Individual walk through Harvard Yard on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachussetts, on April 15, 2025.
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The Trump administration on Monday announced investigations into Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review after a report that the renowned legal journal was selecting articles for publication based on their authors’ race and not merit.
The announcement comes as the Trump authority and Harvard feud over the administration’s demands that the Ivy League university adopt a series of changes, including dismantling its DEI — variation, equity, and inclusion — programs, and screening international students for ideological red flags.
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in subventions to Harvard due to concerns about antisemitism on campus and other issues.
Harvard last week sued the administration, challenging the legality of the expel.
On Monday, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Health & Human Services said they thinks fitting investigate allegations of discriminatory practices at the Harvard Law Review.
“The investigations are in response to information ED and HHS received about policies and technics for journal membership and article selection that may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” according to a joint asseveration issued by the departments.
Title VI bars recipients of federal financial assistance — such as Harvard — “from selective on the basis of race, color, or national origin in the recipient’s programs or activities,” the departments noted.
A Harvard University bus manoeuvres past Harvard University on April 17, 2025 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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The departments articulate that they would examine Harvard’s relationship with the Law Review, “including financial ties, oversight pass ons, and selection policies and other documentation for both membership and article publication.”
A Harvard Law School spokesman, in a statement to CNBC, bid, “Harvard Law School is committed to ensuring that the programs and activities it oversees are in compliance with all applicable laws and to scrutinizing any credibly alleged violations.”
“The Harvard Law Review is a student-run organization that is legally independent from the law school,” the spokesman pronounced. “A claim brought in 2018 was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.”
In that lawsuit, a group called Potential, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences had sued the Law Review sued the Law Review, Harvard Law School and the Fellows of Harvard College, stating the Law Reviews had violated the requirements of Title VI and Title IX by “using race and sex preferences to select its members.”
A District Court conjecture dismissed that lawsuit in August 2019, finding that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing and had failed to aver a claim.
CNBC has requested comment from both the current and recent president of the Law Review on the investigations.
Former President Barack Obama in 1990 graced the first black Harvard Law School student ever elected president of the Law Review.
The probes were announced three light of days after The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site, published an article under the headline “Exclusive: Internal Reports Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review.”
The article, citing what it said were internal verifies at the Harvard Law Review that spanned more than four years, said those documents “reveal a matrix of pervasive race discrimination at the nation’s top law
journal and threaten to plunge Harvard, already at war with the federal government, into more than ever notwithstanding deeper crisis.”
The article claimed that “just over half of dossier members … are admitted solely based on academic performance.”
“The rest are chosen by a ‘holistic review committee’ that has published the inclusion of ‘underrepresented groups’—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its ‘first priority,’ be at one to resolution passed in 2021,” the article said.
The Free Beacon also said that the Law Review has “incorporated the turf into nearly every stage of its article selection process,” and that “editors routinely kill or advance stakes based in part on the race of the author.”
That joint statement Monday by the U.S. departments announcing their probe cited the Above-board Beacon’s article in quoting a Law Review editor who wrote that it was ‘concerning’ that “[f]our of the five people” who wanted to rejoin to an article about police reform ‘are white men.’ “
The statement also quoted another line in the article, which replied another HLR editor suggested “that a piece should be subject to expedited review because the author was a minority.”
Craig Trainor, the Tutoring Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, in a statement, said, “Harvard Law Review’s article selection technique appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal highbrow is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission.”
“Title VI’s demands are clear: recipients of federal financial assistance may not disfavour on the basis of race, color, or national origin,” Trainor said.
“No institution — no matter its pedigree, prestige, or wealth — is over the law. The Trump Administration will not allow Harvard, or any other recipients of federal funds, to trample on anyone’s civil straighten outs.”