Former University President Jim Ryan’s resignation June 27 followed a months-long pressure campaign against the University which was led by Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. Dhillon — a School of Law alumni who attended just one year below Ryan — has publicly criticized Ryan for his diversity practices and alleged that the University had failed to comply with the Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
It is well documented that Ryan and Dhillon find themselves on opposing sides of the debate over university-led efforts to increase diversity on college campuses. Ryan’s record reveals his support for such efforts, while Dhillon has been a long-time opponent of them.
While the University happens to be Dhillon’s alma mater, the Civil Rights Division has targeted the diversity programs of a swath of influential institutions, including the University. Dhillon has also personally represented plaintiffs against universities, prior to joining the Justice Department.
Dhillon’s public opposition to diversity efforts such as affirmative action dates back to her time at the conservative newspaper, The Dartmouth Review, when she was an undergraduate student between 1985 and 1989. Specifically, Dhillon complained that Dartmouth was lowering its academic standards to accommodate a more diverse student body.
Dhillon has an equally long history of expressing concern over a perceived left-wing ideological dominance on college campuses. In 1988, when Dhillon was an editor for The Review, the paper drew criticism from other students, faculty and even the university’s president, James O. Freedman. At the time, Dhillon responded to these criticisms by emphasing students’ rights to free speech.
“[Freedman] purports to want to further the cause of diversity but he's actually supporting censorship and suppressing points of view alien to the faculty of Dartmouth College,” Dhillon.
Freedman’s public criticism of The Review stemmed from an article the paper published that criticized the teaching and qualifications of a Black music professor, William S. Cole.
The following year, The Dartmouth Review, still led by Dhillon, sued Dartmouth College and Freedman after four writers were sanctioned for their actions relating to the Cole article, which included a confrontation with the professor over the article.
The experience heavily shaped the direction of Dhillon’s career.
“I was blown away by the fact that 19 and 20-year-olds could sue an Ivy League institution,” Dhillon said in 2022 on “The Portia Project” podcast. “[The lawsuit] changed my course in life from Medicine, which everybody I knew was doing, to Law.”
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1989, Dhillon entered the University of Virginia School of Law, from which she earned her J.D. in 1993. Ryan earned his just one year earlier. At the University, Dhillon served as president of the law school’s Federalist Society chapter, in addition to being an editor on the Virginia Law Review.
Dhillon’s time in law school also included a stint at the Department of Justice, though in a different division than the one she now leads. During her second summer in law school, Dhillon worked within the Civil Division, Constitutional Torts Section.
“It is an honor to return to the DOJ in this position [Assistant AG for Civil Rights],” Dhillon said in a statement to The Cavalier Daily. “I am one of a long line of lawyers at the DOJ dedicated to protecting the basic decency and humanity of all Americans through enforcement of our civil rights laws.”
As a lawyer, Dhillon settled in San Francisco and eventually founded her own firm, Dhillon Law Group. Dhillon’s firm has several practice areas but has gained prominence for representing conservative plaintiffs who claimed that they faced discrimination on account of their political views.
In 2017, Dhillon filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley. The suit claimed that by canceling an event with conservative commentator Ann Coulter, the university had violated the civil rights of two conservative groups on campus — Young Americans for Freedom and the Berkeley College Republicans. Ultimately, the suit was settled, with Berkeley agreeing to modify its procedures for speaker events going forward as part of a settlement.
In a written statement to The Cavalier Daily, Dhillon said that her past work on issues of free speech on university campuses will have little bearing on her work as assistant attorney general for civil rights.
“The federal civil rights statutes which I am presently charged with enforcing with respect to education, have to do with race, sex, and other enumerated protected characteristics, not speech,” Dhillon said in the statement. “While the Civil Rights Division may occasionally get involved in cases with a speech or viewpoint component regarding campus issues, our focus is more on enforcing Students for Fair Admissions and Title IX issues.”
Dhillon gained further attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she challenged the stay-at-home orders issued by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Dhillon claimed that the orders were violating the constitutional rights of churches and small businesses. Dhillon filed subsequent lawsuits against the governors of New Jersey and Virginia over their COVID-19 policies.
Dhillon had a spell leading the San Francisco Republican Party, before getting involved with national politics. Dhillon worked on President Donald Trump’s campaigns in 2020 and 2024, heading Arizona’s election integrity office in the latter campaign.
Although Dhillon has spoken out against affirmative action and DEI programs, Ryan has supported and led diversity initiatives both during his time at the University and as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In 2023, Ryan penned an essay titled “DEI: The Case for Common Ground,” where he argued for a balanced implementation of DEI that achieves the core aim of more diverse institutions without sacrificing commitment to merit.
“The term ‘equity' has been a lightning rod in debates about DEI, with critics claiming that it means 'equal outcomes' and therefore should be denounced as somewhere between anti-merit and anti-American. I have no idea where this notion came from, but it ought to be rejected out of hand,” Ryan wrote. “A more accurate and appropriate definition of equity is an effort to ensure equal opportunity, not equal results.”
While it is unclear whether Dhillon and Ryan interacted while law students at the University, Dhillon has sharply criticized Ryan publicly over his open support of diversity programs. During the June 27 episode of the CNN program “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” Dhillon invoked a comparison to pro-segregation officials in the Jim Crow South in her reaction to Ryan’s resignation the same day, using the historical term ‘Dixiecrats’ — a word used to refer to a party of southerners who left the Democratic Party after its civil rights stand in 1948.
“When I grew up in the rural south … the Dixiecrats had a similar view to what we're seeing on college campuses today by administrators and leaders like Jim Ryan, which is, I don't care what the federal law is, we're not going to comply with it,” Dhillon told Tapper. “Jim Ryan has built his entire career on what was the academic vogue, which is DEI. Now, it isn't. And so I think it is time for new leadership that's willing to comply with federal law.”
Nominated by Trump to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in December 2024, Dhillon was confirmed by the United States Senate April 3. After she was sworn in April 7, the University received the first of several letters from the Justice Department and signed by Dhillon April 11. These letters asked the University to provide information regarding its affirmative action policies, noting that a 2023 Supreme Court ruling had found that these policies violate civil rights law.
In the months since Ryan’s resignation, Dhillon’s office has broadened the Trump administration’s scrutiny of higher education, adding George Mason University, George Washington University and the University of California, Los Angeles to a list of more than 60 institutions under investigation by the Department of Education, including Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of Virginia.
“We are just getting started at the Civil Rights Division, with less than five months in office,” Dhillon said in her written statement to The Cavalier Daily. “I do believe that widespread racial discrimination in admissions and employment affects tens of millions of Americans every day, and it is our duty to eradicate invidious discrimination.”
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