President and Fellows of Harvard College v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, et al.

On July 22, 2026, numerous legal organizations across the ideological spectrum -- including the ACLU of New Hampshire -- filed an amicus brief urging the First Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a district court’s order blocking the Trump administration’s attempted hostile ideological takeover of Harvard University.

The federal government decided to withhold billions of dollars in research funding from Harvard University after the university refused to vet its students, faculty, and course offerings for “ideological diversity” and place certain departments and centers at odds with the government’s preferred viewpoint – such as the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures – under a third party audit.

On June 9, 2025, the ACLU and numerous other organizations filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard’s motion for summary judgement. On September 3, 2025, the federal court in the District of Massachusetts blocked the government’s attacks on Harvard. The judge noted that the Trump administration tried to “force Harvard to better manifest the government’s favored worldview,” in direct violation of the university’s right to free speech.

Today, the following organizations, together filed an amicus brief asking the appellate court to affirm the lower court’s ruling that the administration's actions are unconstitutional:

• ACLU
• ACLU of Massachusetts
• ACLU of Maine
• ACLU of New Hampshire
• ACLU of Puerto Rico
• ACLU of Rhode Island
• Cato Institute
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Knight First Amendment Institute
• National Coalition Against Censorship
• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
• Rutherford Institute

The brief’s key arguments:

• “The administration’s conduct is unconstitutional any way you slice it: It represents an effort by this administration to impose ‘its own conception of speech nirvana’ on a private institution . . . ; it improperly seeks to leverage federal research funds in a viewpoint-based way, to control speech outside of the scope of the program, and to control the work of a private university—each of which is unconstitutional in its own right.” The government sought to unconstitutionally coerce Harvard to hire faculty, admit students, and make research choices that aligned with the government’s preferred ideological tilt, a viewpoint-based condition for funding that is unconstitutional.

• “The First Amendment principle of academic freedom prohibits the government from imposing ideological admissions, hiring, and programmatic requirements on colleges and universities.” The First Amendment retaliation and coercion in this case is all the more egregious because it targets an institution of higher education, whose choices about who to teach, what to teach, and who should do the teaching are all protected by the First Amendment.