Student Privacy Is Worth Protecting

The federal government has reared its head once again in its game of whack-a-mole with Harvard.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice sued Harvard for access to detailed admissions records, citing a previous request for information as part of a federal civil rights compliance review. That’s not to be confused with a separate Department of Education investigation that also demanded admissions data.

Call it déjà sue: the administration probes Harvard with sweeping requests for change and information, waits for resistance, then swaps in a new executive agency to launch the next attack.

The goal is clearly death by a thousand subpoenas — hurting Harvard in any way possible, regardless of the legal reality of the University’s functioning.

In light of this request, Harvard must continue to protect its most valuable assets: its students. If academic liberty is a core tenet of the University, protecting student privacy is a natural prerequisite. In this moment, refusing to release applicant-level admission data is both defensible and necessary.

Despite Harvard providing thousands of pages of admissions-related information, the Justice Department has now claimed deliberate obstruction by failing to provide individualized records — the most sensitive layer of admissions data.

The granularity of the data requested appears to lie far beyond the scope of information necessary to investigate compliance with federal law. This overreach of student privacy demonstrates how eager the administration is to manufacture grievances with the University’s actions.

Indeed, this request for details is really about political leverage rather than legal clarity from the University.

In light of recent federal actions — from arresting a professor to revoking student visas apparently over protest activity — sharing such detailed information could pose a real threat to Harvard students. That risk, alongside the chilling effect disclosures would impose on prospective applicants, mandates that the University continue to levy a strong defense against federal attacks.

We expect that this dispute marks the beginning of yet another protracted legal conflict between Harvard and the Trump administration. The past year has demonstrated that these scare tactics rarely resolve quickly, but that legal resistance can be productive.

In 2025, a federal judge ruled the Trump administration’s research funding freeze was unconstitutional and ostensibly ideologically motivated. A faculty group’s lawsuit against the Trump administration’s use of immigration policy to punish non-citizen faculty and students’ for pro-Palestine speech was successful just a few weeks later.

Opposite to that, we know that deference doesn’t yield results. Columbia University appeased the Republican show trial against elite universities when it cracked down on student protest. But in the end it was pressured to cede its independence and hand over $200 million to the federal government.

So however frustrating the administration’s insistence upon attacking Harvard may be, our continued resistance remains essential. In the face of these bad faith attacks by federal agencies, the University is right to prioritize the safety of its students.

The lawsuits will continue coming. Harvard’s refusal should, too.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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