Donald Trump’s unusually aggressive campaign against Harvard University has been multifaceted, but one of the key elements of the offensive is the president’s insistence that the school is antisemitic.
Just three months into his second term, Trump published a post on his social media platform that accused Harvard of being “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution.” In the months that followed, the president continued to repeat the smear, telling the public that he considers the university to be “very antisemitic” and “strongly antisemitic.”
This was not, however, simply a matter of Trump peddling absurd claims online. On the contrary, the Republican’s Justice Department actually took Harvard to court, filing an antisemitism lawsuit against the school in March, claiming it discriminated against Jewish and Israeli students, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Harvard’s lawyers deemed the case baseless and asked U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns to throw it out. On Thursday, he did exactly that.
In a four-page order, the Clinton appointee noted that the administration’s complaint focused on three alleged incidents it claims happened a few years ago, as opposed to documenting an ongoing problem. With this in mind, Stearns wrote:
Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.
We’ll learn soon enough about any appeal, but the larger context is relevant: The White House has gone after Harvard with a vengeance, with multiple federal departments and agencies targeting the university, in the apparent hopes that its administrators will succumb to the pressure campaign and strike a deal that the president and his team will like.
Harvard, however, has now won a handful of cases against Team Trump, which necessarily reduces the odds that it will give in and reach an agreement with the White House.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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