A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on Thursday by US President Donald Trump’s administration that alleged that Harvard University failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment.

US District Judge Richard Stearns in Boston said in his ruling that the administration’s lawsuit, which was filed in March, had not plausibly shown an ongoing violation of federal civil rights law on Harvard’s campus.

Stearns ruled that the government’s evidence for Harvard having committed Title VI civil rights violations was “too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.”

The judge said the lawsuit did not adequately allege failures by the Ivy League school after the government told Harvard in June 2025 that it was not complying with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination based on race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal funding.

Trump’s suit against the Ivy League school, first filed in March, was a cornerstone of his administration’s aggressive and contentious fight against campus antisemitism. Harvard was among the most prominent schools to have experienced severe tensions, including incidents directly targeting Jewish students and “Zionists,” in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught in Israel. The school settled cases with some Jewish students and put forward its own plans to fight antisemitism.

Yet unlike some other schools, Harvard resisted the government’s efforts to make concessions and pay a fine in order to resolve Title VI cases. The school also fought the Trump administration’s 2025 freezing of more than $2 billion in........

© The Times of Israel