A federal judge in Boston on Monday dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit seeking to force Harvard University to hand over individual applicant records, ruling that the Justice Department sued before taking the steps the law requires to first try to win the university's voluntary compliance.
Source: Reuters
U.S. District Judge Myoung J. Joun issued the decision on Monday, November 2, in a 10-page opinion. The dismissal was made without prejudice, which means the government can fix the defects the judge identified and bring the case again — a step the Justice Department says it intends to take.
What the government wanted, and why
The Justice Department filed the lawsuit in February. It argued that Harvard had, in its words, thwarted and slow-walked a federal civil rights review by missing deadlines on repeated requests for records. The administration said it needed years of applicant-level admissions data — information about individual students who applied — to determine whether race remains a factor in Harvard's admissions decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that barred race-conscious admissions programs.
The legal basis for the demand is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination in education programs that receive federal funds. Harvard, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a recipient of federal funding, and the administration argues that status obliges the university to produce the records its investigators ask for.
Why the judge threw the case out
Judge Joun, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, agreed with Harvard that the Justice Department moved to court without completing the legally required voluntary-compliance process. He pointed to two specific shortcomings in the government's complaint: it did not allege that the department had told Harvard it would sue if the university failed to comply, and it did not allege that the department had communicated the specific failure it had identified to Harvard.
Source: The Harvard Crimson
"A deadline and a threat to sue, standing alone, do not necessarily demonstrate compliance with the regulatory voluntary-compliance process where the agency seeks to enforce disputed demands for extensive information." — U.S. District Judge Myoung J. Joun
The judge also found that the U.S. Department of Education failed to follow the proper procedural steps before folding its own admissions investigation into the Justice Department's lawsuit in May. At a September oral argument, Judge Joun had already expressed skepticism about the government's negotiating efforts, describing its stance at one point as an ultimatum.
Judge Joun stressed what his ruling does not decide. It does not resolve whether Harvard has discriminated, whether the agencies may lawfully demand appropriately defined applicant-level data, or whether Harvard may ultimately have to hand such data over. "Those questions remain open," he wrote. "Nothing in this decision converts the Government's request for information into an accusation of present discrimination or resolves Harvard's underlying Title VI compliance."
Harvard's side, and the wider fight
Harvard says it gave the government as much information as it could — more than 2,000 pages of documents — without disclosing individualized student records, which it says are privileged. Its lawyers also argued the lawsuit was retaliation for Harvard's refusal last year to accept administration demands to overhaul its governance, hiring and academic programs, and they noted the case was filed after President Donald Trump announced in early February that he was ending settlement talks and wanted 1 billion dollars in damages from Harvard, saying the university had, in his words, been for a long time behaving very badly. Legal experts have separately raised the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal law restricting access to student education records, as another obstacle to the government's request.
The admissions-records case is one front in a much broader confrontation. According to Reuters, Harvard has already secured rulings from other judges rejecting administration efforts to terminate more than 2 billion dollars in federal grants to the university, to block it from hosting international students, and in a separate suit alleging it failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment.
The dismissal landed less than a week after Harvard College released demographic data for its Class of 2030 showing the share of enrolled Black students fell for a third consecutive year since the Supreme Court barred race-conscious admissions, dropping to 9.3 percent from 11.5 percent in the Class of 2029, while the Asian American share rose to 43.2 percent. Those figures are part of why the fight over applicant-level data matters: both sides say the underlying numbers will show whether the university's post-2023 admissions process complies with the law.
What happens next
The Justice Department says it will refile. A spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed: "The Court dismissed the case without prejudice on a narrow pleading question and invited the United States to amend. Harvard continues to refuse to provide the admissions information it is required to produce as a recipient of federal funds under Title VI. The United States will file an amended complaint and continue to hold Harvard to its obligations." For families in the Punjabi and wider South Asian diaspora — communities with large numbers of applicants to competitive U.S. universities, including Harvard — the case is worth watching for two reasons: it will help decide how much of an individual applicant's file the federal government can demand from a university, and its outcome sits alongside the separate court fights over the university's ability to host international students.