Harvard slams Trump administration for ‘retaliatory campaign’ against university

(CN) — Harvard University claims the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking the school’s race-related admissions records is just the latest example of the Trump administration’s “retaliatory campaign” against the Ivy League college.

In a motion to dismiss filed Wednesday night, Harvard claims it’s endured a “government-initiated onslaught” since President Donald Trump reclaimed the White House that violates the top college’s constitutional rights.

“President Trump has publicly expressed his beliefs that ‘Harvard has lost its way,’ that it ‘has been hiring almost all woke, radical left, idiots and birdbrains,’ and that ‘Harvard is a JOKE.’ The rest of the executive branch has followed the president’s lead,” Harvard claims in the 28-page filing.

The entry stems from the DOJ’s February lawsuit against the school, which claims it unlawfully withheld race-related admissions records from the government amid an ongoing anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination investigation. Harvard insists it has complied as much as the law requires, and that the lawsuit was a hasty and political move aimed at battering it into complying with Trump’s war on diversity initiatives.

In the latest filing, Harvard cites public statements from White House officials — including Trump himself — that it claims shows a deliberate targeting campaign from the administration.

In February, Trump said “Harvard has been, for a long time, behaving very badly” and that the government “want[s] nothing further to do, in the future, with Harvard University.”

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said after the lawsuit was filed that the DOJ pinpointed Harvard to get more “bang for the buck” since it was “disproportionately influential and global.”

“A few days after this lawsuit was filed, the president publicly told Dhillon: ‘Good, good. You keep suing them [Harvard]. To hell with them,’” Harvard wrote in the dismissal brief.

According to Harvard, these statements show that the government “singled out” the school and should justify the case’s dismissal. It claims the Trump administration is now “suing Harvard for the same reason it has assailed the university in many other ways for over a year: to retaliate for its exercise of First Amendment rights.”

The college also claims the DOJ skirted the typical process required to enforce their demand for admissions records under Title VI. The DOJ never made a good-faith effort to reach a voluntary resolution with Harvard before filing suit, the school argues, nor did the government notify Harvard that it had failed to comply.

Additionally, Harvard claims its objections to the data requests were ignored by the Department of Education, which supposedly disregarded its own procedures by declining to negotiate with the school.

In its February complaint, the DOJ claims Harvard “has a recent history of racial discrimination” based on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The government said it was seeking race-based admissions records as part of a probe into whether the school’s compliance with these initiatives has led to an unfairly lower admission rate of white and Asian applicants.

The lawsuit comes at the intersection of the Trump administration’s culture war attacks on both DEI and higher education.

Harvard, in particular, has been in Trump’s crosshairs on several occasions. The president previously floated fines ranging from $200 million to $500 million for a myriad of supposed wrongdoing by the university, starting with his claim that it didn’t do enough to stop antisemitism on its campus during pro-Palestine protests in 2024.

Fellow Ivy League institution Columbia University gave into similar pressure from the administration when it agreed to a $200 million settlement over the antisemitism claims.

Harvard has remained resistant, however, filing lawsuits of its own to stop the government’s bids to influence it. Last spring, Harvard sued the administration after it suddenly banned international students from enrolling, winning a ruling from a federal judge that accused the White House of using thousands of student visa holders as “pawns in the government’s escalating campaign of retaliation.”

In another 2025 suit, Harvard challenged the abrupt termination of more than $2 billion in research grants aimed at treating cancer and infectious diseases. Harvard won a court order blocking that, too, after the administration unsuccessfully sought to make that funding conditional on certain demands, including screening international students for their beliefs and installing pro-Trump administrators.

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