Harvard President Says Had 'No Choice' But to Sue Federal Government

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00:00Recently, it's been in the news because Harvard sued the federal government,

00:04which was a very unusual thing for Harvard to do.

00:07Why did Harvard sue the federal government, and what's the status of that case?

00:12Well, I can only tell you a little bit about the status of the case,

00:16except what's publicly known, which is that we received a favorable judgment in district court.

00:24And I think you're referring to the lawsuit in which we alleged First Amendment violations

00:31as well as procedural violations by the federal government when they cut off our funding.

00:39And we sued because they cut off our funding.

00:43We should be very clear about that.

00:45It was done in a precipitous manner without any real process.

00:51And I won't go into all the details.

00:53It's part of the public record, but suffice it to say that we really had no choice

00:58because we had hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

01:03And I want to point out one other thing.

01:05This was not in the form of gifts or subsidies.

01:10It was payment for research that we were performing at the behest of the federal government.

01:17We were fulfilling our obligations under the terms of the grants and contracts

01:22that the federal government issued.

01:24So how much money was frozen?

01:27It's on the order of, it's a little bit hard to be precise, but on the order of $600 million.