The case that will be before Judge Allison D. Burroughs began in April, after the Trump administration began to cut off billions of dollars in federal grants to Harvard. The university sued to restore the funding, contending, among other arguments, that the administration’s tactics were violating the university’s First Amendment rights.

On Monday, both Harvard and the government will try to persuade Judge Burroughs to rule in their favor outright. Her decision will be a milestone in a case that could eventually reach the Supreme Court on appeal and is already being regarded by West Wing officials and Harvard leaders as another bargaining chip.

Before the lawsuit, the administration sent Harvard an extraordinary list of conditions, including new policies on hiring, admissions and faculty influence, compulsory reports to the government and audits of academic programs and departments. Since then, although officials acknowledged that sending the letter was a mistake, the government has barely budged from the demands.

And Trump aides have regarded the university’s proposals as insufficient and anodyne.

“The Trump administration’s proposition is simple and common-sense: Don’t allow antisemitism and D.E.I. to run your campus, don’t break the law, and protect the civil liberties of all students,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “We are confident that Harvard will eventually come around and support the president’s vision.”

Harvard declined to comment.

Drawing out the talks has some benefits, too.

Polls have suggested many Americans have become more distrustful of higher education, and the government’s campaign has demonstrated the vulnerabilities of elite schools, which Mr. Trump and his allies argue have been captive to liberal ideas. Trump administration officials have especially reveled in squeezing Harvard, which, like other major universities, is deeply reliant on federal research money.

The stakes for Harvard will be in focus on July 21 when a federal judge in Boston hears arguments on whether the Trump administration illegally froze over US$2 billion (S$2.57 billion) in research funding, as the university claims.

– Dr Kit Parker is used to being an anomaly on Harvard University’s campus. The physicist – an army reserve colonel who served in Afghanistan – is a long-time critic of the school’s hiring practices and what he sees as liberal biases.

For months, he has urged the university to address criticisms from the White House, even as the vast majority of his colleagues applauded Harvard’s decision to resist President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape higher education.

These days, in Dr Parker’s telling, he finds himself less isolated as Harvard confronts the harsh realities of a sustained fight with the US government.

Three months after university president Alan Garber struck a defiant tone by vowing not to “surrender its independence or its constitutional rights”, an increasingly vocal group of professors across schools, including engineering, law and medicine, say Harvard should reach a deal.

Faculty such as Dr Parker and Dr Eric Maskin, an economics and mathematics professor who won a Nobel Prize in 2007, want Harvard to resolve the clash with Mr Trump before punishing financial penalties cause irreparable damage to the school and the US. They and other faculty agree that reform is needed to address issues including anti-Semitism, political bias and academic rigour. Harvard declined to comment on negotiations with the government.

The stakes for Harvard will be in focus on July 21, when a federal judge in Boston hears arguments on whether the Trump administration illegally froze more than US$2 billion (S$2.57 billion) in research funding, as the university claims.

In a sign that the Trump administration is not running out of ways to challenge the school, government agencies in July threatened Harvard’s accreditation and subpoenaed data on its international students.

Just last week, Dr Garber warned that the combined impact of the federal government’s actions could cost the school as much as US$1 billion annually – a figure that takes into account federal research cuts, a higher endowment tax and the government’s continuing attempt to ban it from enrolling foreign students. Dr Garber said the school will continue to slash expenditures and that a hiring freeze will remain in place.

“There’s a point at which the grant cuts destroy Harvard as a leading university,” said law professor Mark Ramseyer. “That point is far below US$1 billion. So we were already fully in the disaster zone.”

Faculty members like Dr Parker, Dr Maskin and Dr Ramseyer – all members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a campus group that says it supports free inquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse – remain a minority in the wider Harvard community.

In a survey of professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), 71 per cent said they believed Harvard should not try to reach an agreement with the Trump administration. The poll was conducted by the student newspaper in April and May, and less than a third of some 1,400 professors it was distributed to responded, meaning it might not be a representative sample of views overall. FAS houses 40 academic departments.

