Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally – Photo credit: AP
By Face2Face Africa
The fight between the current U.S. government and Harvard has moved back into the courtroom.
The administration of Donald Trump has filed suit against Harvard University, accusing the school of withholding admissions records that federal investigators say are essential to determining whether the university abandoned affirmative action after it was struck down.
In a complaint lodged Friday in federal court in Massachusetts, the Justice Department said Harvard has “thwarted” its inquiry into possible discriminatory practices. The government contends the university has failed to cooperate with a civil rights investigation and is asking a judge to compel the release of the requested documents.
Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, tagged the university’s resistance as suspect. “If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it,” Dhillon said in a statement.
Harvard, in its own statement, said it has been answering the government’s inquiries and remains aligned with the Supreme Court’s ruling that ended race-conscious admissions.
“The University will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach,” the university said.
The new case marks another chapter in Trump’s protracted clash with Harvard. The administration has already imposed or threatened billions of dollars in funding cuts and other penalties after the university declined to comply with a list of federal demands issued last year.
Administration officials have justified their scrutiny by pointing to alleged anti-Jewish bias on campus. Harvard leaders counter that the pressure campaign amounts to unconstitutional retaliation for declining to embrace the administration’s ideological agenda. The federal government is currently appealing rulings in two separate lawsuits where judges sided with Harvard.
The compliance review at the center of the latest lawsuit began last April, the same day the White House rolled out a sweeping set of directives aligned with Trump’s policy priorities. Investigators sought five years of admissions data covering undergraduate applicants as well as those to Harvard’s medical and law schools, the AP reported.