Middle East Studies Association of North America
Court rules on Harvard College v. HHS Lawsuit in Favor of Harvard
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) welcomes a court decision striking down the Trump administration’s freezing of over $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard University. MESA filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Harvard in June in which we argued that the government’s coercion of Harvard violated the First Amendment and induced Harvard to take steps curtailing Middle East studies at the university.
On September 3, 2025, Judge Allison Burroughs found that the government’s threats to Harvard violated the First Amendment and that its pretextual use of antisemitism allegations flew in the face of federal anti-discrimination law, “ignor[ing] the procedural requirements of Title VI.” The court found that “there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism. In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that [the government] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
Nonetheless, MESA expresses dismay that Burroughs’ decision seems to endorse the false narrative that equates protest, scholarship, and other speech on Palestine with antisemitism. In its order, the court reprises claims, “based solely on Harvard’s own admissions,” that “Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism.” Yet Harvard’s “admissions” are based on the work of a task force that was neither an investigative body nor one that required corroborating evidence for the allegations it collected. In other words, no credible investigation of these allegations on Harvard’s campus has ever been completed. In her order, Burroughs regrettably follows the government’s example, which she herself describes as “simply quot[ing] conclusory language from the final report of Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.”
As MESA noted in its amicus brief, “[t]he government’s actions against Harvard violate core First Amendment protections by threatening funding cuts and other sanctions to coerce Harvard into changing how it manages the speech of its faculty and students, particularly […] about the Middle East and, more specifically, the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Harvard’s efforts to appease the government included closing or curtailing at least three academic programs connected to the Middle East, forcing out the director and associate director of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies, ending a collaboration between the Harvard public health and human rights program and Birzeit University, and suspending the Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative.
MESA recognizes that the court’s decision is an important, albeit partial, victory, in favor of academic freedom and First Amendment rights in American higher education. At the same time, MESA urges all parties in this case and in similar circumstances across the country to refrain from conflating pro-Palestine protest, scholarship and other speech on campuses with antisemitism and to resist pressure to appease the Trump administration by imposing new constraints on teaching, research, scholarship and speech about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom.
Contact: Task Force on Civil and Human Rights (tfchr@mesana.org)
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