An alumni group called Crimson Courage continues to urge Dr Garber to fight, and many students would find a settlement unpalatable. “Standing strong is not merely an operational exercise: it is a moral imperative,” Crimson Courage said in June in a letter to Dr Garber and the board that oversees the university. “The world is watching and needs Harvard’s leadership and courage now.”

The splits hint at the delicate position Harvard’s leadership is in after months of standing up to the Trump administration, including by suing the government for cutting off federal funding and to prevent a ban on international students.

In the hearing on July 21 in the federal funding case, Harvard is poised to argue that the administration’s freeze violated its First Amendment rights and failed to follow proper procedures under civil rights law. But the administration argues that Harvard failed to address anti-Semitism, and the US acted properly under federal law in terminating funding.

Harvard has said it is working to combat anti-Semitism with steps like updating its rules on use of campus spaces, reviewing its disciplinary processes and funding projects aimed at bridging campus divisions.

For Dr Garber and the Harvard Corporation, the powerful governing body led by Ms Penny Pritzker, striking a deal quickly would offer significant benefits.

Students are set to start returning to campus in a matter of weeks, so reaching a settlement before then would potentially allow the school to provide a measure of clarity to international students before the start of the academic year. If funding were restored as part of an agreement, it could also end months of uncertainty for researchers.

Mr David Bergeron, a former acting assistant secretary at the Department of Education in Mr Barack Obama’s administration, pointed to another advantage for Harvard of arriving at an agreement soon.

“There are fewer faculty and students around in the summer to object,” Mr Bergeron said.

Now that the school has become an avatar for resistance to Mr Trump’s efforts to transform higher education, a settlement will be perceived by some key constituencies as a capitulation.

Dr Bertha Madras, who has been a professor at Harvard Medical School since 1986, said she thinks some of the changes that could stem from an agreement would benefit the university – even if she thought Mr Trump’s tactics for achieving them were aggressive.

“This new reality calls for institutional pride to yield to negotiations,” said the professor of psychobiology, adding that she sees “an opportunity for timely self-examination and fast-track reforms”.

Dr Maskin, who is one of seven co-presidents of the Council on Academic Freedom, holds a similar view.

“There are plenty of things that Harvard could be doing and should be doing. To go ahead and do them is not caving. It’s making the university better,” he said.

Still, it’s not clear how much progress Harvard and the Trump administration have made towards a deal.

While President Trump said in June that Harvard was close to a “mindbogglingly” historic deal, Bloomberg News later reported that talks between the administration and the school had stalled. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in July that the administration was “negotiating hard” with both Harvard and Columbia University.

“I think we’re getting close to having that happen. It’s not wrapped up as fast as I wanted to, but we’re getting there,” she added. BLOOMBERG

BOSTON — Attorneys for the nation’s oldest university sparred with a government lawyer on Monday in a legal showdown that could determine whether the administration’s attempts to cut billions of dollars in research funding is legal. A federal judge heard arguments from a team of attorneys for Harvard University and its chapter of the American Association of University Professors and from one lawyer for the federal government, peppering them with questions as Harvard cast its arguments as a First Amendment case and the government sought to frame it as simply a dispute over money and contracts.

The hearing represents a pivotal moment in the battle between Harvard and the Trump administration in an unprecedented case that is being watched by all of higher education.

Harvard has challenged the administration’s move to slash billions of dollars in federal research funding, calling it unlawful and unconstitutional, with critical scientific research and the autonomy of the nearly 400-year-old university on the line. The Trump administration’s lawyer said the government froze the funding because the school had not done enough to combat antisemitism.

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Both sides had asked the judge to issue a ruling in the case without a trial, but U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ended the hearing without a decision. Burroughs acknowledged that both sides want a rapid resolution; Harvard, in particular, has pleaded urgency in hopes that the funding terminations will not become final.

Steven P. Lehotsky, who argued for Harvard, called the government’s actions a blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment, touching a “constitutional third rail” that threatened the academic freedom of private universities.

The attorney for the government cast the case as a fight over billions of dollars. “Harvard is here because it wants the money,” said Michael Velchik, a Justice Department lawyer. But the government can choke the flow of taxpayer dollars to institutions that show a “deliberate indifference to antisemitism,” he said.

