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 probe is the latest federal action against the beleaguered university, which last month sued the Trump administration over its decision to freeze more than $2 billion in aid to the Ivy League school.
In a document initiating the investigation, the EEOC cited materials on Harvard’s website—many of them now deleted—in which the school bragged about increasing the number of “women, non-binary, and/or people of color” on the faculty. The largest increase was in the share of non-white tenure-track faculty, which rose by 37 percent between 2013 and 2023.
The majority of those new hires, Harvard noted in a 2023 report, had been made in the past year.
White men, meanwhile, decreased dramatically as a share of tenure-track faculty, dropping from 46 percent in 2013 to 32 percent in 2023. Every other demographic for which Harvard collects data, including white women, rose over the same period.
Hellbound and Down 