CAMBRIDGE, United States: Harvard is due to hold its annual graduation ceremony Thursday as a federal judge considers the legality of punitive measures taken against the university by President Donald Trump that threaten to overshadow festivities.

Thursday’s commencement comes as Trump piles unprecedented pressure on Harvard, seeking to ban it from having foreign students, shredding its contracts with the federal government, slashing its multibillion-dollar grants and challenging its tax-free status.

Harvard is challenging all of the measures in court.

The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump’s ire while publicly rejecting his administration’s repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula and research choices. The government claims Harvard tolerates antisemitism and liberal bias.

“Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” Trump said Wednesday.

Harvard president Alan Garber, who told National Public Radio on Tuesday that “sometimes they don’t like what we represent,” may speak to address the ceremony.

Garber has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with antisemitism, and has struggled to ensure that a variety of viewpoints can be safely heard on campus.

“What is perplexing is the measures that they have taken to address these (issues) don’t even hit the same people that they believe are causing the problems,” Garber told NPR.

Basketball star and human rights campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed the class of 2025 for Class Day on Wednesday.

“When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures,” he said, comparing Garber to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

Madeleine Riskin-Kutz, a Franco-American classics and linguistics student at Harvard, said some students were planning individual acts of protest against the Trump policies.

“The atmosphere (is) that just continuing on joyfully with the processions and the fanfare is in itself an act of resistance,” the 22-year-old said.

Garber has led the fight-back in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities including Columbia which made sweeping concessions to the administration in an effort to restore $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.

A federal judge in Boston will on Thursday hear arguments over Trump’s effort to exclude Harvard from the main system for sponsoring and hosting foreign students.

Judge Allison Burroughs quickly paused the policy which would have ended Harvard’s ability to bring students from abroad who currently make up 27 percent of its student body.

Harvard has since been flooded with inquiries from foreign students seeking to transfer to other institutions, Maureen Martin, director of immigration services, said Wednesday.

“Many international students and scholars are reporting significant emotional distress that is affecting their mental health and making it difficult to focus on their studies,” Martin wrote in a court filing.

Retired immigration judge Patricia Sheppard protested outside Harvard Yard on Wednesday, sporting a black judicial robe and brandishing a sign reading “for the rule of law.”

“We have to look at why some of these actions have been filed, and it does not seem to me seemly that a president would engage in certain actions as retribution,” she told AFP.

Ahead of the graduation ceremony, members of the Harvard band sporting distinctive crimson blazers and brandishing their instruments filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts – home to the elite school, America’s oldest university.

A huge stage had been erected and hundreds of chairs laid out in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public for the occasion.

Students wearing black academic gowns also toured through Cambridge with photo-taking family members, AFP correspondents saw.