No. of Recommendations: 13
Deemed Retaliation, Judge Dismisses Trump Lawsuit against Harvard
On Thursday, a judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard. The suit accused Harvard of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment after the October 7th attacks.
But that’s not actually what this lawsuit was really about for the administration. Look at what they wanted the court to do: to claw back nearly a billion dollars in federal research grants, money for cancer studies and science labs, and to block Harvard from ever receiving federal funding again. That’s not something that would protect students, it’s a blatant attempt to wound the entire institution. Indeed, protecting students would look like increasing mental health funding, or creating support groups. Not destroying the institutions they rely on.
The judge, of course, saw right through that. He ruled that the incidents the government pointed to were, quote “too isolated and episodic” to prove that Harvard was breaking federal civil rights laws. He noted the government’s complaint leaned almost entirely on events from two years ago. In plain terms, the administration didn’t bring this case to fix a problem. Instead, they used a horrifying situation and twisted it as a pretext for their true intentions. Harvard’s lawyers called it exactly that, a retaliation campaign for refusing to hand the federal government control over what it teaches and who it hires.
Any kind of discrimination— whether on racial, ideological, or sexist lines— is unacceptable, and that’s exactly why it’s so insulting to see it used as an excuse. And in this case, by using antisemitism as a facade to attack academic institutions, the administration is taking credibility away from Jewish Americans that actually experience it.
All they’re doing is proving that the concern was never real in the first place.
Adam Kinzinger
