A federal judge on Thursday dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit accusing Harvard University of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic harassment, ruling that the government had not shown that the university was engaged in an ongoing violation of federal civil rights law.
The Justice Department filed the lawsuit in March, alleging that Harvard had been deliberately indifferent to harassment, intimidation and discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The complaint accused Harvard of failing to enforce its own rules against students who harassed Jewish and Israeli peers and sought to compel the university to comply with Title VI.
The dismissal marks another setback for an administration that has made antisemitism on college campuses a central part of its broader campaign against elite universities. Harvard has faced pressure from the administration on federal research funding, international student enrollment and other institutional policies. The university has challenged those efforts in court, with several of the administration’s actions already blocked by judges.
The ruling also casts a new light on the controversy that engulfed Harvard in late 2023 and helped bring down then-President Claudine Gay.
Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned Jan. 2, 2024, after just six months on the job, following intense criticism over her congressional testimony on antisemitism campus. In her resignation statement, Gay said the controversy had created an “extraordinary challenge” for Harvard and that she believed stepping down was in the institution’s best interests.
The antisemitism controversy was not the sole reason for Gay’s resignation, but the connection is difficult to overlook: allegations that Harvard was failing to protect Jewish students became a defining test of Gay’s leadership, and more than two years later, a judge ruled in Harvard's favor in a federal civil rights lawsuit centered around similar concerns.
Gay had told Congress in December 2023 that antisemitism had risen on Harvard’s campus and that the university needed to do more to ensure students could learn without harassment or intimidation. She also defended free expression while drawing a distinction between protected speech and conduct that violated university policies.
Harvard subsequently took additional steps to address the antisemitism. Its own presidential task force later documented reports of Jewish and Israeli students experiencing social shunning, verbal abuse, intimidation and bullying, while also outlining measures the university had undertaken after Gay’s departure.
The court’s ruling stopped short of deciding whether the university had actually violated civil rights law during the period right after Oct. 7, and the judge didn't address Harvard's separate argument that the lawsuit was a pretextual, retaliatory act. Instead, it draws a legal distinction between evidence of a serious campus problem and evidence sufficient to establish an ongoing violation of federal civil rights law.
