President Trump talks more about Harvard than people who actually went there — which is to say a lot.
After several universities made like Paul Weiss and rolled over and showed the Trump administration their belly, the president figured that Harvard would fold eventually. Columbia paid a $200 million settlement to restore its funding. Brown paid $50 million to Rhode Island workforce programs. Cornell agreed to $30 million over three years. Surely those dorks in Cambridge would cough up soon!
But a “settlement” remained elusive, and so Trump ramped up the pressure.
He tried to cancel $2 billion in federal grant funding, alleging the school violated Title VI by discriminating against Jewish students. Judge Allison Burroughs blocked it in September and made it permanent in October. He tried to kick Harvard out of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, effectively banning international students. Judge Burroughs blocked that too.
So today, the Justice Department filed a brand new Title VI lawsuit alleging that Harvard “defied federal law and violated Title VI repeatedly by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students without remorse.” Third time’s the charm?
The 44-page complaint, filed in the District of Massachusetts, alleges that Harvard maintained a campus so hostile to Jewish and Israeli students after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that it violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Most of what it documents are protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, which are protected by the First Amendment. But clearly Jewish members of the community did feel marginalized and endangered. The complaint points to students concealing yarmulkes under baseball caps, a mezuzah stolen from a dorm room, “Heil Hitler” screamed at students waiting for campus transportation, and calls to “gas all the Jews” getting upvotes on the Harvard-only Sidechat platform.
Virtually every one of these allegations is sourced to a report produced in April of 2025 by Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. In fact, the school spent months documenting the problem in excruciating detail and settled two private Title VI lawsuits — Kestenbaum v. Harvard and Brandeis Center v. Harvard — by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, explicitly extending its nondiscrimination policies to Jewish and Israeli students, committing to annual antisemitism training, and establishing a partnership with an Israeli university. That certainly undercuts the government’s claim that Harvard was “indifferent” to the problem or that the violation is systemic and ongoing.
The proposed remedy for this “violation” is functionally a death penalty for the school. The DOJ wants the court to declare Harvard to have been in violation of Title VI since October 7, 2023, forcing it to return billions of dollars in federal grants made since that date, and cutting it off from all federal funds going forward. How this will help Jewish students — many of whom participated in the protests themselves — is left as an exercise for the reader, although the complaint gestures vaguely in the direction of an outside monitor to ensure that the school enforces its policies against protesters, up to and including calling the cops on them.
This would a be a highly novel application of Title VI, and the government didn’t want to risk winding up in front of Judge Burroughs, who called the funding freeze a “targeted, ideologically-motivated assault” and the SEVP revocation “retaliation.” And so the DOJ designated the new case as related to Kestenbaum and Brandeis Center, so as to get in front of Judge Richard Stearns.
Judge Stearns dismissed much those prior complaints, but he didn’t dismiss them entirely. He also characterized Harvard’s response to antisemitism as “at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory,” finding that “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.” But he never adjudicated the claims, since both cases settled in early 2025, and it’s not clear whether he’ll agree that this new cause of action by the government is related enough to automatically wind up on his docket.
Meanwhile, the president continues to make clear, that he’s trying to precipitate an “untenable crisis” in higher education.
Dammit, now we have to side with Harvard. Ughhh, well … GO CRIMSON!
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
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