Discontent is growing after The New York Times reported in late June that Yale University may settle with the U.S. Department of Justice in a dispute over the Ivy League school’s admissions process. The DOJ has accused Yale of continuing to consider race in admissions for its medical school af ter the practice was ruled illegal in the 2023 Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Student, faculty and alumni groups are mobilizing to oppose a potential settlement. A rapidly-organized phone bank Tuesday drew 60 participants ranging from the class of 1970 to the incoming class of 2030. The groups mobilizing include Yale’s undergraduate student government; the Yale College Council; Yale College Democrats; the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors; and the alumni group Stand Up for Yale, which formed in the spring of 2025 as pressure from the Trump administration began mounting on higher education institutions. The groups say they’re concerned any settlement will come at the cost of Yale’s academic freedom and integrity, as well as the safety of its international students. Rishi Gurudevan of the Yale College Democrats said the idea for a phone bank came to him when he saw an Instagram post from the college council sharing phone numbers for people to call. Gurudevan said even his less-politically involved friends were “really worried about this stuff,” and he believed that it was possible to mobilize people who didn’t typically consider themselves as activists or organizers. He reached out to the Yale AAUP and Stand Up for Yale, both of which agreed to pitch in. “A lot of them had never phone banked before, and so, it was really fun to be able to share” how easy it was, Gurudevan said. Yale College Council President Alex Chen said he’s worried “students are being repackaged into clauses to be bargained.” Chen said settlements from Northwestern and Columbia have given Yale students a reason to worry. Among other things, both schools agreed to impose new restrictions on student demonstrations in their agreements. At Columbia, students who occupied Hamilton Hall to protest the war in Gaza were suspended, expelled or had their degrees temporarily revoked. The university also appointed a new senior vice provost to review academic programming related to the Middle East. “Students are not ignorant to the pattern here,” Chen said. Both settlements also involved multimillion-dollar payments to the federal government. Crimson Courage, a Harvard alumni group that formed amid Harvard’s battle with the Trump administration, has also written to Yale’s leadership to urge them not to settle. The DOJ letter Yale once seemed to have avoided the kind of showdown with the Trump administration that snared peers like Harvard and Brown. That changed on May 14, when the DOJ sent a letter to the university arguing that Yale had continued to consider race as a factor in its admissions process after the Harvard case. The letter called on the school to enter a voluntary resolution agreement with the DOJ to bring its admissions practices “into legal compliance.” Zach Pan of the Yale College Democrats said he believes it’s no coincidence the DOJ letter came after students had left for the summer. “They know it’s wrong, so they’re trying to do it at a time when there’ll be less opposition,” Pan said. He also criticized Yale for reportedly hiring the law firm McGuireWoods, which previously helped the University of Virginia settle with the Trump administration. “I think that was a terrible sign,” Pan said. “The surrender firm, if you will.” Although the Times described the DOJ’s inquiry as “expansive,” others have cast doubt on the evidence the department has assembled. “The DOJ’s factual findings are bogus — cherry-picked, statistically weak, and presented without appropriate context or support in the record,” wrote attorneys with Sher Tremonte LLP on behalf of the Yale AAUP in a letter to Yale President Maurie McInnis on July 7. DOJ’s evidence, AAUP lawyers’ response The first piece of evidence the DOJ cited was a slide from a 2024 presentation given to Yale admissions personnel. According to the letter, the slide was titled “Admissions post-SCOTUS” and was otherwise blank. “This suggests that admissions personnel are given verbal instructions during this presentation encouraging the use of race/ethnicity in admissions, and such instructions are not put in writing,” the letter read. It wasn’t clear why the DOJ felt confident making this inference based on a mostly-blank slide. The attorneys from Sher Tremonte noted as much, writing in their letter to Yale President McInnis, “This conclusion is unsupported by facts and is based on pure speculation.” CT Mirror reached out to the DOJ for clarification but did not receive a response. Its letter went on to cite a presentation from a 2025 retreat for the admissions committee, which the DOJ said provided “a roadmap” to get around the Harvard decision. According to the letter, the presentation “uses schools in states like California … as prototypes for circumventing Harvard.” And the presentation allegedly ended with a look at how University of California Davis increased minority representation by weighing “socioeconomic advantage” more heavily. It wasn’t entirely clear whether that would violate the Harvard decision, however. Sher Tremonte’s attorneys certainly didn’t think so. “Rather than demonstrating an intent to circumvent the law, these and other admissions materials described in the [DOJ] Letter paint a picture of an institution seeking in good faith to comply with the requirements of SFFA [v. Harvard],” the attorneys wrote. But Brigid Harrington, a senior attorney at Hunton Andrews Kurth who specializes in higher education and civil rights law, said there’s room for uncertainty. On July 30, 2025, the DOJ released new guidance on how to comply with SFFA v. Harvard. That guidance argued that any other diversity-related considerations “could be read as a ‘proxy’ for race-based discrimination,” Harrington wrote in an email. Courts have not yet weighed in on whether that interpretation is correct. Yale AAUP president Daniel Martinez HoSang said the university had offered extensive legal training