Harvard Moves to Dismiss Admissions Records Lawsuit

Harvard asked a federal judge Wednesday to dismiss the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking applicant-level admissions records, arguing that both the Department of Education and Department of Justice rushed to court without following Title VI enforcement procedures.

In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court in Boston, Harvard’s lawyers claimed that the records demand is procedurally defective and politically motivated, casting the lawsuit as the latest front in its monthslong legal fight with the White House.

The filing marks Harvard’s latest attempt to beat back a federal lawsuit that seeks years of granular admissions data to determine whether Harvard is complying with the 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned race-conscious admissions.

The Justice Department probe has been ongoing since April 2025 and seeks five years of individual-level admissions data, including applicants’ race, grades, standardized test scores, admissions outcomes, and internal evaluations.

The Education Department’s broader request — which sought records dating back to 2016 and information about all “race-conscious” programming at Harvard — was folded into the lawsuit in May after Harvard declined to meet the department’s deadline for handing over the records.

But in Wednesday’s motion, however, Harvard’s lawyers argued that both agencies botched the process required to enforce their requests under Title VI, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs.

The Justice Department, they said, failed to follow three mandatory steps before suing: making a good-faith effort to secure voluntary compliance, formally determining that voluntary compliance was not possible, and notifying Harvard that it had failed to comply before turning to litigation.

Harvard also claimed that the Education Department ignored Harvard’s objections to the data requests, declined to continue negotiations, and referred the matter to the Justice Department without following its own required enforcement procedures.

For the most part, however, the motion echoed the substance of the University’s initial response in April. The lawyers called the document request “unnecessary and vastly overbroad for the alleged purpose of confirming Harvard’s compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision” and noted Harvard had already turned over thousands of pages of documents.

In lieu of a dismissal, the University asked U.S. district court judge Myong J. Joun to pause the case until litigation concludes in a separate umbrella lawsuit, brought by 17 states, that seeks to block the Department of Education from expanding the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to include applicant-level data.

Those states won a temporary injunction in April. Harvard’s lawyers claimed Wednesday that the complaint was an attempted “end-run” around that order and said it would be redundant to rule in the Harvard case before a final ruling in the joint lawsuit.

“Knowing what if any additional information Harvard will produce through IPEDS will inform whether any further information would be appropriate for the Government to obtain here, particularly since its purported purpose in seeking the IPEDS data is identical to that in this case,” the lawyers wrote.

The University’s lawyers also questioned the White House’s decision to single out Harvard for litigation among the dozens of schools that the Justice Department and the Education Department are investigating for compliance with the Supreme Court ruling.

It was unclear, the lawyers wrote, whether any of those schools had divulged more data than Harvard — or any at all.

Harvard’s lawyers also repeated claims that the litigation amounts to retaliation against Harvard for rebuking the White House’s demands last year, citing various senior Trump officials who have publicly tied the administration’s actions to the University’s rebuttal.

“The Government is suing Harvard for the same reason it has assailed the University in many other ways for over a year: to retaliate for its exercise of First Amendment rights,” they wrote.

—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.