Trump Admin Investigating Harvard Law Review Over Alleged Discriminatory Practices: ‘Appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race’; Exclusive: Internal Documents Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review

Trump admin investigating Harvard Law Review over alleged discriminatory practices: ‘Appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race’:

The Trump administration announced Monday that it has launched an investigation into alleged discriminatory practices at Harvard University’s vaunted law journal.

The Title VI investigation is being conducted by the civil rights offices of both the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The offices are probing reports that Harvard Law Review uses “race-based criteria” in lieu of “merit-based standards” in its journal membership and article selection process.

“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,” Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement.

“Title VI’s demands are clear: recipients of federal financial assistance may not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin,” Trainor added. “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 referenced remarks reportedly made by Harvard Law Review editors in a private Slack group in 2024, as they debated who should be allowed to respond to an article about police reform.

“Four of the five people raised in this message are white men, which I find concerning,” one editor wrote, according to the Washington Free Beacon. “Having read the article pretty thoroughly, I think a huge missing piece was that of how race fits into policing and misconduct.” —>READ MORE HERE

Exclusive: Internal Documents Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review:

Will this law review article “promote DEI values”? Does it cite scholars from “underrepresented groups”? Will it have “any foreseeable impact in enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion”? And why did one team of editors solicit “only white, male authors”?

Those are some of the questions that editors at the Harvard Law Review asked in internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The documents, which span more than four years and have not been previously reported, include article evaluations, training materials, and data on the race and gender of journal authors. They reveal a pattern of pervasive race discrimination at the nation’s top law journal and threaten to plunge Harvard, already at war with the federal government, into even deeper crisis.

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, 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, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

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.” 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.

“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.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. 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.

Harvard sued the Trump administration on Monday after the government froze more than $2 billion in grants and contracts to the school. University president Alan Garber said last week that Harvard had no intention of complying with a sweeping set of demands from the White House’s anti-Semitism task force, including “merit-based admission reform” and an end to all diversity programs.

The documents from the law review could create a new line of attack for the administration as the fight over federal funding escalates, and invite litigation from private plaintiffs eager to join the pile-on.

Such plaintiffs would have no shortage of ammunition. The documents show that the Harvard Law Review continued using race after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in June 2023, implementing several DEI measures within the past year. —>READ MORE HERE

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