When a judge ruled last week that the Trump administration illegally froze more than $2 billion in federal research funding for Harvard University, it was a decisive legal victory for the institution and higher ed more broadly.

The administration has frozen nearly $6 billion at nine institutions, but Harvard is the only one to go to court over the freeze. This ruling likely has implications for those other universities, as well as for other lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s grant cuts.

But while Harvard won this legal battle, a larger war with the White House rages on.

Federal government officials quickly announced they would appeal the decision, setting up another round in a heavyweight legal fight that has far- reaching implications for higher education as the Trump administration seeks greater control over the sector—an effort that’s seen success elsewhere as other rich institutions under pressure agreed to settlements.

Now an appeal looms, and the fight is likely to end at the Trump-friendly Supreme Court.

A Murky Financial Picture

Judge Allison Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston blasted the federal government in an 84-page opinion, finding that the Trump administration violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

“The fact that defendants’ swift and sudden decision to terminate funding, ostensibly motivated by antisemitism, was made before they learned anything about antisemitism on campus or what was being done in response, leads the court to conclude that the sudden focus on antisemitism was, at best … arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual,” she wrote in the much-anticipated ruling.

The ruling, on paper, restored the federal research funding, but when those funds will resume flowing to Harvard remains unclear.

“Everything is theoretical when you have the White House already saying there will be an appeal,” explained Sarah Hartley, a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and co-chair of BCLP’s higher education team. “A lot will obviously be determined by whether the decision gets stayed pending an appeal and how quickly a resolution happens on appeal.”

She added that she doesn’t “expect the funding faucet to get turned right back on.”

Despite the judge’s ruling, the White House has claimed the authority to continue withholding funds, releasing a statement that declared Harvard “remains ineligible for grants in the future.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed on Friday. But legal experts have suggested a disconnect between the ruling and the White House statement. “I don’t know how they justify their position in light of the court’s order,” Hartley said.

Harvard declined to provide comment on the case Friday. But President Alan Garber’s statement following the ruling suggests that the university is gearing up for a long legal fight.

“Even as we acknowledge the important principles affirmed in today’s ruling, we will continue to assess the implications of the opinion, monitor further legal developments, and be mindful of the changing landscape in which we seek to fulfill our mission,” Garber wrote.

A Legal Road Map

Harvard’s decision to fight stands in stark contrast to other institutions that quickly settled.

Columbia University, for example, agreed to sweeping changes in response to federal pressure over how it handled alleged antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian campus protests last year. Columbia agreed to overhaul admissions, disciplinary processes, academic programs and more, and also to pay $221 million in return for the restoration of at least $400 million in frozen federal research funding. The Trump administration agreed to close pending investigations or compliance reviews at Columbia related to potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race or national origin.

In the aftermath of the settlement, Education Secretary Linda McMahon let it slip that the federal government had political motives beyond fighting antisemitism in seeking changes at Columbia.

“This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left–leaning professors,” McMahon said in a Fox Business interview in July.

It’s those kinds of admissions that Burroughs seized on in her ruling, pointing to multiple statements from President Donald Trump and others that indicated to her the funding freeze had little to do with fighting antisemitism. Burroughs specifically cited online statements from Trump in which he accused Harvard of “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students,” among other remarks. Even when Trump blasted Harvard for alleged indifference to antisemitism on social media, the judge noted, Trump added it was a “Far Left Institution” and a “Liberal mess.” Burroughs seemed to view those remarks as a confession of the government’s true intent.

Although Burroughs did not cite McMahon’s Columbia comments, she did point to other statements, such as the education secretary’s remarks about making sure Harvard was vetting international students before they were admitted to ensure they weren’t “activists.”

“These public statements corroborate that the government-initiated onslaught against Harvard was much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism,” Burroughs wrote.

Hartley believes the ruling offers similarly threatened institutions a road map for fighting back. While she noted that map will be shaped by the outcome of the appeal, she said other colleges “will have a similar basis for defending themselves against the administration’s attacks.”

In that same vein, she added that the federal government could also use this legal setback to sharpen attacks on the sector “if they wanted to be reasonable, rational and actually abide by the letter of the law in their determinations” and develop investigations with proper evidence.

A Sectorwide Victory

When Harvard emerged victorious, the legal win was felt (and celebrated) across the sector.

Groups such as the American Council on Education, the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression applauded the ruling as a victory against governmental overreach.

Harvard’s favorable ruling also prompted celebration from conservative critics of higher education, such as Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Education Freedom. (In June, the Cato Institute also filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard, alongside other organizations.)

“The evidence overwhelmingly points to the administration trying to use federal funding to strong-arm its ideological preferences on a private university, which is an unconstitutional incursion on freedom,” McCluskey wrote in a statement, calling the ruling “the right decision.”

Harvard’s win was felt far from Cambridge as college presidents at small liberal arts colleges with distinctly different missions from the large research university remarked on the ruling at a Thursday press dinner. Asked by an Inside Higher Ed reporter what the ruling meant for the sector broadly, some presidents said it brought solace—but noted the legal fight is far from over.

“I think it’s too early to tell what the long-term impact of that will be, because like so many other things that have happened in the last few months, it’s taking place in a context of tremendous ambiguity,” said Alison Byerly, president of Carleton College in Minnesota. “And I think many of us find that it is often difficult to understand what the actual impact of some of those [legal] decisions are.”

Others noted that despite the win, the actions against Harvard have shown how vulnerable the nation’s richest institution is, making the risks even greater for less-resourced Trump targets.

“It’s really clear that if you withhold research funding and you have to wait for a court system process to play out within multiple years, that even the wealthiest institutions can find themselves in existential conversations,” said Oberlin College president Carmen Twillie Ambar. “And as we think about the value of what we provide as a higher education sector, it’s exposed vulnerability in places like Harvard, and I think that that’s disconcerting for institutions that don’t even come close to that level of endowment or that level of diversity in revenue streams.”