The Trump administration urged a federal appeals court to restore its freeze of $2 billion in research funding for Harvard University over the Ivy League school's refusal to comply with government demands over governance.
In an appellate brief filed Wednesday in Boston, the administration asked the court to overturn US District Judge Allison Burroughs' September ruling that the government's demands and subsequent funding freeze violated Harvard's free-speech and due-process rights.
The Justice Department argued the government was justified in seeking reforms and oversight of Harvard's governance, admissions and hiring practices as part of a policy goal of targeting antisemitic conduct at institutions receiving federal funds. Burroughs was wrong to find Harvard's conduct protected by the Constitution, the government said.
"Such unlawful conduct does not enjoy First Amendment protection," the Justice Department said in a brief outlining its appeal arguments on Wednesday. No oral arguments have yet been scheduled, so a decision is likely months away.
Harvard has been the main target of President Donald Trump's efforts to reshape elite higher education, a campaign that first focused on allegations of campus antisemitism following Israel's war on Gaza and later grew into a much broader attack on diversity programs and perceived political bias.
Several elite universities have settled with the Trump administration, including Columbia, Cornell and Northwestern universities, in order to get their frozen federal research funding back.
The government also argued in its brief that Burroughs did not have jurisdiction over the case because the dispute should have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims, which handles contract disputes with the federal government.
Harvard didn't have an immediate comment on the government's appeals arguments.
The brief focused largely on allegations of antisemitism on Harvard's campus saying the government had a right to use all legal tools to seek to combat it.
"At the very least, the government is not required to continue giving taxpayer dollars to universities that have demonstrated deliberate indifference to antisemitic conduct and discrimination on campus," the government said in the filing.
In her ruling last year, Burroughs found the government's stated concerns about discrimination "arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual."
The Trump administration "used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul" of the law, she said. It "impermissibly retaliated against Harvard for refusing to capitulate to the government's demands."