That ruling said nothing about whether Harvard’s policies meet the expectations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires universities that accept federal funds to respond to discrimination and harassment on their campuses. Whether an institution meets that obligation comes down to its policy and procedural infrastructure: the internal machinery it has in place to recognize harassment, judge whether it creates a hostile environment, and take prompt, effective action to end it.

When a Courtroom Win Isn’t the End

When a university defeats a harassment lawsuit in court, it can look like proof of Title VI compliance. But a court and a regulator do not answer the same questions. In court, a student suing for damages must show that administrators knew about serious harassment and failed to act. The government, when it sues, must first give the school notice and a chance to comply. A regulator does not file suit; it audits whether a university’s policy machinery works in line with federal expectations. Clearing the court does not clear the regulator; the requirements tied to federal funding still apply.

Consider Harvard. The dismissal never touched the question a regulator would ask: whether Harvard’s systems for reporting, investigating, and remedying harassment live up to federal expectations. Nor did it address or overturn a separate 2025 Notice of Violation from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over the university’s handling of a hostile environment. It spared Harvard from protracted litigation, invasive disclosures, and immediate financial liability, but it left the HHS matter fully alive, including a referral that could jeopardize its federal funding.

Haverford College illustrates the same point. Judge Gerald McHugh dismissed the Title VI claims, ruling that the alleged incidents fell short of the high legal bar for a hostile environment, though he let a breach-of-contract claim proceed. Seven weeks later, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened its own Title VI investigation into Haverford, examining the same alleged failures to respond that the lawsuit had raised. The dismissal did nothing to foreclose that separate regulatory track. In August 2026, Haverford settled the remaining contract claim in the lawsuit, formalizing upgrades to the procedures the suit had put in question.

What the Rule Actually Requires

“A student’s silence does not relieve the university of its duty to investigate harassment.”

While the legal standards for a hostile-environment violation under Title VI are high in court, the regulatory standard is modest in what it dictates. It does not tell a university what specific policies to write, nor does it mandate a dedicated Title VI coordinator the way Title IX requires a Title IX coordinator. It leaves the design of those processes to each school. Instead, it sets functional objectives: maintaining systematic processes to recognize targeted harassment, determine whether a hostile environment exists, and execute prompt remedies.

When universities fall short, it is usually not because they lack policies entirely, but because their existing machinery contains procedural gaps. At Brown University, OCR’s 2024 review examined the school’s handling of harassment complaints from Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students alike. Brown’s existing policy infrastructure was allowing administrators to close or pause a case when a student stopped responding to outreach. But a student’s silence does not relieve the university of its duty to investigate the harassment. Similarly, Reed College recently resolved a Title VI complaint over acts of targeted harassment through a settlement focused on institutional response, not on the acts themselves.

Not a Speech Code

The year before the DOJ’s Title VI suit against Harvard, Biden’s OCR had already faulted the university under the same core duty. That duty is older than either the Trump or Biden administration, worked out in federal regulations and guidance over decades. It is also tightly bound. Title VI does not impose speech codes or declare any particular phrase or slogan off-limits. Only a specific type of conduct counts: harassment severe or pervasive enough to shut a student out of their education. Even the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a leading defender of campus free speech, acknowledges that properly defined harassment is not protected speech.

Mapping Policy to Expectations

Evaluating compliance, even in this modest, tightly bound environment, takes some doing: federal expectations run through decades of regulations, enforcement, and agency guidance, while university rules sit scattered across student handbooks, employee codes, anti-bullying rules, and grievance procedures unique to each school.

In our “Mapping Higher Ed Decision-making” research project at Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies (CPS), we are developing new systems for mapping campus policy handbooks directly onto federal regulatory expectations for Title VI. We intentionally keep individual campus incidents and administrator behaviors out of our knowledge base for analysis. Setting aside the drama of any given protest or funding fight, we can isolate the underlying structure of institutional response. This mapping shows whether the machinery is in place and aligned with federal objectives, not whether a school used it well in any given case. Even at this early stage, we are beginning to see a pattern: for many universities, meeting Title VI will likely take targeted fixes, bringing existing policies into line with federal expectations and broadening internal understanding of what those policies are there to do. It will rarely require a radical overhaul.

Institutions like Harvard, fighting high-stakes federal cases, can afford well-resourced legal teams that approach all of this strategically: when to settle and when to litigate, when to revise a policy or write a new one, how to word it, where to announce it. But the bulk of higher education operates in a different reality. Lacking that kind of apparatus, most universities cannot afford to develop sophisticated strategies to navigate regulatory pressure after the fact.

Today’s unsettled regulatory environment has raised the stakes for everyone, making precise policy self-knowledge far more valuable now than it was in quieter years. A university need not rely on a court to examine its own policies; that much it can do for itself. Far better to take stock on its own terms than when the regulators come knocking.

“A university need not rely on a court to examine its own policies … far better to take stock on its own terms than when the regulators come knocking.”

Ron Liebowitz is Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Work at Northeastern University. He is also President Emeritus of Brandeis University and Middlebury College.

Jessica Liebowitz is Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Work at Northeastern University. She is also Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University.