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President Donald Trump reacted to the hearing Monday afternoon with a post on social media about the judge. “She is a TOTAL DISASTER, which I say even before hearing her Ruling.” He called Harvard “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America.”

“How did this Trump-hating Judge get these cases? When she rules against us, we will IMMEDIATELY appeal, and WIN. Also, the Government will stop the practice of giving many Billions of Dollars to Harvard,” he said.

Spokespeople for Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday about the president’s remarks.

Peter McDonough, vice president and general counsel at the American Council on Education, said all of higher education could be impacted by the case. “And I don’t think it is too dramatic to say that Americans and the constitutional protections that they value are in court,” he said.

“Freedom of speech is on trial, due process is on trial,” he said, with the executive branch of the government essentially charged with having violated those rights.

The Trump administration has engaged in intense efforts to force changes in higher education, which it has said has been captured by leftist ideology and has not done enough to combat antisemitism in the wake of protests at some colleges over the Israel-Gaza war.

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Its biggest target has been Harvard.

The Trump administration announced earlier this year that it would review nearly $9 billion in federal funding to the school and its affiliates, including local hospitals whose physicians teach at Harvard Medical School. In April, a letter from a federal antisemitism task force, alluding to civil rights law, demanded that the university upend its governance, hiring, student discipline and admissions, and submit to years-long federal oversight over multiple aspects of its operations.

Hours later, the Trump administration announced it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard. It has also launched multiple investigations into the Ivy League institution’s operations, threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, and moved to block its ability to enroll international students.

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Harvard filed a lawsuit challenging the funding cuts, and later filed another to counter the administration’s effort to block international students and scholars from Harvard. In the latter case, Burroughs twice ruled swiftly in Harvard’s favor, allowing the university to continue welcoming non-U.S. students while the case proceeds.

On Monday, Harvard’s lawyers argued that the government violated the school’s First Amendment rights, ignored the requirements of federal civil rights law and that its actions were unlawfully arbitrary and capricious.

Any claim that Harvard is simply interested in getting money back is “just false,” Lehotsky said. “We’re here for our constitutional rights.”

He called the government’s actions an end-run around Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and compared it to the scene in “Alice in Wonderland” in which the queen orders that sentence comes first then the verdict afterward, with the funding freeze preceding the investigation required by statute.

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“The government now says Title VI is totally irrelevant,” he said, arguing they had cooked up a post hoc rationale.

Harvard had asked the judge to grant a summary judgment, set aside the funding freezes and terminations, and block any similar actions as soon as possible before Sept. 3, after which the university believes the government will take the position that restoration of the funds is not possible.

Velchik, the Justice Department attorney, himself a Harvard alumnus, defended the government’s decisions to slash the university’s funding in response to what he said was its failure to tackle antisemitism.

“Harvard does not have a monopoly on the truth,” he said. Those same funds would be “better spent going to HBCUs or community colleges.”

The government canceled the grants under an obscure regulation that allows it to terminate funding when they no longer align with agency priorities. “Harvard should have read the fine print,” Velchik said.

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While Burroughs pushed both sides to justify their arguments, she appeared skeptical of the administration’s rationale for the cuts.

She repeatedly pressed the government on what process it had followed in deciding to terminate a major portion of Harvard’s federal funding.

“This is a big stumbling block for me,” she said, even as she acknowledged the government had argued some of its points well (a “Harvard education is paying off for you,” she told Velchik).

Burroughs noted that the government had apparently slashed Harvard’s funding without following any established procedure or even examining the steps Harvard itself had taken to combat antisemitism.

If the administration can base its decision on reasons connected to protected speech, Burroughs said, the consequences for “constitutional law are staggering.”

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At one point, Velchik appeared to grow emotional. He spoke about wanting to go to Harvard since he was a child, then seeing the campus “besieged by protesters” and hearing about Jewish students wearing baseball caps to hide their kippot, a visible sign of their identity. “It’s sick, federal taxpayers should not support this,” he said.

Burroughs also spoke about the case in unusually personal terms. “I am both Jewish and American,” she said. Harvard itself has acknowledged antisemitism as an issue, she said.

But “what is the connection to cutting off funding to Alzheimer’s or cancer research?” she asked. “One could argue it hurts Americans and Jews.”

