Inside Harvard’s Discrimination Machine

The university has adopted race-conscious hiring policies, potentially in violation of civil rights law.

The Trump administration has escalated its battle with Harvard University, freezing all future grants and threatening to strip the school’s tax-exempt status. In response, Harvard has adopted some conciliatory measures— rebranding its DEI office and cancelling its racially segregated graduation ceremonies—but, behind the scenes, the university’s discrimination machine continues to operate at full capacity.

We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.

For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.”

In another hiring guide, “Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches,” the university recommends several discriminatory practices. At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to “ensure that the early lists include women and minorities” and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” The university counsels that committee chairs should “continually monitor” the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, “attend to all women and minorities on the long list.”

Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.

In the past, the university has made extensive use of DEI statements—a “required qualification for all position descriptions and job postings”—and university-supplied “diversity-related sample interview questions,” which effectively filtered out candidates who did not adhere to the principles of left-wing racialism. Though Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences officially discontinued its use of mandatory DEI statements last year, the university continues to promote non-mandatory diversity statements for faculty positions and includes language about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as guiding principles.

Gail Heriot, a law professor who sits on the United States Commission on Civil Rights, characterized Harvard’s practice of making candidates swear fealty to DEI as a form of ideological conditioning. “At other universities, faculty candidates who respond to such inquiries by saying that they treat all individuals equally regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex get excluded from consideration,” she said. “The same is probably in store for any job candidates at Harvard who dissent from the campus orthodoxy on this issue.”

Harvard’s discriminatory programs are not limited to faculty hiring. According to one of the internal documents we obtained, the university has adopted explicit racial hiring goals for administrative and support positions under the guise of affirmative action. For various divisions and occupations within the school, Harvard lists the percentage of each workforce that belongs to a “protected class,” as well as target goals. For example, the university declared a goal of increasing the share of minorities in one department’s alumni affairs office nearly sixfold, and of raising the share of female assistants in the School of Public Health to more than 90 percent.

“Employers seldom set goals like these if they don’t intend them to be acted on,” Heriot said after reviewing the document. “These particular goals are hilarious,” she added. “Harvard has a few job categories that are already female dominated, sometimes with over seventy percent of its employees in those categories being female. Rather than being concerned with why more men aren’t applying, Harvard sets a goal to make these job categories even more female dominated.”

These goals also potentially violate civil rights law. Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, suggested that the document may legally expose Harvard. The document appears to violate the provisions of Executive Order 11246, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 and rescinded by President Trump earlier this year. Harvard’s plan “lumps together all racial and ethnic groups other than white people under the rubric ‘minority,’” Morenoff said, which courts have found to be a violation of racial balancing rules.

Harvard, asked whether it still operates these programs, did not respond. The only major change to the university’s faculty-hiring process of which our source was aware was the above-mentioned repeal of mandatory DEI statements at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

These policies, while contemptible, are no secret on campus. According to the Harvard researcher, the university’s current hiring policies—for staff, administrative, and faculty positions—are deliberately discriminatory. “Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has instead become ideologically driven,” the researcher said. “This is a totally corrupted institution.”