A federal judge in Boston ordered the Trump administration to reverse its cuts of more than $2.6 billion in research funding for Harvard University. The retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of the Trump administration’s demands for changes to Harvard’s governance and policies was illegal.
The government had tied the funding freezes to Harvard’s delays in dealing with antisemitism, but the judge said the university’s federally backed research had little connection to discrimination against Jews. the government used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities” the judge wrote. The country must fight antisemitism, she wrote, but it also must protect the right to free speech.
This judgement looks like a piece of happy balance, in the surrounding political mess.