Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports a new review of one of America’s elite universities.
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.”
