The College signed onto an amicus brief filed July 22 with the First Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Harvard University’s April lawsuit against the Trump Administration. Thirty-five other colleges and universities also signed the brief, including all Ivy League universities except Harvard.
In the ongoing case, the Trump administration is appealing a September 2025 ruling in favor of Harvard after the administration froze $2.2 billion in federal grants because the university refused to comply with federal demands to make institutional changes such as reforming admissions and hiring practices, shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion practices and addressing antisemitism “or other bias” in campus programs.
The brief argues that “even temporary cuts” to federal research funding could have “permanent effects” which “endangers” the “life-changing and history-altering innovations” that arise from “basic research” conducted at colleges and universities.
“Draconian cuts to federal research funding endanger this longstanding, mutually beneficial relationship between institutions of higher learning and the American public — especially when funding is terminated or withheld for reasons wholly unrelated to the merits of funded research,” the brief reads.
Amici institutions listed advancements in “scientific progress” made possible by federal funding — such as the computer, DNA sequencing, the pacemaker and the “decades-long collaboration among academia, government and industry” which produced the internet — as “enormous long-term benefits” of university research.
“Federal funding is critical to those discoveries because the basic research universities and colleges conduct is so fundamental that it is hard to predict how it might be put to practical use, making the prospect of private commercial support for such research unlikely,” they wrote.
The brief argues that the cuts to Harvard’s funding will also impact “schools whose funding is not cut,” because “cutting-edge research is often conducted via collaboration,” citing joint research between Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University which could “yield tools to treat Alzheimer’s disease.” Both MIT and Princeton joined the brief.
The co-signers of the brief concluded that terminating federal funding “jeopardizes American innovation and economic growth,” by “limiting [colleges’ and universities’] ability to play their vital, longstanding roles in expanding scientific knowledge.”
The second Trump administration has conducted a sweeping crackdown against colleges and universities, issuing punitive funding cuts against multiple universities in an effort to shape admissions practices and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Dartmouth largely avoided similar confrontation until the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into the Geisel School of Medicine and four other medical schools on July 22.
In December 2024, the College adopted an institutional restraint policy that recommends institutional statements should be issued “sparingly — typically when external events have a direct impact upon the relationship of the institution to its members.” Since the Trump administration began its campaign to reform higher education, however, Dartmouth has joined other amicus briefs, including one last June in support of Harvard’s initial lawsuit against the Trump administration after federal funding cuts.
The Harvard case satisfies the exception outlined in the institutional restraint policy which allows Dartmouth’s senior leadership to “reaffirm Dartmouth’s core values and commit to taking actions in support thereof” when “issues directly relating to Dartmouth’s mission” are threatened, College spokesperson Kathryn Kennedy wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.
“Institutional restraint specifically allows us to defend our shared academic mission,” Kennedy wrote.
At the time of publication, College president Sian Leah Beilock and general counsel Matt Raymer ’03 did not respond to requests for comment on the brief and its relationship to the College’s institutional restraint policy.
Tierney Flavin ’28 is a reporter and editor. She is from Kansas City, Mo. and plans to major in Government and Sociology.
