Legal experts say the Department of Justice will face a steep challenge in proving Harvard violated Title VI after the agency filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing the University of tolerating antisemitism on campus following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.

In the 44-page complaint, the DOJ alleged that Harvard allowed a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students to persist — and, in some cases, treated misconduct targeting them more leniently than it would have for other groups.

The lawsuit asks a federal court to find Harvard in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and to impose sweeping penalties, including cutting off future funding and clawing back nearly $1 billion in federal grants.

The Crimson spoke with a dozen legal experts who said the strength of the case varies sharply across the government’s claims. The DOJ’s first argument — that Harvard was “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitic harassment — faces a high legal bar and may struggle in court, they said. Its second — that Harvard enforced its rules unevenly — may be more likely to be entertained, though still difficult to establish. And its attempt to recover previously awarded federal funds is virtually unprecedented.

A DOJ spokesperson did not repsond to a request for comment.

Here’s how legal scholars assess each part of the Trump administration’s case.

Intent and Inaction

The DOJ’s first claim — that Harvard acted with “deliberate indifference” — faces what several attorneys described as a remarkably stringent standard in civil rights law.

To prevail, the government must prove not only that harassment was severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, but that it also deprived students of educational access, occurred within Harvard’s programs, was known to the University, and was met with a response so inadequate as to be unreasonable.

Several experts said the DOJ may struggle to pass the first test.

Courts in the First Circuit have been reluctant to treat political speech about Israel as inherently discriminatory. In a 2025 ruling in favor of MIT, the court held that pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist slogans are not, on their own, evidence of discrimination absent proof of intent.

Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Eidelson said the DOJ’s complaint relies too heavily on inferring discriminatory intent from political speech about Israel.

“The protesters have their view about what’s a fair way to carve up the Middle East,” he wrote in a statement. “They might be right or they might be wrong, but nobody gets to just rule their position out of bounds as an expression that somehow demeans fellow students for having Jewish ancestry.”

That precedent is especially relevant because U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns — who will hear the DOJ’s case — has already applied it. Last year, he dismissed a similar lawsuit brought by Harvard Business School student Yoav Segev against Harvard, finding that Segev could not “transform his assailants’ anti-Israel sentiment into antisemitism based on their use of certain rhetoric.”

Even if the DOJ could establish pervasive harassment, it must still clear a second hurdle: showing Harvard’s response was effectively nonexistent.

Jackie G. Wernz, who investigated Title VI race discrimination and harassment at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, said the “deliberate indifference” standard required that schools completely ignore discrimination.

“It’s very rare that they did nothing in response,” she said of schools challenged with Title VI suits. “Typically, it’s just that the plaintiff is taking issue with how they responded and whether it was successful — which is not a valid basis for finding a violation.”

The complaint itself may complicate that argument, lawyers said. While it catalogs dozens of incidents, it is often less precise about how Harvard responded in each case — and whether those responses were absent, delayed, or simply insufficient.

Beth Gellman-Beer, an attorney who spent nearly 20 years at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, said the timeline could also work in Harvard’s favor. She argued that DOJ’s case may be backward-looking: a “really solid case” in 2023 or 2024, when Harvard struggled to respond to pro-Palestine protests, but a much weaker one now that the University has taken steps to address antisemitism on campus.

“Let’s say I was still at OCR, and I received this complaint and I started investigating it,” Gellman-Beer said. “I might be able to conclude, based on some of the information that is cited in that complaint, that there was clearly a hostile environment.”

“But if by 2025, 2026, they are responding in an adequate fashion, then it’s very likely you would not find a violation,” she added.

Harvard pointed to those changes in its public response to the Friday lawsuit, citing expanded training, new civil discourse initiatives, and updated nondiscrimination policies. The DOJ complaint does not acknowledge or attempt to rebut Harvard’s reforms.

Disparate Treatment

The DOJ’s second claim — that Harvard intentionally discriminated by enforcing its rules unevenly — may be comparatively more viable, though still difficult to prove, experts said.

