Twenty -four universities, including five Ivy League schools, and more than 12,000 alumni took measures to support Harvard University in their legal battle against the Trump administration, which has threatened it with the reduction of billions of dollars in subsidies.
Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, along with several other schools, presented an Amicus report on Monday in support of the oldest university in the nation, arguing that the freezing of funds would affect more than only Harvard, due to the interconnection of scientific research, and finally hindered US innovation and economic and economic growth.
Also on Monday, the group of 12,041 Harvard students presented a separate report that describes the retention of funds as an “reckless and illegal” attempt to affirm control over school and other institutions of higher education.
“The growing campaign against Harvard threatens the base of who we are as a nation,” said the former students in the report. “We learn our responsibility to defend our freedoms and values, safeguard freedom and democracy, and serve as bastions against these threats to everyone’s safety and well -being.”
Amicus summaries aim to provide experience or information to the Court, but schools and individuals are not parties in demand itself.
The presentations occur after Harvard in April rejected the government list of 10 demands, including the audit views of the student body, a movement that the administration says that it aims to address the anti -Semitism on the campus. After the government threatened to freeze $ 2.2 billion in subsidies of several years and $ 60 million “in contract value of several years,” Harvard responded with a lawsuit.
The report presented by universities included other prominent institutions such as Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The only Ivy League schools were missing were the universities of Cornell and Columbia.
The schools argued that the association between the Government and the Academy has long taken critical advances, from the human genome project to the COVID-19 vaccine. And that the funds cut to a school could endanger research in others. Harvard, MIT and Princeton, for example, have received funds from the National Health Institutes for a project that could produce tools to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
“The work cannot continue in individual sites; the MIT cannot use automatic learning to discover patterns, for example, without Princeton and Harvard data,” the report said.
Universities said in the report that cuts would only cause more damage to the ability of the United States to compete in science and academia.
“These cuts to investigate the financing of the risk of a future in which the next innovative innovation, whether a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s, a military technology or the next Internet, is discovered beyond our coasts, if it does,” the report said.
Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, told the community of the school that it was essential to present a legal argument against fund cuts.
“Although the value for the public of university investigation funded by the federal government seems obvious to us in the MIT, we are forced to present the case of its innumerable benefits for the Court and, in effect, for the American people,” Kornbluth said.
Harvard students presented their brief in support of the school motion for a summary trial presented last week. If awarded, the summary trial would allow the court to decide the case without a complete trial. Students, which include comedian Conan O’Brien, author Margaret E. Atwood and Senator Tim Kaine, D-V., Wrote in the report that the “final objective of the administration is to reduce our freedoms to learn, teach, think and act, and claim for itself the right to dictate who can enjoy those freedoms.”
The alumnus also criticized the concerns of the administration about anti -Semitism as justification on the freezing of financing.
“We unequivocally condemn anti -Semitism and any other form of discrimination and hate, which do not take place in Harvard or anywhere else in our society,” said the alumni in their brief. “However, anti -Semitism positions, particularly without due process and the appropriate bases and findings by the Government, should not be used as a pretext for illegal and unconstitutional punishment and the acquisition of an academic institution by the Government.”
The government’s demands on Harvard, the students said in the report: “They have little or nothing to do with the combination of anti -Semitism” or any other form of discrimination on the campus.
“Rather, their demands suffocate the commitment, teaching and research that unite communities, increase our mutual understanding and advance solutions that directly benefit us all,” the report said.
The legal support sample occurs in the middle of a month from time to time between the administration and the Harvard University. More recently, the school sued the Administration after Trump issued a proclamation last week denying visas for foreign students trying to come to the United States to attend the prestigious school.
