HHS’ Civil Rights Office Finds Harvard University in Violation of Federal Civil Rights Law

Harvard University Violated Title VI by Showing Deliberate Indifference to the Hostile Environment Faced by its Jewish and Israeli Students

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that Harvard University (Harvard) violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) by acting with deliberate indifference towards harassment of Jewish and Israeli students by other students and faculty from October 7, 2023, through the present. OCR enforces Title VI, which prohibits a recipient of Federal financial assistance from discriminating in its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, or national origin, which includes discrimination against individuals that is based on their actual or perceived Israeli or Jewish identity or ancestry. From fiscal years 2023 to 2025, Harvard and its subrecipients have received over $794 million in Federal financial assistance from HHS.

OCR’s Notice of Violation finds that Harvard has been – and is – deliberately indifferent to the severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment of Jewish and Israeli students by its own students and faculty. The findings are based on information and documents obtained during the investigation: Harvard’s policies and procedures; conclusions from Harvard’s own internal Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias; findings from a U.S. Congressional task force that investigated antisemitism on college campuses; and reliable media reports that contemporaneously depicted antisemitic episodes of vandalism, harassment, and physical violence over a 19-month period at Harvard.

“Harvard’s public pledges to improve its disciplinary framework for harassment and misconduct are inadequate to meaningfully address these serious findings,” said Paula M. Stannard, Director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS. “HHS stands ready to reengage in productive discussions with Harvard to reach resolution on the corrective action that Harvard can take to remedy the violations and come into compliance with its Title VI obligations.”

OCR’s findings document that a hostile environment existed, and continues to exist, at Harvard. This hostile environment includes harassing speech, threats, and intimidation targeting Jewish and Israeli students, including calls for genocide and murder. OCR’s findings also extensively detail acts of physical intimidation and violence between students. This hostile environment denied, and continues to deny, students’ fundamental educational opportunities. Such educational opportunities denied include safe class attendance, access to campus facilities such as libraries, dining halls, dorms, and other common areas, participation in extracurricular activities, and overall physical and emotional well-being on campus.

The Notice of Violation explains the ways in which Harvard – which has substantial control over both the students who committed harassment and the property where harassment occurred – acted with deliberate indifference with regard to the hostile environment.

For example, Harvard failed:

• To establish clear and consistent policies and practices to report and remediate discrimination;
• To discipline violators of its policies with any uniformity, resulting in a patchwork application of sanctions that Harvard inconsistently reduced or reversed, resulting in a disciplinary system that had little to no deterrent effect; and
• To enforce its own time, place and manner restrictions in any consistent or meaningful way, resulting in recurring and unsanctioned episodes that deprived Jewish and Israeli students their full access to parts of campus where they studied and socialized.

The Notice of Violation may be found at https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/harvard-title-vi-notice-violation.pdf. This investigation is the second OCR investigation completed in this Administration under Title VI that examines the civil rights liability of a Federal funding recipient for race and national origin discrimination under a deliberate indifference theory. The scope of the findings released today do not address OCR’s ongoing investigation under Title VI into suspected race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the Harvard Law Review journal.

Today’s announcement is part of a broader effort by the Administration’s multi-agency Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is part of the Administration’s commitment to address “unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence,” as expressed in President Trump’s Executive Orders, Combatting Anti-Semitism (Dec. 11, 2019) and Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism (Jan. 29, 2025).

If you believe that you or someone else has been discriminated against because of race, color, national origin, disability, age, sex, or religion in programs or activities that HHS directly operates or for which HHS provides Federal financial assistance, you may file a complaint with the HHS Office for Civil Rights at: https://www.hhs.gov/civil-rights/filing-a-complaint/index.html.

Follow HHS OCR on X (formerly Twitter) at @HHSOCR.