For most of my career, a federal civil rights complaint against a school or university followed a familiar path. It went to the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education. An attorney or investigator there opened it, asked for documents, talked with the institution, and more often than not the matter ended in a resolution agreement that both sides could live with. The process was slow and uneven, but its instinct was cooperative.
That path has changed, and I do not think the field has fully absorbed how much.
What changed
On June 16, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice announced an interagency agreement that moves the investigation of education civil rights complaints to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The Office for Civil Rights still receives complaints and keeps its role in policy guidance, technical assistance, and voluntary resolution. The evaluation and investigation of a complaint, including formal data requests and witness interviews, now sits with lawyers whose ordinary work is litigation.
We have already seen what that looks like. On September 9, the two departments announced a joint finding that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discriminated on the basis of race in admissions. On September 22, the Justice Department announced findings against the UCSF School of Medicine. The UCSF letter built its case from the institution's own admissions data, examined each stage of review separately, treated pipeline programs and the scholarships attached to them as part of the Title VI analysis, and gave the university ten days to respond.
These are findings letters. They are the enforcing agency's conclusions, not court judgments, and no court has yet tested the analysis behind them. But they show plainly how the new investigator reads a file: statistically, stage by stage, and with litigation as the stated alternative to settlement.
What did not change
The statutes did not change. Title VI, Title IX, Section 504, and Title II mean what they meant in May. The obligations they place on an institution are the same obligations, owed to the same students and employees.
Private litigation did not change. A complainant who does not receive a fast federal resolution still has a lawyer, a court, and a statute of limitations that will outlast this administration and the next one.
And the institution's own process did not change, except in importance. Reporting on the agreement has noted that the Justice Department's education unit is far smaller than the Office for Civil Rights was, and oriented toward systemic cases rather than individual complaints. If that holds, many complainants who once would have been served by a federal investigator will be served, or failed, by the institution's grievance process instead. The internal process is becoming the primary forum. It should be built like one.
The record now has a named reader
The idea this firm was founded on is that every engagement leaves a record that someone who was not in the room will eventually read. For years that reader was hypothetical: a reviewer, an auditor, a judge, a journalist, a successor. It now has a name and an address. The first reader of a contested file may well be a trial attorney at the Civil Rights Division, reading it the way trial attorneys read everything: looking for the gap between what the institution says it did and what the documents show.
That changes what good practice looks like in three concrete ways.
First, every selection process should be describable stage by stage. Admissions, scholarships, honors programs, summer bridge and pathway programs, research training, hiring. For each stage: who decides, on what criteria, seeing what information. An institution that can produce that map when asked is in a very different position from one that has to reconstruct it after a letter arrives.
Second, every institution should have a written response protocol for a federal data request. Who receives it, who coordinates, who reviews for privilege, and how fast the institution can assemble records. UCSF was given ten days. Most offices I know could not locate the right custodians in ten days, let alone produce a coherent response.
Third, every investigation file should stand on its own. Contemporaneous notes, not reconstructed ones. Findings that state their reasons and cite the evidence that supports them. Decisions about scope, witnesses, and credibility explained at the time they were made. A file that depends on its author being in the room to explain it will not survive a reader who was never in the room.
None of this is new advice. What is new is that the cost of ignoring it has become specific.
What I would ask of institutional leaders
Do not read the reorganization as relief. I made this argument in July about enforcement volatility generally, and it applies with more force now. A slower federal complaint process does not reduce an institution's obligations. It shifts the weight of them onto the institution's own processes, and it raises the stakes when a federal matter does arrive, because the matters that arrive now are the ones a litigation unit chose to pursue.
Fund the internal process as the forum it is becoming. That means trained decision makers, investigators who are not also advising on the policy at issue, and records that are kept as though they will be read, because they will be.
Ask one question of every program that selects people or distributes benefits: could we explain, in writing, this week, exactly how this works? If the answer is no, the time to find out is before someone else asks.
What this means for us
Our investigation standard has always assumed a skeptical reader. We write reports to be read by someone who was not there and who has reason to doubt us. That assumption has not changed. It has simply become more likely to be tested, and I would rather the firm be held to it than be spared.
If your office is holding a file that you would not want read by a litigator, that is a solvable problem, and it is far easier to solve now than after the letter arrives.
The standard has not moved. The reader has.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Justice, "Joint Investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Department of Education Finds U.C. Berkeley Law School Discriminates Based on Race in Admissions," September 9, 2026.
- U.S. Department of Justice, "Justice Department Finds UCSF Medical School Discriminates Based on Race in Admissions," September 22, 2026.
- Inside Higher Ed, "ED Shifts Some Civil Rights Enforcement to Justice Department," June 16, 2026.
- Education Week, "Ed. Dept. Shifts Civil Rights to the Justice Dept.: What It Means for Schools," July 2026.
- Littler Mendelson P.C., "The New DOE-DOJ Interagency Agreement: A Meaningful Shift in Civil Rights Enforcement for Educational Institutions," June 2026.