A complaint by Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors against the Trump administration, filed before the university took action, is being heard concurrently with Harvard’s case.

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In its court filings, the Justice Department urged Burroughs to reject Harvard’s request for summary judgment.

Summary judgment is a motion in which a party in a civil suit asks a judge to decide a case before it goes to trial.

To win a summary judgment, the party filing the motion must show there is no genuine dispute over the central facts of the case and they would prevail on the legal merits if the case were to go to trial.

Harvard supporters, with crimson colored shirts, signs and hats along with American flag pins, crowded around the main entrance of the John Joseph Moakley federal courthouse Monday afternoon. About 100 alumni, faculty, staff and students rallied in a joint protest with the Crimson Courage alumni group and supporters of the American Association of University Professors union.

“What the federal administration is doing is basically co-opting American values for their own political ends, and we are determined to say this is not what America is about,” said Evelyn J. Kim, a co-chair of the Crimson Courage communications team and a 1995 Harvard graduate. “America is about the values that allow for Harvard to exist.”

Walter Willett, 80, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, biked to the rally to deliver a speech to the group. In May, $3.6 million of National Institutes of Health grant money that funded Willett’s research on breast cancer and women’s and men’s health was cut, he said. It is critical to push back against the administration, Willett said. “In this case, our basic freedom — what we’re fighting for — is also at stake.”

The stakes are high — and not just for Harvard.

More than a dozen amicus briefs filed in support of Harvard argue that the Trump administration is imperiling academic freedom, the autonomy of institutions of higher education and the decades-long research partnership between universities and the federal government.

Eighteen former officials who served in past Democratic and Republican administrations noted in a brief that they were aware of no instances in more than 40 years where federal funds had been terminated under Title VI, the provision of civil rights law that Trump officials have in some cases cited in slashing Harvard’s grants.

The Trump administration received outside support in a brief filed by the attorneys general of 16 states, led by Iowa. “There are apparently three constant truths in American life: death, taxes, and Harvard University’s discrimination against Jews,” it said, citing Harvard’s own internal report on antisemitism on campus.

Harvard has taken numerous steps to address antisemitism after protests over the Israel-Gaza war in the 2023-2024 academic year sparked concerns from some Jewish and Israeli students, but the Trump administration has repeatedly said the problem persists and must be acted upon forcefully.

James McAffrey, 22, a senior and first-generation college student from Oklahoma, co-chairs the Harvard Students for Freedom, a student group that joined the rally Monday to support the school.

He said the Trump administration’s actions pose a threat to the nation’s well-being.

“I think the reality is it’s time for us to root out the evils of anti-Americanism in the Trump administration,” he said.

A federal court ruled on Thursday that President Trump’s firing of a Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission was illegal and that she was a “rightful member” of the agency.

In March, Mr. Trump dismissed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, an F.T.C. commissioner, and her colleague Alvaro Bedoya from their positions as he asserted control over agencies that regulate companies and workplaces. The move challenged longstanding legal precedent that members of the F.T.C. can be fired only for a narrow set of reasons.

Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in her ruling on Thursday that because “those protections remain constitutional, as they have for almost a century, Ms. Slaughter’s purported removal was unlawful and without legal effect.”

Mr. Bedoya also challenged his removal. But he resigned from the commission in June, saying he could not afford to have no income while his position at the agency was debated in court. As a result, Judge AliKhan dismissed his claims.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a contentious executive order ending birthright citizenship after certifying a lawsuit as a class action, effectively the only way he could impose such a far-reaching limit after a Supreme Court ruling last month.

Ruling from the bench, Judge Joseph N. Laplante of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire said his decision applied nationwide to babies who would have been subject to the executive order, which included the children of undocumented parents and those born to academics in the United States on student visas, on or after Feb. 20.

The Trump administration has fought to challenge the longstanding law, laid out in the Constitution, that people born in the United States are automatically citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Judge Laplante’s order reignites a legal standoff that has been underway since the beginning of President Trump’s second term.

The judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush, issued a written order formalizing the ruling on Thursday morning. He also paused his order for seven days, allowing time for an appeal.