Harvard Now Facing an EEOC Investigation

Yesterday, Harvard send Sec. McMahon a letter which attempted to walk a fine line between finding common ground with the Trump administration and flipping them the bird. As Ed pointed out here, the administration’s response was to announce another round of funding cuts amounting to nearly half a billion dollars. The message is pretty clear: You’re already in a hole, Harvard. Stop digging!

But even before the funding cuts announced today, the Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday that Harvard was facing a new EEOC investigation, one that could potentially mean big trouble for the school. The investigation was launched last month but hadn’t been reported publicly until yesterday.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating whether Harvard University unlawfully hires faculty based on race and sex, arguing that the school’s own data provides evidence of discrimination…

The statistics cited in Harvard’s own reports could be evidence of a “pattern or practice of discrimination,” acting EEOC commissioner Andrea Lucas wrote in the document, known as a commissioner charge. The agency also cited a bevy of fellowships and training programs that only accept non-white applicants, such as a Harvard Medical School internship for “underrepresented minority (URM)” students.

The difficult thing about this investigation is that the EEOC is simply quoting Harvard’s own reports back to them. The school was very proud of it’s record of “diversifying the faculty” and bragged about it in various reports. There was only one group of people whose representation at the school declined consistently. Can you guess?

In public documents now deleted from Harvard’s website but still publicly available on web archives, Harvard admitted that in a span of ten years, it went from 59% of “all ladder faculty” being white men to 49%, comparing that decrease in white men to an increase in the “total women, nonbinary, and faculty of color” (i.e., all faculty other than white men) from 41% in 2013 to 51% in 2023.  To make the point in stark contrast, in its 2023 annual report on Faculty Development and Diversity, Harvard showed shifting faculty demographics over time in the following graph, broken out by “tenured” and “tenure-track.”

Harvard touted its success in changing its faculty demographics, noting in 2023 that its numbers of women and “people of color” tenured was up 24% and 33% over ten years, with the percentage of each group tenured since 2022 (just one year) at 46%. The numbers were even higher for tenure-track faculty hiring, as shown in the graph below. White men made up 56% of tenured faculty, but only 32% of tenuretrack faculty. 

Here’s a chart summarizing the progress. The declining line on each side of the graph is labeled “White Men.”

The fact that the percentage of tenure track white men as of AY23 is 32%, which just happens to be very close to their percentage of the overall US demographic is probably not an accident. 

Of course you can argue that a faculty demographic that “looks like America” is where this should end up over time. That’s what would happen in an ideal world, but the reality is that there probably aren’t as many minority candidates for Harvard faculty positions in exactly the same way there aren’t as many minority candidates for undergraduate admissions at Harvard. Specifically, Asians are probably overrepresented in the candidate pool (for faculty jobs and admissions) and Black and Hispanic candidates are probably underrepresented. If you wind up with a new class of freshmen who look exactly like America demographically, someone is putting a finger on the scale. That’s just not what the the pool of top high school graduates looks like at this moment in time. And given that candidates for faculty positions are made up of past graduates of these same elite schools, the demographic of faculty candidates is probably even less diverse than the demographics of incoming freshmen.

So what happens next? The EEOC will carry out an investigation and that could lead to a lawsuit.

Unlike HHS and the Education Department, the EEOC cannot cut off funds to institutions found to be violating civil rights law. It can, however, sue employers based on the results of its investigations, which have led to settlements as large as $250 million.

The agency’s probe of Harvard comes as universities around the country are facing lawsuits over their discriminatory hiring practices. The University of Illinois Chicago, for example, was sued in February by a former professor who alleged that he was fired for speaking out about racial quotas in faculty hiring. Northwestern University was hit with a similar lawsuit last year.

My own suspicious is that many of these schools have been winking at laws against using race as a factor in hiring and could be facing lawsuits. But we’ll have to wait and see where this goes. Only one thing is certain. Harvard’s decision to lead the resistance is not looking very smart at this moment.