‘Deliberately Indifferent’: Trump Administration Sues Harvard University Over Campus Antisemitism

Harvard University ignored antisemitism while extreme anti-Zionist activists subjected Jewish students to harassment and discrimination in violation of federal civil rights laws as well as the institution’s own purported commitment to anti-racism, the Trump administration alleged in a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts on Friday.

The complaint demands the recovery of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants and other federal support Harvard received during the years in which it allegedly neglected to correct the hostile campus environment.

The lawsuit marks a shift in the Trump administration’s previous strategy of confiscating Harvard’s federal money and then defending the action in court. That policy has yielded mixed results, making a strong political statement while leaving Harvard strong enough to mobilize its GDP-sized wealth to sidestep the worst potential consequences by issuing bonds or bringing the matter before judges who have been sympathetic to their case.

It has also alienated progressives, including some Jewish students, unwilling to validate the administration’s coupling addressing campus antisemitism with its parallel ambition of reforming higher education in a manner preferred by political conservatives. Others have said that they sustained collateral damage when funds were cut from their own departments and programs.

“Harvard has been and remains deliberately indifferent to what its own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias deemed the ‘exclusion of Israeli or Zionist students from social spaces and extracurricular activities,'” US Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon argued in the filing. “Harvard has failed to enforce its rules or meaningfully discipline the mobs that occupy its buildings and terrorize its Jewish and Israeli students. Harvard instead rewarded students who assaulted, harassed, or intimidated their Jewish and Israeli peers.”

In a statement, Harvard contested the government’s account of the facts, saying it “deeply cares about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus.” It also argued that it enacted “substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.”

On Friday, Middle East expert and writer Alex Joffe told The Algemeiner that time will tell whether the government’s lawsuit is effective in addressing antisemitism at Harvard.

“The new filed lawsuit represents another volley in what has become a well-established pattern of federal allegations and Ivy League stonewalling,” he said. “Universities appear to have decided that the Trump administration is too preoccupied with other problems, not least of all Iran and battles with Congress, including Republicans, to pursue its reforms of the higher education industrial complex and are planning to wait it out.”

He added, however, that “the national security implications of the lawsuit come into focus,” noting that “the pro-Hamas movement is shown to be comprised of exactly the same protest groups and funders as the pro-Iran and anti-ICE movement, including the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, The People’s Forum, and others, all connected via personnel and Chinese Communist Party funders.”

There has been a major overlap between campus groups that participated in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests throughout the Gaza war and those that have been expressing support for the Iranian regime amid the current US-Israeli campaign against Iran.

Harvard University student Tejas Billas added, “This lawsuit largely copies Harvard’s own task force report, which found widespread discrimination against Jews and Israelis. It’s hard to say that Harvard has done all it can to combat antisemitism while many of Harvard’s proposed actions to improve the campus have yet to be implemented.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism acknowledged that the university administration’s handling of campus antisemitism fell well below its obligations under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its own nondiscrimination policies.

In a 300-plus-page report, the task force compiled a comprehensive record of antisemitic incidents on Harvard’s campus in recent years — from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee’s endorsement of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist atrocities in Israel, to an anti-Zionist faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as murderers of people of color. The report identified Harvard’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups as a key source of its problem.

Throughout that time, according to a 2024 report by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Harvard repeatedly misrepresented its handling of the explosion of hate and rule breaking, launching a campaign of deceit and spin to cover up what ultimately became the biggest scandal in higher education.

The committee charged that Harvard formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult its members when Jewish students were subject to verbal abuse and harassment, a time, its members felt, when its counsel was most needed. The advisory group went on to recommend nearly a dozen measures for addressing the problem and offered other guidance, the report said, but it was excluded from high-level discussions which preceded, for example, the controversial congressional testimony of former president Claudine Gay, in which the chief executive said choosing to punish antisemitism “depends on the context.”

The public has not learned anything new about Harvard, Sabrina Soffer, research fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told The Algemeiner.

“The federal government is reaching conclusions drawn years ago but campus antisemitism at Harvard rages on,” she said. “The effort is appreciated, but the fight against antisemitism must not be reduced to a game of ‘Whack-A-Mole’ — government should enact real enforcement mechanisms that correct both faculty and student conduct. This suit, if it succeeds, could achieve that, as it calls for an independent monitor of conditions at Harvard and other actions to correct the campus climate, but Harvard has proved adept at avoiding accountability. It may do so again.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.