A US federal court has rejected the Trump administration's lawsuit against Harvard University. This was reported by infohub.kz.

In a ruling on Thursday morning, US District Judge Richard Stearns in Boston said the administration's lawsuit, filed in March, failed to plausibly show an ongoing violation of federal civil rights law on Harvard's campus.

Stearns said the administration's complaint focused largely on a handful of incidents alleged in March 2025, calling them "too isolated and episodic" to support a claim of ongoing civil rights violations by Harvard.

Thursday's ruling deals a blow to Donald Trump and his officials, and their ongoing push to force the elite university to bow to its will – not only on the response to antisemitism, but also on a range of issues including race in admissions, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

In its original complaint, the Trump administration painted a dystopian picture of Harvard life in the wake of Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack. Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers said that Jewish and Israeli students were "harassed, physically assaulted, stalked, and spat upon" while the university administration's response had been to "do nothing".

The DoJ argued that this was a violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in federally funded programs on grounds of race or national origin.

In a brief but pointed four-page ruling, Stearns said he was not "diminishing any concern arising" from campus events in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks. However, he said the DoJ's complaint had misconstrued the remit of Title VI.

The judge ruled that in framing the 1964 legislation, Congress intended not to penalize a "wayward funding recipient" but instead to incentivize it to bring itself into compliance with Title VI. It was in essence forward-looking, rather than backward-looking, while the examples of alleged discrimination provided by the Trump administration in its complaint were almost entirely restricted to the 2023-24 academic year.

The Trump administration's later amended complaint was "devoid of any factual allegations" and evidence of noncompliance after it had put Harvard on notice under Title VI in June 2025. As a result, what the judge dismissively described as "the government's fevered forewarning of potential havoc" failed to meet the purpose of the enforcement action.