By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – A federal judge agreed on Monday to expedite Harvard University’s lawsuit seeking to block U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from freezing $2.2 billion in federal grant funding that the Ivy League school has warned will threaten vital medical and scientific research.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs during a brief hearing in Boston set a July 21 hearing for the case after Harvard warned that the freeze and additional threatened cuts were putting research at risk.
Monday’s hearing was the first she has held since Harvard sued last week after refusing to cede to what the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university’s president said were illegal demands from an administration antisemitism task force “to control whom we hire and what we teach.”
Those demands included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints, and terminate certain academic programs.
Harvard has said that while it is committed to combating antisemitism, the administration’s sweeping demands violate the free speech guarantees of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Rather than seek a preliminary injunction blocking the freeze pending the outcome of the litigation, Harvard has opted to skip straight to the merits of the case, which both it and the U.S. Department of Justice asked the judge to quickly address.
“We would welcome oral argument as soon after as your honor is able to accommodate,” Steve Lehotsky, Harvard’s lawyer, told the judge.
Harvard and other universities have seen federal funding threatened by the administration over how they handled pro-Palestinian protests over Israel’s war in Gaza that roiled campuses last year.
The schools have also been in the administration’s crosshairs over other issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion programs and transgender policies.
The Trump administration in late March announced it was launching a review of about $9 billion in grants and contracts with Harvard over what it says is the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic discrimination, including during campus protests.
Since then, the Trump administration has frozen $2.3 billion in funding to Harvard and threatened to strip the university of its tax-exempt status and take away its ability to enroll foreign students. It has also demanded information on the university’s foreign ties, funding, students and faculty.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Gregorio)
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