A federal agency is claiming Harvard University may have violated antidiscrimination law through its faculty hiring and promotion decisions, citing the university’s own demographic data, The Washington Free Beacon first reported on Monday.
Andrea R. Lucas, acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, issued what’s called a commissioner charge against the university, which typically precedes an investigation by the EEOC. The document, which the Free Beacon obtained and is dated April 25, cites an annual report on faculty development and diversity showing the proportion of white male professors declined over the past decade, as the ranks of women and faculty of color increased. (Those reports are no longer publicly accessible on Harvard’s website, but at least some information has been archived online.)
Among the tenured, the percentage of white men decreased from 64 percent in the 2013 academic year to 56 percent in 2023. Among the tenure-track, that share dropped from 46 percent to 32 percent in the same period.
“Since at least 2018 and continuing thereafter, Harvard may have violated and may be continuing to violate Title VII” — the federal law barring employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, and other factors — “by engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight employees, applicants, and training program participants in hiring, promotion (including but not limited to tenure decisions), compensation, and separation decisions,” wrote Lucas, whom President Trump designated acting chair in January. She also alleges that Harvard’s “pattern or practice of discrimination” goes beyond the faculty and lists programs that aim to enroll students from underrepresented groups.
Asked for comment, a Harvard spokesperson referenced a Monday letter from Alan M. Garber, the university’s president, addressed to Linda E. McMahon, the education secretary. Last week, McMahon upbraided Harvard in a letter to Garber, recounting the institution’s many failures as she saw them and informing the university president that the institution “should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided.”
In Garber’s letter responding to McMahon’s concerns, he wrote that employment at Harvard is “based on merit and achievement,” noting that the university seeks “the best educators, researchers, and scholars at our schools” and does not have quotas, “whether based on race or ethnicity or any other characteristic.”
The EEOC commissioner charge is the Trump administration’s latest shot at the Ivy League institution. In April, Harvard announced it would not comply with a set of demands from the Trump administration to, among other things, adopt “merit-based hiring policies,” review all existing professors for plagiarism, not admit international students who are “hostile” to American values, and shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said in a statement at the time. In response, billions in federal funding to Harvard was frozen. The university has challenged that freeze in court.
The EEOC cannot cut off federal dollars. But in the past, the agency has sued colleges it alleged had engaged in discriminatory behavior.
The claims against Harvard also come at a time of heightened skepticism and criticism of efforts to diversify the professoriate by race and gender through hiring. Over the past decade, many colleges expressed commitments to recruiting more faculty members from minority backgrounds and took steps to reach said goals. Now, those practices — and whether they encouraged or amounted to unlawful discrimination — are being called into question, in court and in the media. That scrutiny comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s effective elimination of race-conscious admissions — in a 2023 decision against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In January, The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section published an analysis of documents obtained by public-records request related to faculty hiring at the University of Colorado at Boulder that found that the institution had “brazenly prompted departments to select faculty based on race.” After the article was published, the university announced it had paused a hiring program “to ensure there are no ongoing gaps between university policy and the program’s implementation.”
To Damani White-Lewis, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, concluding that the decline of white male professors at Harvard must be the result of discriminatory practices ignores the fact that those who populate the pipeline for faculty jobs — graduate students and postdocs — have also become more racially diverse in recent years. “It’s a slippery slope to get into the causation and correlation of it all, to try to pin Harvard’s diversity numbers on discrimination, which completely evades growth in graduate-student diversity, competitiveness, and selection criteria,” White-Lewis said.
Dan Morenoff had a different takeaway. He’s the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a law firm that describes its mission as sponsoring litigation and filing administrative complaints to ensure a non-identitarian interpretation of civil rights as “individual rights, equally held by all.” He noted that Lucas seems to quote from statements Harvard has made regarding faculty diversity.
She writes that she believes “Harvard may have taken such unlawful action in an effort to achieve, in Harvard’s own words, ‘demographic diversification of the faculty’ within a ‘framework for faculty hiring that recognize[d Harvard’s] goals when authorizing faculty searches, conducting the searches themselves, and reviewing search committee recommendations.’ This focus on ‘issues of recruitment, development, and promotion’ was in pursuit of ‘progress in diversifying’ Harvard faculty.”
To Morenoff, it seems like the EEOC has “some compelling evidence, in the form of admissions by Harvard” that the university has been making decisions regarding recruitment, hiring, and promotion “with a motivation [that] Title VII forbids,” though he noted that investigators will now figure out to what extent that’s been the case. (Trump’s administration has fast-tracked investigations, sometimes issuing penalties just days after it levies allegations against a college.)
Both White-Lewis and Morenoff agree that more scrutiny of diversity hiring efforts is likely in the offing. Other universities “should not assume that this is a one-off,” Morenoff said. “It probably isn’t.”
