judge rules Trump Harvard

Washington (dpa)— A US federal judge on Wednesday handed the government of President Donald Trump a defeat in its dispute with Harvard University over a funding freeze.

US District Judge Allison Burroughs said in a decision that the US government should not have frozen and terminated more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts, and she instructed for the money to be released.

Trump has accused Harvard and other US universities of pursuing a left-wing ideology and allowing anti-Semitism on campus.

As a result, it froze around $2.2 billion in multi-year funding, a move that the Ivy League university has challenged in court.

Burroughs found that Harvard could, by its own admission, have done a better job to combat anti-Semitism.

“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that [the Trump administration] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” the ruling read.

The court said that “the sudden focus on antisemitism was, at best… arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual.”

The Trump administration has targeted several universities it accuses of promoting a left-leaning agenda, pressuring them to shut down diversity initiatives and comply with new directives on admissions, campus conduct, and hiring practices.

Unlike other universities, Harvard has pushed back, refusing to comply.