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Donald Trump has kept Harvard’s lawyers busy.

Over the past four months, the University has found itself facing at least 10 new federal investigations and fighting 12 federal agencies across two high-profile lawsuits. In Trump’s Washington, the federal bureaucracy has become a weapon to aim at higher education — and Harvard in particular.

“They’re engaged with the government on so many different fronts at the same time right now,” said Joyce P. Jacobsen ’82, a former president of Hobart College and William Smith College. “That obviously isn’t a situation that really has ever happened before.”

In response, Harvard has retained lawyers from white-shoe firms and mobilized its own legal office. Its two lawsuits accusing the Trump administration of unconstitutional retaliation — with more than $2.7 billion dollars and a quarter of the University’s student body at stake — have grabbed headlines nationwide.

Since the beginning of April, Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel has filled a newly-created position with an attorney who led an organization founded during Trump’s first term to take his agenda to court.

And the University has brought on an expanding team of outside lawyers, many with strong conservative networks and deep Washington ties, with 21 currently working on its two lawsuits against the Trump administration.

“They’ve hired the best and the brightest,” Stanley M. Brand, former general counsel to the House of Representatives, said. “Harvard isn’t lacking for legal talent — that’s for sure.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Harvard has handed over reams of documents to federal agencies as other investigations continue to advance.

Though legal experts say that the investigations will likely be an uphill battle for the Trump administration, their outcomes are anything but certain in such a volatile political environment. And even if Harvard can maintain its innocence to the government, the inquiries may take their toll on Harvard’s reputation.

‘An Open Question’

Of the investigations opened into Harvard this semester, four accuse the University of failing to protect Jewish students and faculty from discrimination, and an overlapping four claim that it discriminated on the basis of race or sex. Another three examine Harvard’s foreign ties or international students. Two accuse Harvard of anticompetitive admissions practices.

Some investigations have already had consequences. A joint task force between the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the Education Department cut more than $2 billion in Harvard’s research funding after the University rejected a list of heavy-handed demands.

And the DHS revoked Harvard’s authorization to enroll international students after it refused to provide some requested records on international students, though the measure is currently blocked in court.

In those two cases, Harvard decided the government’s asks were unacceptable — and that it was on firm enough ground to sue.

Harvard has likewise indicated that it will take legal action if the Internal Revenue Service strips its nonprofit status, as Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have threatened.

It might be an easy victory: federal law prevents the president from ordering IRS investigations.

“It’s not to say that officials at IRS can’t, on their own, decide to proceed with some kind of tax enforcement effort,” said Brian D. Galle ’94-95, a tax law professor at Georgetown University. “But they can’t do it at the direction of the president.”

But most of the time, Harvard seems to have quietly complied. In a meeting with other Ivy League presidents in early April, Garber and the group came to a strategic consensus: they would comply with the requirements of civil rights investigations, but rebuff demands they saw as interfering with academic freedom.

The investigations into antisemitism and racial discrimination largely hinge on Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race- and national origin-based discrimination at federally funded institutions. The Education Department and HHS, which jointly launched a probe into Harvard and the Harvard Law Review alleging anti-white discrimination, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform all cited Title VI.

The government has broad authority to request evidence from Harvard. But legal scholars believe that actually proving the University violated Title VI by tolerating antisemitism could be a tall order for the Trump administration, especially since the provision sets the burden that Harvard must have intentionally discriminated against the affected groups.

“Discrimination has to be intentional,” said Richard Delgado, who teaches at Seattle University and specializes in free speech law. “It can’t just be statistical, it can’t be episodic.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is examining Harvard’s hiring practices and 13 fellowship programs for prioritizing applicants of color over “white, Asian, male, or straight employees, applicants, and training program participants,” instead cited Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination.

Though discrimination under Title VII does not have to be intentional, legal scholars say that the data on the diversity of Harvard’s faculty is not enough to prove a pattern of discrimination.

The Trump administration’s contention that diversity programs represent a snub to white and male employees, rather than a way to equalize opportunity for disadvantaged applicants, is a sharp break with decades of precedent. Until January, federal nondiscrimination law required Harvard and other federal contractors to provide annual reports on diversity and information about their efforts to address employment barriers.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is investigating whether Harvard has complied with the Supreme Court’s ruling to end affirmative action, and has alleged that the use of racial preferences in Harvard’s admissions may be defrauding the government under the False Claims Act.

Though little information has been provided about how the government would apply the law in this case, experts believe that any interpretation would be a new application of the 162 year-old provision.

“It’s a very contestable, open question as to whether the government will succeed in using the False Claims Act against schools like Harvard,” said Daniel G. Currell, a former deputy under secretary at the Department of Education during the first Trump administration.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Department of Education are each investigating Harvard’s relationship with foreign donors. Though Currell, who worked on Section 117 cases during his time in the government, explained that collaboration or funding from foreign sources, such as governments, is not inherently illegal, the government would have to prove that Harvard failed to disclose these relationships. The Education Department attempted a similar investigation in 2020.

The antitrust inquiry, opened by the House and Senate Judiciary Committee last month, alleges that Harvard and the seven other Ivy League institutions may have colluded to hike tuition costs using tools like enrollment management software and algorithms to calculate financial aid.

Without explicit evidence that the Ivies verbally or contractually agreed to the practices under scrutiny, like feeding applicant information into a shared database to maximize tuition revenue, it may be hard for the government to prove collusion.

If each institution was acting in its own best interests, coincidences — like using similar financial aid algorithms — may not be evidence of illegal activity, said Boston University law professor Keith N. Hylton, who specializes in antitrust law.

A Punishing Process

Even where the powers of the federal government to punish Harvard are limited, it has broad investigative authority — which may leave the University doing damage control.

Harvard has been asked to fork over information on an unprecedented scale — including its messages with the College Board, research collaborations with Chinese- and Iranian-funded scholars, drafts of its reports on campus antisemitism, and a list of employees who witnessed pro-Palestine protests at Harvard Medical School’s 2024 Commencement.

Pennsylvania State University professor L. Lance Cole, who studies the law of congressional investigations, said Congress retains broader investigative authority than the executive branch, allowing for a lower bar to request materials from Harvard — which he says explain why Harvard has been more “cooperative” and “forthcoming” with congressional investigations. The University turned over tens of thousands of pages of records to a House-wide antisemitism investigation in 2024.

“The congressional investigations are legal, constitutional and permitted,” Cole said.

But for executive agencies, the bar to launch an investigation is much higher, which may warrant a level of defiance.

“It may well make sense to file lawsuits and oppose those investigations, while potentially at the same time cooperating with congressional investigations, because it’s really two separate legal arenas,” Cole said.

Still, without penalties from the relevant agencies, experts say that Harvard cannot challenge the launch of these investigations. And there’s little it can do to contain Congress’ ability to publicize confidential documents and air the University’s dirty laundry.

When the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released its 325-page report on campus antisemitism at Harvard, for example, it exposed the tense internal deliberations of the University’s top officials. According to New York University constitutional law professor Peter M. Shane ’74, federal investigations that expose sensitive material may be a penalty of their own for Harvard through damaging its reputation.

“For people who are targeted by the federal government for any reason, the investigatory process is as much a punishment as a possibility of some eventual civil sanction,” Shane said.

And though experts say that Harvard has a strong chance of beating the Trump administration in both lawsuits, the University still faces three and a half more years of Trump.

“Even if Harvard wins the lawsuit with respect to particular actions that the government has taken, as long as President Trump’s in office and continues this policy, Harvard will remain in jeopardy,” Cole said.

—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.

—Staff writer Annabel M. Yu can be reached at annabel.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @annabelmyu.