One has to wonder just how long Harvard will stand on its principles in this fight — especially when the main principle appears to be the right to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, and religion. And given how the Harvard Law Review operates, that’s not an exaggeration.
On Friday, the Washington Free Beacon ran an exposé on the Review, based on internal documents they obtained. The journal — ostensibly independent but run out of Harvard Law School — made discrimination a key process in topics, writers, and editors:
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.
As abhorrent as this sounds, this would not necessarily break any laws — if Harvard or its law school operated on the Hillsdale College model. Hillsdale refuses all federal funding, including student loans, to remain independent of the federal government and its education oversight. Hillsdale adopted that model to prevent the federal government from forcing the school to adopt policies like those reported by the Free Beacon as operational at Harvard.
Now, however, the current administration has a much different interpretation of Titles VI, VII, and IX. Based on recent Supreme Court decisions as well as common sense, the Trump administration is using the same leverage that previous administrations used to force schools to adopt DEI, this time to eradicate it. The same strings that Joe Biden attached to push for access by biological males into female spaces and competitions now are being used by Trump to end those policies.
However, Harvard does take federal funding — a lot of it, much of which Trump has frozen already. The new information about the level of discrimination taking place at the Harvard Law Review has given Trump another opportunity to investigate Harvard’s use of that money to discriminate on the basis of their readings of the Civil Rights Act, and they wasted no time in launching new probes:
The civil rights offices of the departments of Education and Health and Human Services said the agencies launched the investigations “based on reports of race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the journal.” …
“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,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Education Department Craig Trainor said in a statement. “No institution — no matter its pedigree, prestige, or wealth — is above the law.”
The two agencies are examining Harvard’s relationship with the Harvard Law Review, which is student-run and independent of Harvard Law School, according to the journal. Student editors make all organizational decisions and its members are second- and third-year Harvard Law students.
It won’t be difficult to find evidence, the Free Beacon reports today in a follow-up:
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.”
In a way, this may make Havard more useful to Trump and his team. These are the practices that many schools adopted, in large part due to pressure from previous administrations to impose DEI policies. Others, like Harvard, adopted those more enthusiastically. Other schools have made the wise decision to rethink those policies rather than have their practices dragged out into the light for all to see. Harvard’s refusal to comply allows the Trump administration to rip the cover off of the way Academia operates.
I wonder how long Alan Garber will want that process to play out. Right now, the president of Harvard is the toast of the progressive elite for defying Trump. If enough of this comes to light, though, Garber may find himself eating lunch alone more frequently.
