By Jan Wolfe and Susan Heavey
Feb 13 (Reuters) – The Trump administration sued Harvard University on Friday, accusing it of failing to comply with a federal investigation and seeking documents to determine whether the university had illegally considered race in its admissions process.
The move comes less than two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump said his administration was seeking $1 billion from Harvard to settle probes into school policies, after a news report that said Trump had dropped his demand for a payment from the Ivy League school.
A Harvard spokesperson said the university is committed to following the law and has been responding to the government’s inquiries in good faith.
“The university will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach,” the spokesperson said.
Trump’s administration has been threatening to withhold federal funds from Harvard and several other universities over issues including pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, campus diversity and transgender policies.
The Justice Department said on Friday in a press release that Harvard had “repeatedly slow-walked the pace of production and refused to produce pertinent data and documents,” including admissions policies and correspondence related to banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In the complaint filed in Boston federal court, Justice Department lawyers said the documents requested will help assess whether Harvard is complying with a 2023 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which said that race-conscious college admissions programs are unconstitutional.
The Justice Department said it brought the lawsuit “solely to compel Harvard to produce documents relating to any consideration of race in admission” and “does not accuse Harvard of any discriminatory conduct, nor does it seek monetary damages or the revocation of federal funding.”
The administration last year attempted to cancel hundreds of grants awarded to Harvard researchers on the grounds the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus, prompting Harvard to sue.
Trump’s attempts to freeze federal funds for Harvard have faced legal resistance and the two sides have failed to reach a deal thus far.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Susan Heavey; Additional reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Chizu Nomiyama and Daniel Wallis)
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