This story was originally produced by the Valley News. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The next steps remain unclear in a civil rights investigation into the Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine, but the probe is not an isolated incident.
The U.S. Department of Education launched a civil rights investigation into the Geisel School and four other medical schools last week, in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Justice.
Why is the federal government investigating Dartmouth?
The Department of Education announcement says the investigations are part of “President Trump’s mission to eliminate racial discrimination in medical school admissions processes across the country” and these universities had “alleged racial discrimination in admissions.”
Federal officials did not provide a specific explanation for why any of the five schools, including Dartmouth, were chosen for investigation.
A Department of Education spokesperson declined to answer questions about why the investigations are underway now, why they focus on medical schools, and what the penalties or timelines might be.
In an executive order the day after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump committed to eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion policies at institutions around the country, contending they violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In August 2025, a related executive order specifically ordered transparency in college admissions.
Dartmouth has remained largely insulated from attacks and funding cuts by the Trump administration, though the government has targeted all the other Ivy League schools, along with other elite universities.
Last October, the administration invited Dartmouth to join a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that promised priority access to federal funding in exchange for committing to the administration’s vision for academia.
Dartmouth ultimately rejected the proposal, as did six of the nine universities that received similar invitations.
The Department of Education also declined to say if the new investigation is related to that rejection.
What are the legal grounds of these investigations?
The investigations cite Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public places and businesses, integrated schools, and banned discriminatory employment practices
The act “was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction,” according to the National Archives.
Title VI of the document bans discrimination in programs that receive federal funding, including universities.
During the second Trump administration, the Civil Rights Act has been used to justify investigations into race-based admissions at colleges around the country.
The administration is investigating medical schools “to enforce compliance with federal law and ensure the students become doctors based on their merit, not their race,” according to a June Department of Justice news release announcing a separate investigation into 15 medical schools.
The federal government has interpreted Title VI based on a 2023 Supreme Court Decision, often called the Harvard ruling, that deemed university practices of race-conscious admissions were illegal.
Using the Civil Rights Act to eliminate programs designed to support historically disadvantaged populations is an “unprecedented kind of pivot in the history, in the arc of our civil rights enforcement in our country,” said Robert Kim, a civil rights and education lawyer and executive director of the Education Law Center. The center, based in New Jersey, is a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that focuses on education rights and policy.
To Kim, the administration’s actions are a “perversion of the civil rights responsibility of the government.”
What’s more, recent investigations have been a “much more aggressive and punitive type of enforcement” than the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision and federal law allow, Kim said.
“The Supreme Court did not disallow the use of a variety of factors to diversify student bodies, whether in medical schools or in colleges and universities generally,” Kim said. “Schools, including medical schools and all schools, can cultivate diverse student bodies and take into consideration a variety of race-neutral criteria,” such as family background, income levels and personal history.
But, Kim said, the administration has incorrectly considered those criteria as “inappropriate or unlawful proxy for the kind of race-conscious admissions” that are illegal.
The government has argued the opposite.
After an investigation into the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the Supreme Court “made clear that proxies for race also may not be used to discriminate” in admissions.
What will this investigation entail, and how long will it take?
Though no timeline has been provided for the Dartmouth investigation, the Trump administration has mounted other civil-rights-focused admissions investigations, including the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine and the Yale University School of Medicine. Both were launched in the spring of 2025, and took about a year to complete.
Another investigation into the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, launched in March, took only four months.
In all three cases, the administration found that the universities were violating the Civil Rights Act.
What evidence is the government looking for?
The U.S. Department of Justice, which conducted the investigations, reviewed internal and external admissions materials provided by all three colleges, including slideshow presentations with headings related to race or the 2023 Supreme Court decision but no further text.
“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 Department of Justice wrote in detailing the findings of its UCLA investigation.
Other evidence included grade point averages and test scores broken down by race, analyses of language used in admissions materials, and evidence of admissions practices that consider more than just test scores.
Does the federal government have a history of getting involved in medical education?
No, said Laura Hirshbein, a professor of medical history and psychiatry and member of the University of Michigan Center for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. There have been few historic instances of the federal government intervening in medical schools, she said.
“For the most part, there’s been kind of a shared understanding of what it means to think about discrimination,” Hirshbein said. “The way that this administration is viewing racial discrimination is upside down and backwards from that.”
Forcing universities such as Dartmouth to respond to an investigation also diverts attention away from the regular functions of the medical school.
“This kind of federal investigation can’t be anything but enormously disruptive and my guess is that’s the intent,” Hirshbein said. “The allegations seem impossible to prove.”
This seems particularly true at Dartmouth, she said, where just over 1% of more than 8,000 applicants are granted admission, according to the college website.
Based on those numbers, Hirshbein said, thousands of talented applicants must be denied admission every year, regardless of race.
In the long run, Hirshbein said, these investigations are “undermining public confidence in medicine” and could undo decades of work to ensure doctors treat all patients “as humans” regardless of their backgrounds.
Coupled with other changes, such as reinstating borrowing caps for student loans in May, the Trump investigations could make medical schools less accessible to candidates from different backgrounds and thus affect patients.
“We’re supposed to be learning from things we’ve done badly in the past and getting better, and it feels like instead of doing that we’re going backward,” Hirshbein said.
What other universities were targeted and how are they responding?
The five universities in this round of investigation appear very different. They include public, private, religious and secular medical schools across the country.
The East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine in Greenville, N.C., is a public program largely focused on primary care; it’s part of the University of North Carolina system. A spokesperson for the medical school told a local ABC affiliate that the college complies with state and federal regulations and plans to respond to the Department of Education.
Saint Louis University School of Medicine is a private Catholic Jesuit school. It plans to cooperate with the federal government while under investigation, a spokesperson told St. Louis Public Radio.
William Carey University is a Christian school whose College of Osteopathic Medicine is based in Hattiesburg, Miss. A spokesperson for William Carey did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Western University of Health Sciences, based in Pomona, Calif., is an independent private college and has one of the largest graduate schools for health sciences in California, according to the college’s website.
“Western University of Health Sciences complies with all state and federal laws governing its admissions practices,” VP and Chief of Staff Jill Ferreira said Monday. “We have no further comment at this time.”
Dartmouth spokeswoman Jana Barnello told the Valley News last week that the college is “confident in Geisel’s admissions process” and will respond to the administration’s request for information “in due course.”
Barnello declined to comment further this week on the investigation or on the Geisel Office for Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement. The office seems to have no connection to admissions but puts inclusive programming in the medical school, according to the program website.
