A former Justice Department civil rights attorney alleges the investigations behind this year's biggest admissions-policy settlements were rigged from the start — and House Democrats are now demanding DOJ turn over its files.
Haley Van Erem, who spent nearly a decade in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division before being pulled onto the administration's antisemitism task force, filed a whistleblower disclosure this week with the inspectors general at DOJ and Health and Human Services and with the Office of Special Counsel. Her lawyers say the investigations into Harvard, Brown, and Columbia had outcomes that were "predetermined, without regard to the evidence," part of what the complaint calls a "politically mandated effort" to extract settlement money and funding freezes.
The specifics vary by school. At Brown, Van Erem says investigators finished their review in April 2025 and found no Title VI violation — but a senior official allegedly told her there was "no way we're going to get a letter of no violation cleared" by leadership, and pushed for a settlement anyway. At Columbia, she says attorneys were given only hours to review draft findings on an accelerated timeline, built partly on claims that were "unsupported, based on news reports or litigation filings," or tied to protected speech. At Harvard, officials allegedly discussed sweeping funding freezes and settlement terms before any investigation had established a violation.
The disclosure landed with Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who fired off a letter to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon calling the investigations "a pre-baked frame-up operation" and demanding she sit for a transcribed interview and hand over records — not just on Harvard, Brown, and Columbia, but on Cornell too. A DOJ spokesperson denied the allegations and said Van Erem didn't work on the university investigations in question. Read more at Higher Ed Dive.
This is a story about how three admissions-relevant settlements got made, not (yet) a story that changes what any of these schools require from you as an applicant. Keep those two things separate.
Columbia's commitment to race-blind admissions and demographic reporting, and Brown's data-sharing commitments around merit-based admissions, are terms of signed settlements — a whistleblower complaint and an angry letter from a committee minority don't undo them. Undoing a federal settlement takes a court fight or a renegotiation, and neither is close. If you're applying to Columbia, Brown, or Harvard this cycle, go by the admissions criteria each school has actually posted, not by how this controversy resolves.
If Van Erem's account holds up under an inspector general review, it hands these schools something they didn't have before: documented evidence that the process behind their settlements may have been legally deficient. That's a lever a school's counsel could eventually pull to renegotiate terms, even if nothing moves this admissions cycle. It's also a new reason for Cornell applicants to pay attention — Raskin's records request pulls Cornell into this story for the first time, even though it wasn't previously reported as a named target.
Five days after a federal judge dismissed DOJ's separate antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard for being too thin on evidence, a DOJ insider is now alleging that thinness was the pattern, not the exception, across Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. Neither development rolls back a settlement or reopens an admissions decision. But together they suggest the legal footing under this administration's whole Title VI campaign is less solid than the settlement press releases implied — worth tracking if you're choosing between these schools and peers that haven't been through this fight.
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