The Four-Page Amnesty: United States v. Harvard and the Invention of Title VI’s Ongoing-Violation Requirement – Mark Goldfeder
On August 13, 2026, the District of Massachusetts needed only four pages to dismiss the United States’ Title VI enforcement action against Harvard University, and in those four pages it held that a university may violate Title VI for two academic years, keep every federal dollar it received, and defeat the United States by outwardly behaving itself once the government’s letter arrives. The order is short, and the brevity is not accidental: the reasoning cannot survive a longer look at the statute, the precedent, or the district court’s own prior findings.
The order is particularly astounding because the author of those prior findings is the author of the order. In August 2024, in Kestenbaum v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Judge Richard Stearns reviewed the same campus and refused to dismiss a private Title VI suit brought by Jewish students. He called Harvard’s response to their harassment “at best, indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory,” warned that crediting the university’s public statements would “reward Harvard for virtuous public declarations that for the most part . . . proved hollow when it came to taking disciplinary measures against offending students and faculty,” and concluded that “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.” Two years later, those facts barely rate a footnote, which declines to “further rehearse” the 2023–24 allegations because prior opinions, including his own, had already fleshed them out. What matters now, the court says, is the calendar: the government alleged only three later incidents, all in March 2025, and none after June 30, 2025, when the agency formally advised Harvard of its failure to comply. Those incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to show continuing institutional noncompliance, and without an ongoing violation there was no case...
Read the full article
