A federal judge handed Harvard University a win in court Wednesday, but any hope the school has of returning to business as usual still faces significant obstacles.
President Trump has vowed to appeal the decision, which ordered the administration to restore $2.2 billion in research funds. Harvard’s prospects beyond the Boston judge appointed by President Barack Obama who ruled in its favor remain unclear. Meanwhile, the government has a deep arsenal of weapons to exert pressure on the Ivy League school.
Harvard depends on government support to win future research grants, enroll international students and maintain its tax-exempt status. Trump has applied pressure on all those fronts. Shortly after the judge’s ruling, the White House said the school remained ineligible for future funds.
Harvard President Alan Garber acknowledged the challenges.
“We will continue to assess the implications of the opinion, monitor further legal developments, and be mindful of the changing landscape in which we seek to fulfill our mission,” Garber wrote to the school community after the ruling.
On the legal front, the Supreme Court has given the White House some reason to be optimistic if the case makes it there, said Jodie Ferise, an attorney with Church Church Hittle and Antrim.
The Trump administration has argued that the Harvard case isn’t a constitutional issue but rather a contract dispute that should be adjudicated in a different venue.
In a different case last month, the Supreme Court appeared to leave open the door to the contractual argument. In a case about the administration’s termination of National Institutes of Health grants, the five most conservative justices indicated they were sympathetic to the government’s position that a lower-court judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the case and couldn’t interfere with the administration’s termination of the grants even if he did.
“That’s the landscape right now and the question is did [the Harvard case’s judge] give enough of a reason to see it differently than the justices saw the NIH case?” Ferise said.
No matter what ultimately happens in the court case, the university faces the reality that the White House has many advantages in the broader battle. While Harvard, with its $53 billion endowment, is better positioned than its peers, it still relies on federal support.
The relationship between universities and the federal government is layered, complicated and entrenched. That has led to a byzantine bureaucracy that gives the White House a vast number of levers to try to stymie Harvard’s operations. If the court strikes down one tactic, the government can turn to another. The structure makes Harvard’s battle with the White House akin to fighting a hydra.
Other than pulling federal research funds, the Trump administration has also challenged Harvard’s tax-exempt status, demanded records of gifts it has received from foreign sources and tried to block the school from enrolling international students.
Last month, the administration warned Harvard it could take over its patents, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, if a review finds the university hasn’t complied with federal law.
Some of the federal expansion predates the second Trump administration. The Obama and Biden administrations suspended student-loan payments and inserted equity requirements into contracts, said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
Harvard also faces a broader antipathy among Trump and his allies toward elite universities, which Hess compared with Democratic attitudes toward the oil and gas industries.
“When MAGA looks at college presidents…they see parasites that have pocketed billions in public subsidies that were happy to try to smother conservative thought on campus,” Hess said. “They see colleges as heavily subsidized privileged havens.”
Write to Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com
