Faculty groups question DOJ’s Yale admissions claims, balk at potential deal

Dive Brief:

 The American Association of University Professors and other related faculty groups on Monday called on Yale University to reject any potential deal with the Trump administration to resolve probes into the Ivy League institution’s admissions practices.
In May, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that Yale illegally gave admissions advantages to Black and Hispanic medical school applicants. Attorneys for Yale’s AAUP chapter this week sent university leaders a scathing analysis of the agency’s findings, arguing it relied on “cherry-picked” and “statistically weak” evidence, leading to “bogus” findings.
“Yale has the resources, stature, and responsibility to stand firm,” the faculty coalition said Tuesday in a statement, warning that concessions to the government would compromise Yale’s academic freedom, shared governance and independence.

Dive Insight: 

The Trump administration has upended decades of civil rights enforcement by cracking down on efforts meant to address historical inequities and practices it regards as reverse discrimination, often citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on race-conscious college admissions in the process. Yale is one of the first universities to publicly come under fire in the latest front of that crusade — medical school admissions. 

The national AAUP, together with its Yale chapter and the national and Connecticut American Federation of Teachers, called on university leaders to defend Yale and its admissions practices. 

In a Tuesday letter to Yale President Maurie McInnis and General Counsel Alexander Dreier, lawyers representing the Yale AAUP with a firm hired by Yale AAUP, Sher Tremonte, said the DOJ’s allegations had “significant factual and legal deficiencies” and urged university leaders to reject “what is a transparent DOJ effort to strong-arm Yale.”

The “purported evidence” that formed the basis of the DOJ’s findings was “paper-thin and amounts to little more than speculation,” wrote the attorneys, from the firm Sher Tremonte.

They pointed in part to the DOJ’s citation of an admissions guidance slide from 2024 simply titled “Admissions post-SCOTUS.” In the May letter, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights unit, wrote that the slide “suggests that admissions personnel are given verbal instructions during this presentation encouraging the use of race/ethnicity in admissions.”

The Sher Tremonte attorneys wrote that Dhillon’s conclusion is “unsupported by any facts and is based on pure speculation.”

They also attacked Dhillon’s claim that admitted applicants to Yale’s medical school show “significant differences across racial lines” on the Medical College Admission Test as well as differences in their GPAs, with White and Asian students having higher median scores and grades than Black and Hispanic students.

“The tables show extremely minor variations at the very highest range of the GPA and MCAT distributions,” Sher Tremonte attorneys wrote. “Although the DOJ Letter describes these differences as ‘significant,’ the numbers themselves belie that description.”

Moreover, they argued that the DOJ ignored all other possible factors contributing to the differences, such as socioeconomic background, home states and past work experience. “By isolating race alone and omitting all other explanatory variables, the DOJ’s statistical analysis falsely inflates the relationship between race and admissions statistics.”

The analysis follows shortly after The New York Times reported in late June that Yale could cut a deal with the Trump administration to resolve the probe, which by then had spread to the university’s law school and undergraduate admissions. 

Citing anonymous sources, the publication reported that Yale was in talks with the Trump administration and had offered a potential settlement proposal to resolve the widening admissions probe.

“Yale’s quick moves to try to reach an agreement with the government suggest it does not want a high-profile, drawn-out fight,” the Times reported, pointing to the Trump administration’s prolonged, multi-faceted attacks on Harvard University and the ensuing legal battle. 

A Yale spokesperson said Wednesday that the university doesn’t discuss the specifics of ongoing legal matters. 

“That said, we stand firm in the university’s commitment to students’ free expression, academic freedom, and Yale’s ability to determine who is admitted in accordance with the law,” the spokesperson said in an email. 

Since the DOJ took aim at Yale, it has announced similar findings about admissions at the University of California, Davis’ medical school and said it has opened at least 15 additional probes into other unnamed institutions.