Harvard professors are suing Trump’s administration about the threat of federal funds

Two groups that represent Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday and said that his threat of shortening billions of federal funds for the university violated freedom of speech and other rights of first aid.

The American Association of University Professors’ complaint and the Harvard Faculty Chapter of the group follows the announcement of the Trump administration at the beginning of this month that Harvard’s federal financing has checked around 9 billion US dollars. The administration also sent the school a list of demands that it must meet if it wants to keep the funds.

The lawsuit submitted to the Federal District Court in Massachusetts requests a temporary injunction to prevent the Trump administration from reducing the funds.

“This campaign questions the illegal and unprecedented abuse of the federal financing and the enforcement authority of civil rights in order to undermine academic freedom and freedom of speech on a university campus,” says the lawsuit.

The White House did not immediately answer a request for comments.

The Trump administration has a campaign against elite universities, which it sees as a lax for anti -Semitism. In a recent letter to Harvard, the government said that the school “basically failed to protect American students and faculties from anti -Semitic violence”. Other top schools such as Columbia and Cornell were also targeted.

Harvard did not answer a request for comments on Saturday. In the past few weeks, Alan Garber, the president of the university, has said that Harvard has spent “considerable efforts” against anti -Semitism in the past 15 months and added that even more work should be done.

In a statement, Andrew Manuel Crespo, a legal professor in Harvard and General Counsel of the chapter of Aaup Harvard faculty, said that the government’s politics are an excuse to relax universities and their skills of language, teaching and research, which do not correspond to the views of President Trump.

“The Harvard faculty has the constitutional law of speaking, teaching and leading research without fear that the government will take revenge against its points of view by canceling grants,” said Crespo.

On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of demonstrators, including students, professors and even the mayor of Cambridge, to protest against the threat of the Trump government, defy the financing of Harvard. In a fully packed park in Cambridge, Massachusetts in which Harvards campus were, they asked the university to conduct the government’s prosecution against university education.

“Harvard not only has the resources to withstand the pressure,” said Mayor Denise Simmons from Cambridge, “but the moral obligation to do so.”

Miles J. Herzhorn controlled the reporting from Cambridge.