On June 6, Dartmouth and 17 other universities backed Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Trump administration after federal funding cuts.
The schools have requested to file an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. district court of Massachusetts that describes the impact of research freezes.
“The federal funding terminations challenged in this lawsuit inflict grievous harm that extends well beyond Harvard University,” the motion reads. “As amici intend to explain, academic research is an interconnected enterprise. The elimination of funding at Harvard negatively impacts the entire ecosystem.”
This is the fifth lawsuit against Trump’s freezes that Dartmouth has supported. The College has filed other declarations that “demonstrate the harm” that funding cuts “pose to research and American competitiveness,” according to College spokesperson Jana Barnello.
The past lawsuits were in response to funding cuts from the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.
Dartmouth’s involvement in the clash between higher education and the Trump administration has stirred controversy on campus.
College President Sian Leah Beilock received heat from some community members as the only Ivy League president to abstain from signing a letter against funding freezes. More than 1,800 individuals signed an April 9 public letter on Change.org calling for Beilock and the Board of Trustees to publicly condemn the Trump administration’s “attacks” on the academic freedom of universities. Further, over a third of faculty members signed an open letter asking Beilock to “defend the values” of higher education.
At the same time, more than 550 community members signed a petition in support of Beilock’s response to the Trump administration.
The motion, however, is explicit about the potential impact of cuts.
“The cuts will disrupt ongoing research, ruin experiments and datasets, destroy the careers of aspiring scientists, and deter long-term investments at universities across the country, including amici,” it reads. “Amici can therefore offer a broader perspective of how these devastating consequences will play out, adding dimensionality to the argument that the funding cuts fundamentally threaten the longstanding, mutually beneficial partnership between the government and academia that has powered American innovation and ensured American leadership for over 80 years.”
Other universities that signed on to the motion include Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University.
The lawsuit the College is supporting, “President and Fellows of Harvard College v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,” was filed by Harvard on April 21 and alleges that the Trump administration’s decision to freeze over $2 billion in grant funding to the Havard is unlawful.
The Trump administration imposed the funding freeze in mid April after Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the administration, which included reporting international students who violate university policies to federal authorities and reducing the power of students and faculty in university operations.
Correction Appended (June 7, 3:06 p.m.): A previous version of this article erroneously stated that this is the fourth lawsuit Dartmouth has joined against federal funding freezes.
