FOLLOW US

A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit accusing Harvard of tolerating antisemitism, ruling the government never showed the university was still out of compliance with civil rights law by the time it sued. The decision hinged on timing more than on the underlying antisemitism claims themselves. It's the latest turn in a much larger legal war between Harvard and the administration that has already put billions of dollars in federal funding on the line.

A federal judge in Boston has dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit accusing Harvard University of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment during the war in Gaza.

U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled Thursday that the government's case, filed in March, never plausibly showed that Harvard remained in violation of federal civil rights law by the time officials actually sued.

The administration's complaint leaned heavily on incidents from the 2023 to 2024 school year, when pro-Palestinian protests including a three-week encampment roiled the campus, and cited only a handful of episodes from as recently as March 2025. Stearns wrote that those incidents were, taken together, "too isolated and episodic" to support the claim that Harvard's noncompliance with the law was still ongoing.

The Case Turned on Timing, Not Whether Antisemitism Occurred

The ruling turned less on whether antisemitism happened at Harvard and more on when. Federal law requires the government to notify a school of an alleged Title VI violation and try to secure voluntary compliance before it can sue. Officials sent Harvard that notice on June 30, 2025.

Stearns found the government's amended complaint never plausibly alleged that Harvard was still breaking the law after that date, which meant the case failed regardless of what happened in 2023 and 2024.

The Justice Department had argued that standard would make it "virtually impossible" to ever win a Title VI case, since a school could simply clean up its act the moment the government threatened to pull funding. Stearns rejected that logic, writing that Congress built Title VI to push schools toward compliance, not to punish them for violations already in the past.

In a footnote, he went further, questioning whether the government had any real basis for deciding Harvard couldn't have fixed the problem voluntarily in the first place, saying it had identified "no rational basis" for that conclusion.

Judge Narrows Scope of Decision

Stearns was careful to note the decision was narrow. He didn't rule on whether Harvard's response to the protests actually violated the law back when tensions were at their peak, only that the government hadn't built a case around what was happening more recently.

He added that the ruling "does not have as broad an impact as the government asserts."

Trump Administration Accused Harvard of Ignoring Antisemitism

The lawsuit accused Harvard of turning a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis after Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack, alleging Jewish students were harassed, denied access to campus facilities, and in some cases hid their yarmulkes out of fear.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the suit as an effort to hold accountable any school that permits discrimination while taking federal money, and the government sought steep consequences, including clawing back close to a billion dollars in grants already paid out and cutting off future funding entirely.

Harvard Rejects Allegations and Defends Its Actions

Harvard has denied the allegations from the start, calling the lawsuit another retaliatory move tied to the administration's broader push to control the university rather than a genuine response to antisemitism. The school filed for dismissal while stating tht it condemns antisemitism and has expanded training and anti-harassment enforcement since the protests.

This was just one front in a much larger fight. The administration has also tried to cut off billions in Harvard's research funding, a move a different federal judge blocked and which the government is now appealing to the First Circuit.

Separate court battles have covered Harvard's ability to enroll international students and the school's compliance with demands around race-conscious admissions. Federal money makes up roughly 11 percent of Harvard's operating revenue, according to Time, and university leaders have warned that losing it could halt cancer and heart disease research programs mid-project.

Thursday's dismissal doesn't end that fight so much as narrow one piece of it. The government could still try to build a new case around more recent conduct, and the underlying question, whether Harvard's handling of the 2023 and 2024 protests amounted to genuine indifference toward its Jewish students, remains something no court has actually decided.