U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns said the claims in the lawsuit were ‘too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference.’
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice on Aug. 13 that accused Harvard University of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment.
The lawsuit, filed on March 20, 2026, accused the prominent university of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said on Aug. 13 that the claim of an ongoing violation of Title VI lacked sufficient evidence.
“Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote in a ruling on Aug. 13.
The ruling was made after Harvard filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
“The Amended Complaint focuses almost entirely on incidents that took place during the 2023–2024 school year,” Stearns added. “Only three incidents are alleged to have occurred after this period, all of which took place nearly a full year later (and more than one full academic year before this case was filed) in March of 2025.”
Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, told The Epoch Times in a statement on Aug. 13: “We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is actively investigating antisemitism nationwide. The Civil Rights Division has an extensive and active portfolio of antisemitism enforcement, including indictments, prosecutions, settlements, and investigations across the country.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Harvard for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
The initial 44-page lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, alleged that the university fostered and continued to foster a campus climate in which hostile anti-Semitism, discrimination, and anti-Israeli conduct thrived in the wake of the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel.
The Trump administration alleged that Jewish students at the school were harassed, physically abused, stalked, and spat upon as Harvard allegedly “turned a blind eye” to anti-Semitism and discrimination.
“Fearful for their safety, Jewish students wore baseball caps to conceal their yarmulkes or kept out of sight, effectively denying them access to Federally funded educational opportunities,” the complaint states.
Former Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in a statement made at the time the lawsuit was filed, accused Harvard and other schools of allowing “anti-Semitism to flourish on campus,” and she said that the “litigation underscores the Trump Administration’s commitment to demanding better from [the] nation’s schools and putting an end to discriminatory behavior that harms students.”
By Jacki Thrapp
