By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) – A federal judge dismissed on Monday a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s administration seeking to force Harvard University to turn over records for an investigation into whether it continues to consider race in its student admissions process.
US District Judge Myong Joun in Boston rejected the US Department of Justice’s lawsuit, which Harvard contends was filed as part of a broader campaign by the Republican president’s administration against the Ivy League school.
Harvard has been a top target of the administration’s effort to leverage federal funding and government power to force changes at universities that Trump says are dominated by “radical left” ideologies.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university has already secured rulings from other judges rejecting the administration’s efforts to terminate over $2 billion in grants, block the school from hosting international students and sue it for allegedly failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment.
The Justice Department filed the case before Joun in February, arguing that Harvard was not complying with investigations into whether it is following the US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling rejecting race-conscious admissions programs used to boost enrollment of minority students.
The administration contends that the Justice Department and the US Department of Education need years of applicant-level admissions data to determine whether race remains a factor in Harvard’s admissions decisions.
The university’s lawyers countered that the case was filed to retaliate against Harvard for refusing demands that it overhaul its governance, hiring and academic programs to align with the administration’s agenda.
They said the lawsuit was filed after Trump announced in early February that he was ending settlement talks and wanted $1 billion in damages from Harvard, which he said had “been, for a long time, behaving very badly.”
Harvard said the Justice Department sued without first taking legally required steps aimed at securing the university’s voluntary compliance with its demands for years of records, which Harvard said included sensitive data on thousands of high school students who sought admission.
The Justice Department sought the records as part of an investigation into whether Harvard is complying with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination in education programs.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
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