WASHINGTON — Harvard University is engaging in unlawful racial and sexual discrimination and prioritizing at least $49 million in taxpayer-funded DEI programming, according to a civil rights complaint filed by a conservative legal group Wednesday.
America First Legal, along with the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights, claimed that the Ivy League school was violating Title VI, Title IX of federal law, along with President Trump’s executive actions and the US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling outlawing race-based affirmative action.
Among the outlays cited in the complaint is a $21.9 million grant for Harvard Medical School’s Clinical and Translational Science Center to “train and diversify” its workforce by prioritizing “underrepresented” and “diverse” populations to address “health inequities.”
The feds also awarded another $1.7 million grant for a study on “climate factors, racial/ethnic disparities, and menstrual cycle health.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose civil rights office already faulted Harvard for “deliberate indifference towards harassment of Jewish and Israeli students,” greenlit the funding among the millions of dollars in grants handed out since 2021 to the Cambridge, Mass., institution.
Those outlays have since been blocked by the Trump administration as it seeks to end tolerance of antisemitism, race-based discrimination and DEI initiatives on campus.
America First Legal demanded “a formal investigation into Harvard Medical School’s admissions, scholarships, clerkships, residency pipelines, affiliated residency programs, faculty hiring, and research practices,” according to its 26-page complaint.
Neither Harvard reps nor the DOJ’s Civil Rights division did not immediately respond to a request for comment
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