from hosting international students.
Trump administration officials sent Harvard a list of 10 demands in April 2025, including ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the appointment of third-party auditors to monitor academic departments for viewpoint diversity.
Harvard President Alan Garber rejected the demands, saying “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Within hours of Garber’s statement, the administration said it was freezing federal grants to the university because of its alleged failure to address harassment of Jewish students during campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. It ultimately terminated about $2.2 billion in grants.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard filed a lawsuit seeking to block the funding freeze, calling it retaliation for speech protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.
The case was assigned to US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama.
In an 84-page decision last year, she said the Trump administration used “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
The Justice Department appealed to the 1st Circuit, saying “the Government is not required to continue giving taxpayer dollars to universities that have demonstrated deliberate indifference to antisemitic conduct and discrimination on campus.”
The administration has separately filed three other lawsuits against Harvard, including a case that the Justice Department launched in March alleging it violated a civil rights law by failing to protect Jewish students. A judge in August dismissed that lawsuit, which had sought to claw back federal funding.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
