U.S. President Donald Trump's administration said Monday that Harvard and Harvard commented on whether they violated civil rights laws when editors of the journal quickly comply with an article written by minority members.
News of the new investigation comes hours after a federal judge agreed to speed up the lawsuit at Harvard University, which aims to prevent the Trump administration from freezing more than $2 billion in federal grant funds as Ivey Alliance schools warn that it will threaten important medical and scientific research.
The U.S. Department of Education, Health and Human Services said the Harvard Law Review editor may have violated Chapter 6 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and engaged in “racial-based discrimination.”
“The article selection process of Harvard Law Review appears to be based on race to select winners and losers, adopting the Lenos system in which the race of legal scholars is more important than the merits submitted,” the acting assistant assistant secretary of the Department of Education said in a statement.
A Harvard representative said in a statement that the school is “committed to ensuring that the programs and activities it supervises comply with all applicable laws and investigate any breach that is reliablely charged.”
Comment now without legal comments
The Harvard Law Review representative is a legally independent student organization that does not immediately respond to emails seeking comments.
Earlier, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs warned at Harvard University that freezes and additional threat cuts put research at risk.
Monday’s hearing was her first since Harvard’s indictment last week for refusing to keep the president of Cambridge, Massachusetts, talking about illegal demands from the government’s anti-Semitism task force, “control the people we hire and what we teach.”
These requirements include requiring private universities to reorganize their governance, change their recruitment and admission practices to ensure ideological balance of perspectives and end certain academic programs.
Harvard University has said that despite its commitment to combat anti-Semitism, the government's comprehensive demands violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.
Rather than seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the freezing before the lawsuit’s outcome, Harvard chose to skip the merits of a case that was directly resolved with the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Justice requested a judge to be promptly resolved.
Tensions between universities, Trump administration
Harvard and other universities have seen the threat of the government’s federal funding for how they handled last year’s protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
These schools are also on the government’s crosshairs, such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and transgender policies.
Since taking office, Trump has been cracking down on DEI programs aimed at improving marginalized groups facing historical inequality. He took these steps aimed at helping ethnic minorities discriminate against groups like whites and men.
The Trump administration announced in late March that it would initiate a review of the U.S. contract with Harvard University, indicating that the school failed to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism, including during campus protests.
Since then, the Trump administration has frozen more than $2 billion in U.S. funds and threatened to deprive him of tax-free status and deprive him of his ability to enroll foreign students. It also requires information on university foreign relations, funding, students and faculty.