Rather than focusing on the content of speech, this theory turns on differential treatment: whether Harvard responded less aggressively to violations affecting Jewish and Israeli students than it would have in comparable situations involving other groups.

The complaint points to a series of incidents, including the November 2023 occupation of University Hall, protests in Widener Library, and the spring 2024 encampment, arguing that such conduct “would have been unthinkable” if directed at other protected classes.

It also highlights more individualized allegations. In one instance cited in the report, a student reported being asked to leave a Middle Eastern studies class they were attending to watch a friend’s presentation because they were Israeli. The student alleged they were singled out based on national origin and that a complaint to then-College Dean Rakesh Khurana yielded no response.

“That looks like disparate treatment on the part of the professor if it is based on the national origin of the student,” said University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier. “That’s not protected at all.”

But that allegation — like several others cited in the complaint — originates from a secondary source: a May 2024 report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association. The report does not identify the professor involved, and its authors did not respond to a request for comment seeing additional details.

That reliance on unverified or anonymous accounts could pose a challenge for the DOJ if it cannot substantiate them through discovery.

Lakier said Harvard appeared to treat the Israel-Palestine conflict as “a very live political debate,” which shaped what she called its initially lax enforcement decisions.

“Part of the issue here is that the University, I think — and certainly, initially — viewed the student protests as participating in legitimate political discourse, and so didn’t come down on them that hard at first,” Lakier said.

But that explanation does not resolve the legal question. To prove intentional discrimination, the DOJ must identify real comparators — not hypotheticals — showing that Harvard treated similar conduct differently.

That requirement has proven decisive before. In a previous Title VI case against Harvard, Stearns dismissed the direct discrimination claim because plaintiffs failed to identify “comparably situated” individuals who were treated more favorably.

“If this is true, it is certainly troublesome,” Northwestern University Law professor Paul A. Gowder said of the uneven enforcement claims. “But it would be difficult to prove, because the comparison protests would have to be pretty similar.”

Cornell Law School professor Michael C. Dorf said Harvard could mount a broader defense: that it has historically underenforced protest rules across contexts.

“Harvard and other prestigious universities generally underenforced their time, place, and manner rules out of a sense that they didn’t want to exacerbate tensions with students or lead to escalation, not because they were necessarily sympathetic to all of those causes,” Dorf said, referencing past protest movements, including the apartheid and anti-Vietnam War protests.

An ‘Unprecedented’ Remedy

Even if the DOJ succeeds in showing liability, its requested remedy may be the most striking element of the case.

The government is seeking not only to cut off Harvard’s access to future federal funding, but also to recoup the nearly $1 billion already disbursed during the period of alleged noncompliance — a move legal experts described as unprecedented.

“I’m not aware of any prior case in which the government has sought reimbursement for alleged civil rights violations by a federal funding recipient,” Dorf said.

Legal scholars said the request departs sharply from how Title VI has traditionally been enforced, where remedies are designed to bring institutions into compliance — not to penalize them retroactively.

“The idea is you want the remedies to be in proportion to the violation,” Lakier said. “Not a means of punishing or shutting down or destroying the institution that is the funds grantee.”

“Retroactive suspensions don’t look remedial,” she added. “They look punitive.”

Former Education Department attorneys said they had never seen the government attempt to recoup funds in similar cases.

“All of it’s unprecedented,” Wernz said. “It’s just not how things worked under previous administrations. They’ve really rewritten the whole book on civil rights enforcement, and they’re just trying to use as much leverage as they can to get Harvard to fold.”

Beyond the scope of the remedy, the DOJ may also face questions about the process.

Before filing suit, federal agencies are typically required to make a good-faith effort to secure voluntary compliance. Though the government says negotiations with Harvard broke down, Dorf said a court may scrutinize that claim.

“I have a very hard time imagining that that argument is going to win in court,” Dorf said. “I think that at the very least, it will be open to Harvard to say, ‘Well, the reason why voluntary compliance didn’t work is that what the government was asking for was unreasonable.’”

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.