By Jessica Liebowitz and Ron Liebowitz

For the past two years, the crisis over civil rights compliance on American campuses has played out as a political confrontation, with federal funding threats, the withholding of funds, high-profile investigations, and enforcement actions against colleges and universities. Missing from that confrontation has been the question of whether those institutions have the compliance capacity Title VI requires.

When the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Harvard University in March of this year for Title VI violations, it stood out from the sweeping federal actions against Harvard that had been capturing headlines. This was a carefully constructed civil rights complaint, one that linked the campus turmoil of recent years directly to specific gaps in Harvard’s Title VI compliance infrastructure.

Those gaps are themselves linked to the structure of accountability for civil rights compliance. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which oversees compliance for roughly 5,000 institutions, operates reactively. It investigates complaints after they are filed. It does not examine whether institutions have the infrastructure to meet their obligations.

The failures in university leadership that followed October 7, 2023, put that infrastructure gap on full public display. The harassment of Jewish students went unaddressed. Administrative responses were halting and inconsistent. University presidents could not say clearly, under congressional testimony, whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their own codes of conduct.

Focused legal attention was not long in coming. Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation making New York the first state in the nation to require every college and university to name a dedicated Title VI coordinator. The Office for Civil Rights sent warning letters to 60 universities under investigation for failure to respond appropriately to a hostile environment of harassment, while a multiagency task force, including the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Education, and the General Services Administration launched parallel investigations that remain active across dozens of institutions.

The intensity of the emerging legal attention on Title VI compliance pointed to a problem long in the making. For decades, colleges and universities underinvested in the kind of self-assessment needed to know where they stood on Title VI compliance. Reactive rather than proactive federal oversight made that neglect easy to sustain and justify. One measure of that neglect is a bill recently introduced in the Senate, with bipartisan support, echoing Governor Hochul’s earlier recognition of the problem: every college and university receiving federal aid would be required to name a dedicated Title VI coordinator.

“An AI-driven audit built on evidence, not inference, can identify in advance what federal investigators find after the fact.”

Jessica Liebowitz and Ron Liebowitz

It was against this backdrop that our research program at Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies began focusing on better understanding Title VI compliance at the level of individual colleges and universities. Several weeks ago, our research team ran AI-automated compliance audits of a small number of universities, focusing on Title VI’s hostile environment provisions. Coincidentally, eleven days later, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging Title VI violations that threaten nearly one billion dollars of the university’s federal aid. Since Harvard was one of the schools in our sample, we were able to review each of DOJ’s allegations in light of our own findings. Every infrastructure deficiency identified in the government’s complaint was flagged in our analysis.

We do not assess whether administrators follow through on their own policy promises. That is a question of behavior, not capacity. Our analysis focuses strictly on the policy details of compliance readiness.

Consider the Harvard case. Already back in January 2024, the Biden administration formally notified Harvard that its Title VI policies were non-compliant, and Harvard signed a resolution agreement committing to specified corrections. As of a few weeks ago, AI analysis reveals that those corrections have not yet been made. This is a particular kind of self-awareness gap: one where stated commitments to reform have not yet found their way into actual policies.

Even though we are still in the prototype phase, the correspondence between the Harvard lawsuit and our preliminary Harvard findings confirms that our methodology works. An AI-driven audit built on evidence, not inference, can identify in advance what federal investigators find after the fact. The next step is weighting compliance elements according to the regulatory and legal attention they receive. That body of evidence spans legal and regulatory actions across many years, including the kind of resolution agreement Harvard signed with the Biden administration, and DOJ’s recent lawsuit against UCLA. The key is keeping the AI’s tasks tightly defined and its reasoning transparent, so that the findings can be trusted, analyzed for insight, and acted upon.

“The practical barriers to institutional self-awareness are falling away. With increasing precision and lowering cost, colleges and universities can know where they stand on Title VI compliance. The response to that kind of self-awareness will become a new test of university leadership.”

Jessica Liebowitz and Ron Liebowitz

The practical barriers to institutional self-awareness are falling away. With increasing precision and lowering cost, colleges and universities can know where they stand on Title VI compliance. The response to that kind of self-awareness will become a new test of university leadership.

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

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