across campus on how to comply with the Harvard decision. HoSang served on the admissions committee for the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and said the DOJ’s allegations bore “no resemblance” to what he experienced. He said for Yale’s leadership to suggest otherwise now would be “an incredible betrayal.” Another admissions document the DOJ’s letter cited was a “holistic metrics model” from the AAMC, which Yale allegedly circulated in an instructional packet to admissions personnel. The model is a wheel-shaped diagram with several attributes an applicant to a medical school might have, including race and national origin; it also includes things like grade trends, family status, life experiences, sexual orientation and age. The letter included a link to the diagram on the AAMC website, but the link led to a 404 page. The DOJ stated that the inclusion of the diagram was itself a violation of the Harvard decision. “By circulating this wheel to its admissions personnel, Yale encourages them to consider race and national origin as legitimate factors for granting and denying admission,” the letter stated. The DOJ then presented admissions data from the Yale School of Medicine, which showed median GPAs and MCAT scores were slightly lower among admitted Black and Hispanic students than among white or Asian students from 2023 to 2025. For example: In 2025, the median GPA among admitted Black students was 3.88 and the median GPA for white students was 3.97. The median MCAT score for Black students was 518, the 95th percentile, while the median score for white students was 524, the 100th percentile. This, the DOJ alleged, “means Yale considers a substantially broader swath of Black and Hispanic students than it does for White or Asian students.” The letter went on to conclude that, because the scores were consistently lower across all three years, the university must not have changed its admissions practices after the Harvard decision. Sher Tremonte’s attorneys described that reasoning as highly suspect.  “As an initial matter, the tables show extremely minor variations at the very highest range of the GPA and MCAT distributions,” the attorneys wrote. This, they argued, showed that “YSM is an extraordinarily selective institution whose incoming students all meet the most rigorous standards of academic excellence.” Moreover, the attorneys wrote, there was no evidence in the DOJ letter that the variations were statistically significant — nor did the letter explore the possibility that other variables, such as household income or first-generation status, might explain the data. It’s a common statistical problem: Ice cream consumption is correlated with skin cancer, but ice cream does not cause skin cancer. There’s another explanatory variable — in this case, how sunny it is outside — that explains the relationship. Similarly, if it turns out first-generation students have lower MCAT scores, and more Black students than white are first-generation, then Yale weighing first-gen students more in admissions could produce the same results without considering race. “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 attorneys wrote. Harrington said the dispute here came down to the DOJ’s guidance on proxies for race. If Yale were using those other “explanatory variables” as proxies, it could be in violation of SFFA v. Harvard as the DOJ interpreted it. In fact, the department explicitly identified using first-generation status as something that could violate the ruling. In effect, Harrington wrote, whether the statistics reflect the use of race-based admissions preference would hinge on two factors: “1) do the ‘explanatory variables’ account for why MCAT score and grades are slightly lower for non-white students? And 2) can Yale permissibly favor students based on those ‘explanatory valuables’ or are they ‘proxies’ for race-based discrimination?” Sher Tremonte’s attorneys also questioned the legal basis for the DOJ’s challenges. “The DOJ’s letter relies on an untenable proposition: that any mention of race during the admissions process is unlawful,” the attorneys wrote. This, they argued, was actually at odds with the Supreme Court’s ruling, which explicitly allowed universities to continue considering “how race affected [the applicant’s] life.” In fact, Sher Tremonte’s attorneys wrote, the only way for Yale to eliminate all statistical differences in GPAs and MCAT scores would be to do exactly what the Supreme Court has said it cannot: to “isolate race during the admissions process” and “ensure that each admitted racial group presented precisely the same median statistics as any other.” This, the lawyers contended, would constitute “outright racial balancing,” which the Court has declared “patently unconstitutional.” Muneer Ahmad, co-general counsel for the Yale AAUP, agreed with Sher Tremonte’s findings and described the DOJ’s case as “weak on both the law and the facts.” He said faculty would pursue legal action if the university settles, though it’s too early yet to say precisely what form that would take. Pan of the Yale College Democrats said he sees the DOJ letter as an example of how the federal government has been weaponized against those who disagree with Donald Trump. “They have been attacking universities for a long time now, and this is the latest front in their battle,” Pan said. “I think it would help everyone if they were just more honest with their intentions here.” Gurudevan said students will resist if Yale does reach a settlement that limits campus freedoms. “When everyone comes back in the fall … if there are unfair rules around student gatherings or threats to international students’ privacy … students are going to step up,” Gurudevan said. Yale has not yet provided any details on the settlement it is reportedly negotiating. If it does not settle, there are still several steps the DOJ would have to go through before it could withhold funds from the university under Title VI, according to the Sher Tremonte attorneys. U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal is scheduled to speak at a press conference at Yale on Friday afternoon. Calista Oetama contributed reporting to this story. ...read more read less