A federal court in the United States has rejected this Thursday the lawsuit filed last March by the Trump Administration against Harvard University, in which the academic institution was accused of having tolerated alleged cases of discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students on its campuses.
The U.S. magistrate Richard Stearns, district judge in Boston, made this decision after concluding that the Department of Justice did not provide sufficient evidence to support "systematic and persistent violations of federal civil rights laws" at the prestigious university.
In his ruling, Stearns emphasizes that the U.S. Executive based its argument "almost exclusively" on the academic year 2023-24 and only mentioned three subsequent episodes to attempt to support its accusations that Harvard would have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a regulation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, according to the ruling.
"Without diminishing any of the concerns raised by these facts, the court considers that, both separately and as a whole, they are too isolated and sporadic to support a plausible inference that an institutionalized violation of Title VI persists at Harvard to this day," states the document released by the news agency Bloomberg.
The judge also adds that the Government misinterpreted the purpose of the coercive measures provided for in Title VI.
"The intent of Congress was not to sanction a recipient of funds that did not comply with the rules, but to encourage them to adhere to the provisions of Title VI. Even in its alarmist warning about the possible damage, the Government acknowledges that its own hypothetical outcome is positive, although it has been achieved in a rough manner," Stearns indicated in his ruling.
This judicial decision represents a new setback for the Trump Administration in its struggle with Harvard, after it had already taken the center to court over its diversity policies before pushing this second lawsuit focused on the alleged antisemitism at the university.