The pro-segregation Trump administration continues to pursue its efforts to influence the racial makeup of college campuses. And once again, it has Harvard in its crosshairs. 

The Department of Education on Monday announced two probes of Harvard. One concern claims, backed by Trump’s Department of Justice, that the university has put Jewish and Israeli students at risk by failing to address antisemitism on campus since a Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The other investigation is focused on whether Harvard “continues to use illegal race-based preferences in admissions” since a 2023 Supreme Court decision gutted affirmative action at colleges. (The announcement doesn’t share the source of or evidence for these claims.) The news release suggests Harvard may have violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And although Harvard saw a steep drop-off in admissions for Black students after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the administration, known for promoting white supremacist propaganda, is not raising an issue over Harvard’s lack of Black students. 

A Harvard spokesperson told the school’s newspaper earlier this week, “We are reviewing the U.S. Department of Education’s latest actions, which represent the government’s latest retaliatory actions against Harvard for its refusal to surrender our independence and constitutional rights.”

The Trump administration has tried to punish Harvard ever since the school’s leadership refused to acquiesce to a list of demands the administration wanted in exchange for releasing federal funding that had been previously authorized. Among those demands was a requirement that Harvard hand over admissions data so the feds could monitor what it called “viewpoint diversity.” The administration also demanded data “broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests” to ensure what it called “merit-based admissions reform.” Harvard has resisted handing over this race-based data, and several state attorneys general are in court this week suing the Trump administration over similar demands to other schools. 

Professional wrestling executive turned Education Secretary Linda McMahon referenced this data in the announcement of the Harvard probes.

“If Harvard continues to stonewall as we try to verify its basic compliance with antidiscrimination statutes, we will vigorously hold them to account to ensure students’ rights are protected,” she said.

Trump and his administration have given schools ample reason to distrust their intent for the data. Trump has previously railed against the law cited in the Education Department’s probe, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as some sort of tool to discriminate against white students. 

In January, he falsely asserted to The New York Times that “white people were very badly treated” after the law’s passage and denied their rightful places on college campuses:

When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed ‘a lot of people were very badly treated.’

‘White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,’ he said, an apparent reference to affirmative action in college admissions. ‘So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.’

The claim is detached from reality. Plenty of white people were helped by the Civil Rights Act, which included protections against religious and gender discrimination. And while Trump and his conservative allies try to portray affirmative action as some sort of anti-white cudgel, studies have repeatedly shown white women to have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action.  

In one of his 2023 rants about diversity on college campuses, Trump said that as president, he would seek “restitution” for “victims” of schools that have deployed “unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.” Some critics of the proposal framed it as a perverse form of “reparations” for white people purportedly harmed by diversity policies.

All of that context, and particularly Trump’s own delusions about race on college campuses, is vital to understanding the administration’s Harvard probe and its demonizing of diversity at colleges and universities.

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