Dive Brief:
- Eighteen research colleges are seeking to formally support Harvard University’s legal challenge against the Trump administration for cutting or freezing roughly $2.8 billion of the institution’s grants and contracts.
- In a legal filing Friday, the colleges asked a U.S. District Court for permission to file an amicus brief in support of the Ivy League institution, even though the lawsuit only addresses the federal cuts facing Harvard.
- “Academic research is an interconnected enterprise,” the filing argued. “The elimination of funding at Harvard negatively impacts the entire ecosystem.”
Dive Insight:
On Friday, the 18 universities — a mix of public institutions like the University of Oregon and selective private ones like Brown University — argued that the nation’s “essential research would not be nearly as fruitful if conducted by institutions outside academia.”
They are seeking to bolster Harvard’s arguments that the Trump administration’s cuts will “threaten the longstanding, mutually beneficial partnership between the government and academia that has powered American innovation.”
The colleges also said the loss of Harvard’s funding has had ripple effects across the academic research sector. In addition to disrupting long-term research, they argued the cuts will “destroy the careers of aspiring scientists” and dissuade long-term investments at colleges nationwide.
The colleges seeking to support Harvard in court are:
- Boston University.
- Brown University, in Rhode Island.
- California Institute of Technology.
- Colorado State University.
- Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
- Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Michigan State University.
- Oregon State University
- Princeton University, in New Jersey.
- Rice University, in Texas.
- Rutgers University, in New Jersey.
- Tufts University, in Massachusetts.
- University of Maryland, College Park.
- University of Oregon.
- University of Pennsylvania.
- University of Pittsburgh.
- Yale University, in Connecticut.
Dartmouth’s support may have come as a surprise to some.
The college’s president was the only Ivy League leader not to co-sign an April letter that condemned the Trump administration’s actions against colleges as “overreach and political interference.”
While Harvard’s lawsuit only addresses its own cuts, the Trump administration has directly threatened federal funding at some of the universities named in Friday’s motion.
At Brown, for example, the Trump administration was reportedly planning to freeze $510 million in federal research grants in April.
But so far, no university has faced cuts on the scale of Harvard’s.
In April, the federal government froze over $2.2 billion of Harvard’s multi-year federal grants after the Ivy League institution rejected its demand seeking more control over everything from academic programming to faculty hiring. The Trump administration claimed it sought this unprecedented oversight to address concerns about antisemitism on Harvard’s campus.
Harvard sued shortly thereafter.
“Before taking punitive action, the law requires that the federal government engage with us about the ways we are fighting and will continue to fight antisemitism,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in a statement at the time. “Instead, the government’s April 11 demands seek to control whom we hire and what we teach.”
Since then, several agencies have further cut off Harvard from millions in federal funding, and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the Trump administration intends to block the university from all research funding.
