Trump Admin Investigating Harvard and Harvard Law Review for Alleged Race Discrimination
“No institution—no matter its pedigree, prestige, or wealth—is above the law. The Trump Administration will not allow Harvard, or any other recipients of federal funds, to trample on anyone’s civil rights.”
The Trump administration is investigating allegations that Harvard and the Harvard Law Review discriminate based on race. The investigation was launched by a report from the Washington Free Beacon, which also broke the story of former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism.
It’s important to note that this investigation is happening because if the allegations are true, Harvard is guilty of civil rights violations. Woke culture often finds itself at odds with existing law in this fashion.
From the Washington Free Beacon:
Trump Administration Launches Probes of Harvard Law Review’s Racial Preferences
The Trump administration on Monday launched multiple probes of Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review, citing allegations that the flagship law journal discriminates based on race.
The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services will conduct separate investigations of the university after the Washington Free Beacon published a news report Friday revealing that the law review uses race to select both editors and articles for publication. The report was based on a trove of internal documents.
The probes—to be conducted by each agency’s office for civil rights—come days after former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell vowed to sue Harvard over the journal’s policies, which include evaluating articles on both the race of the author and the racial diversity of its citations.
“Harvard Law Review’s article selection process appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission,” said Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. “No institution—no matter its pedigree, prestige, or wealth—is above the law. The Trump Administration will not allow Harvard, or any other recipients of federal funds, to trample on anyone’s civil rights.”
In a 2024 memo obtained by the Free Beacon, one journal editor argued that the fact that an author was “not from an underrepresented background” was a “negative” when it came to evaluating the piece for publication. Another memo from the same year recommended advancing a piece because “the author is a woman of color.” Still other documents showed that the journal’s “holistic review committee,” which selects nearly half of student editors, had made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups” its “first priority.”
Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium posted many of the details on Twitter/X:
NEW: The Harvard Law Review has made DEI the "first priority" of its admissions process. It routinely kills or advances pieces based on the author's race. It even vets articles for racially diverse citations.
And guess what? Editors at the top journal put all this in writing.🧵 pic.twitter.com/ZOeylFIVV3
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
We obtained more than four years of documents from the law review, including article evaluations, training materials, and data on the race and gender of journal authors. They reveal a pattern of pervasive race discrimination that could plunge Harvard into even deeper crisis.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
Just over half of journal editors are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a "holistic review committee" that has made the inclusion of "underrepresented groups"—defined to include race—its "first priority," per a resolution passed in 2021. pic.twitter.com/zFScNAGqs9
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers "both substantive and DEI factors." pic.twitter.com/pFUZ4F6LX2
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a "negative" when recommending that his article be cut from consideration. pic.twitter.com/h7Zg0qsnaE
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
"This author is not from an underrepresented background," the editor wrote in the "negatives" section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue. pic.twitter.com/Zyt4Pd8CDv
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to the journal's data, only one white author has been chosen to write the foreword to the review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. pic.twitter.com/Ta68tUvZ7T
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.
That pattern is a stark departure from the historical norm. Between 1995 and 2018, the data show, nearly every foreword author was white. pic.twitter.com/Rws28tEJKB
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 25, 2025
CNBC has a statement from a school spokesman:
“The investigations are in response to information ED and HHS received about policies and practices for journal membership and article selection that may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” according to a joint statement issued by the departments.
Title VI bars recipients of federal financial assistance — such as Harvard — “from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin in the recipient’s programs or activities,” the departments noted.
The departments said that they would examine Harvard’s relationship with the Law Review, “including financial ties, oversight procedures, and selection policies and other documentation for both membership and article publication.”
A Harvard Law School spokesman, in a statement to CNBC, said, “Harvard Law School is committed to ensuring that the programs and activities it oversees are in compliance with all applicable laws and to investigating any credibly alleged violations.”
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Comments
Coming on the heels of its documented discrimination against Jewish, Asian and white students, Harvard appears to have the distinction of being the most brazenly, blatantly and unrepentantly racist and lawless university in the U.S.
But, it’s all “remedial” discrimination in service of “Affirmative Action” and “Diversity!”
Positive discrimination is how Obama “got on” as an editor to Harvard Law Review. It sure wasn’t on the strength of his intellect. To date no evidence of such has ever been uncovered.
Slyness, deception. brutal tactics. That we have in abundance.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-refresher-on-obamas-senate-race/
It would be so fine if discovery in this case dredged up a bunch of Obama’s hidden history at Harvard.
“Positive discrimination” is how the asshole got elected.
And, they are about to lose their $2.5 billion annual gravy train.
Gee… didn’t you ever wonder how the sainted Obama became editor of the Harvard Law Review yet never managed to publish a paper?? Actually, I never wondered. Did you?
Barack H. Obama was the original DEI-admitted student at Columbia and Harvard Law.
One would almost think he was a token N3gr0, but that would be racist.
He was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
– Joe Biden
It seems that after graduating summa cum laude from their undergraduate institutions and achieving near-perfect LSAT scores to gain admission to Harvard Law School, the students seem to lack the awareness that by incorporating race into almost every phase of the article about its selection process is inappropriate and illegal.
Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate selection process, which considers diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) factors as a matter of policy, will cost them dearly.
One hopes but the layers and judges may have other ideas.
But it’s like the “illegality” of jumping our southern border: if the Powerful People are honoring it exclusively in the breach, the streetwise law student, like the streetwise illegal migrant, quickly figures out which behaviors will result in wins, and which in losses.
The problem is, timing is everything. If causality should again return to the world, one must be ready to reverse course on a dime, and these Relicts slept through the alarm clock.
Yeah these racist institutions seem to be viewing the Civil Rights Act’s clear prohibition on use of race to engage in discrimination as optional. These modern d/prog are just as committed to picking winners and losers by race as the segregationist d/prog of generations past. Probably gonna take the implementation of a DoJ pre clearance and monitoring regime to fix it.
Let’s see if we can get Obama’s transcripts entered into evidence.
false success is rewarded by the left
maga is attacked for being successful
According to this, it may be illegal for a judge or company to consider Law Review as a positive for hiring. It would be like considering membership in an all-white country club.
Discrimination in re: to sex / race / ethnicity is pretty much baked into Harvard & most other “Ivy League” schools. By “Gentlemen’s Agreement” they didn’t admit blacks or women for a century+, they didn’t admit or severely limited Jewish admissions because any logical merit / grade based admission policy was letting in “too many of THOSE kinds”.
And in modern times they DEI their staff and student body to death because they’re all racists who believe minorities are inferior and incapable of being hired and admitted on merit in enuf numbers to keep up the pretense that they’re NOT racist – it’s the old “some of my best friends” defense in play.
If this should somehow end up in our legal system [which it may not because pretty much all of the pre-Trump civil rights bureaucracy [whose function is to guarantee results that the Left wants] we can anticipate the high probability that our judiciary will find some way to make an exception to the Constitution that will allow discrimination against Whites, straight males, and Asians [our immigrants are too results oriented as competition].
And there will be great mystification as to why our society and economy collapses.
Subotai Bahadur
Not too long ago I was mandated to attend a day long indoctrination at my academic institution on DEI, which explicitly insisted that because I am White the only way to demonstrate that I am antiracist is to acknowledge and accept the fact that I am racist.
This assertion was not open for discussion or debate. So we did as we were told, and tried to ignore the obvious insanity the best we could.
Will somebody please tell your web manager that the photo you keep using to accompany articles focusing upon Harvard University are of the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island?