The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging the school failed to provide key admissions data necessary for a federal investigation into potential racial discrimination.
The lawsuit, filed February 13, stems from compliance reviews the DOJ initiated in April 2025 to assess whether Harvard’s undergraduate college, law school, and medical school are adhering to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin by institutions that receive federal funding.
According to the complaint, Harvard receives more than $2.6 billion in active federal grants, including approximately $650,000 from the Department of Justice itself. As a recipient of federal funds, the university is required to cooperate with civil rights investigations and provide “pertinent” information upon request.
The DOJ alleges that Harvard has not met that obligation.
“At every turn, Harvard has thwarted the Department’s efforts to investigate potential discrimination,” the lawsuit states, accusing the university of slow-walking document production and failing to provide applicant-level admissions data. The department says Harvard’s most recent production of admissions-related materials occurred in May 2025.
The lawsuit clarifies that the DOJ is not currently accusing Harvard of discrimination, nor is it seeking monetary damages or attempting to revoke federal funding. Instead, the department is seeking court intervention to compel compliance with its information requests.
According to the filing, Harvard initially produced 292 pages related to undergraduate admissions, 441 pages for the law school, and nearly 200 pages for the medical school. The DOJ contends much of that information was publicly available and did not include the detailed applicant-level data necessary for meaningful review.
Two weeks after a DOJ deadline, Harvard provided more than 1,000 additional pages covering all three schools. However, the department says those documents contained only aggregated admissions data and still lacked individual applicant-level information.
The DOJ states it granted multiple deadline extensions, including a final extension to October 10 for medical school records, despite first requesting admissions data nearly six months earlier. Harvard later sought an additional one-week extension. The department alleges that as of mid-October deadlines, no further documents had been produced and no explanation was provided.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement: “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. Providing requested data is a basic expectation of any credible compliance process.”
The lawsuit unfolds against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which held that race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
On the day of that ruling, Harvard’s leadership reaffirmed its commitment to diversity in an email stating that “diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence” and that the university aims to educate a student body reflecting varied lived experiences.
The DOJ’s current action does not allege that Harvard has continued unlawful practices post-ruling. Instead, it focuses on whether the university is complying with federal oversight requirements.
