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The Trump administration sued two groups that represented the Harvard University professors on Friday and said that his threat of shortening billions of federal funds for the university violated freedom of speech and other rights.
The grievance of the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group follows the announcement of the Trump administration this month that it has checked about 9 billion US dollars of federal financing that Harvard receives. The administration also sent the varsity a listing of demands that it must meet if it wants to maintain the funds.
The lawsuit submitted to the US district court in Massachusetts requests a brief injunction to stop 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 didn’t 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 federal government said that the varsity “basically failed to protect American students and faculties from anti -Semitic violence”. Other top schools, including the colleges in Columbia and Cornell, were targeted.
Harvard didn’t answer a request for a comment 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 prior to now 15 months and added that much more work was to be done.
In a proof, Andrew Manuel Crespo said a legal professor in Harvard and General Counsel of the Aaup Harvard faculty chapter that the federal government's politics are a pretext to chill out the colleges and their skills of language, teaching and research that don’t match President Donald Trump.
“The Harvard Faculty has the constitutional right to speak, teach and teach and operate without fear that the government will take revenge against its points of view by canceling grants,” said crespo.
On Saturday afternoon, a whole bunch of demonstrators, including students, professors and even the mayor of Cambridge, to protest against the federal government's threat, defy the financing of Harvard. In a completely packed park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through which Harvard's campus lived, they asked the university to conduct the administration against the federal government's procedure.
“Harvard not only has the resources to withstand the pressure,” said Mayor Denise Simmons from Cambridge, “but the moral obligation to do so.”
image credit : www.boston.com