The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing administrators of withholding data that are necessary to determine whether there is continued racial discrimination in admissions.

The DOJ initiated compliance reviews in April 2025 to determine whether Harvard is discriminating in admissions to its undergraduate college, medical school, and law school. The lawsuit argues that the DOJ has the right to review Harvard's compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because the school receives federal funding from the department itself, and Harvard must supply "pertinent" information for the investigation.

The DOJ alleges that Harvard has refused to cooperate.

"At every turn, Harvard has thwarted the Department's efforts to investigate potential discrimination," reads the lawsuit, dated February 13. "It has slow-walked the pace of production and refused to provide pertinent documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions. Harvard made its most recent production of admissions-related documents in May 2025. The repeatedly extended deadlines for document production have long passed."

However, the lawsuit clarifies that the DOJ is not accusing the university of discrimination, nor is the department pursuing monetary damages or the revocation of federal funds.

According to the lawsuit, the university provided 292 pages of documents related to the undergraduate college, 441 pages of documents related to the law school, and nearly 200 pages related to the medical school in May. The DOJ claims that much of this documentation was already publicly accessible, and the university did not include applicant-level data.

Two weeks after the department's deadline, Harvard produced more than 1,000 pages of documentation related to the undergraduate, medical, and law school programs. The DOJ alleges that the university again provided "aggregated admissions data" and failed to include the requested applicant-level information.

"After discussions with Harvard's counsel, the Department agreed to one final extension of the deadline for production of Harvard Medical School documents until October 10, even though the United States first requested the admissions data nearly six months earlier," says the lawsuit.

The DOJ also claims that, at the time, it stated that it would not agree to any further extensions. The university then requested a one-week-long extension.

"Harvard still has not produced any documents in response to the Department's September 8 and September 12 letters and has not provided any explanation for its failure to meet the October 10 (or October 17) deadlines," reads the lawsuit. "Its most recent production on admissions practices was on May 30."

Per the lawsuit, the university will receive over $2.6 billion in federal funding through its currently active grants, including around $650,000 from the Department of Justice itself.

"The Justice Department will not allow universities to flout our nation's federal civil rights laws by refusing to provide the information required for our review," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. "Providing requested data is a basic expectation of any credible compliance process, and refusal to cooperate creates concerns about university practices. If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it."

The Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that race-conscious admissions policies practiced at Harvard University violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

National Review previously reported that Harvard University's president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution's commitment to diversity on the day the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The email stated that "diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence" and "to prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience."