JUSTICE FOUND NOTHING AND TOOK $50 MILLION
Justice Department investigators found no civil rights violation at Brown. Their leadership refused to let them write it down. Brown paid $50 million anyway.
Haley Van Erem filed a whistleblower disclosure on Tuesday saying the government investigators who examined Brown University found no violation of civil rights law, that her superiors would not let the team put that in writing, and that Brown paid $50 million anyway.
Van Erem worked in the Justice Department's civil rights division for nearly a decade. Last year the department assigned her to the multi-agency task force it launched in February 2025 to investigate antisemitism at universities. She quit in May 2025, she wrote, because she was "unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law." Her lawyers sent the disclosure to the internal watchdogs at the Justice and Health and Human Services departments, and to the federal office that handles whistleblower complaints. The Associated Press obtained it.
At Brown, the team found no evidence supporting a violation of Title VI, the part of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination by anyone taking federal money. "Leadership refused to permit a notice of no violation," the complaint says, "and instead sought some form of settlement or resolution despite acknowledging the absence of a legal basis for doing so." Brown later agreed to pay $50 million to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island, closing three federal investigations. The government found no wrongdoing.
Columbia went differently. Investigators there did find evidence of discrimination, the complaint says. But the department drove the case to a finish on a compressed timetable, before anyone finished the fact-finding or the legal review, on allegations that were "unsupported, based on news reports or litigation filings, or that implicated protected First Amendment activity." Columbia paid the government $200 million to get its federal funding switched back on.
