The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have issued information requests regarding admissions practices and international students at the University of Chicago. The exact subject of the requests is unclear.
The University disclosed the inquiries in bond issuance documents dated July 11, Bloomberg reported July 18. The documents warned investors of a possible investigation.
“While the immediate financial impact on the University is not material at this time, these and other developments involving the federal government may, directly or indirectly, have a material adverse effect on the financial profile and operating performance of the University,” the documents read.
The disclosure accompanied the University’s recent issuance of $150 million in taxable revenue bonds through the Illinois Finance Authority as part of a public financing deal. As required, the University disclosed in the accompanying investor prospectus any known legal, regulatory, or financial risks, including ongoing or potential federal investigations.
When asked for comment, a University spokesperson referred the Maroon to the bond issuance documents.
Neither federal agency responded to a request for comment about the information requests by the time of publication.
The University, like many other institutions of higher education, has come under increased federal scrutiny amid the Trump administration’s broader efforts to challenge campus diversity initiatives and tighten oversight of international students.
In March, the University was named as one of 45 schools under investigation by the Department of Education for alleged Title VI violations. The complaint cited the University’s partnership with the PhD Project, an organization which aims to increase diversity in business school Ph.D. programs.
“[The] U.S. Department of Education has indicated that it views as unlawful a wide variety of actions that may be taken by colleges and universities to increase student and employee diversity, and that such actions may result in the loss of federal funding,” the bond issuance documents said, referring to the investigation.
In April, the U.S. Department of State revoked without explanation and then later restored the visas of 10 current and recently-graduated University students.
The University has also seen an array of federal funding cuts, including grants from the Department of Health and Human Services for research on HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and health inequality.
The timeline and subjects of potential investigations are unclear at the time of publication.
Jeremy / Aug 14, 2025 at 11:07 pm
At last we have a mechanism of accountability to neutralize modern-day racists cowering behind the language of “equity.”
As a 2021 graduate of the College and an ostensible beneficiary of the University’s DEI machinery, I can attest DEI was never concerned with cultivating excellence and promoting fairness. In fact, its functions were entirely nefarious: to police thought, reward ideological conformity, and nurture mediocrity.
Graham J. Slater and other smug pro-DEI figures on campus spent years force-feeding students their dogma under the guise of moral instruction. Now, with federal scrutiny intensifying, they have gone silent. No grandstanding. No op-eds. No self-congratulatory panels. And for good reason: they have finally grasped that their “equity” crusade was, in fact, little more than a socially sanctioned form of racism. (Side note: one must wonder — with so much spare time to play politics — if it’s only the irrelevant academics who engage in this as a bid for relevance.)
The conduct of pro-D.E.I. zealots — the manipulation, the harassment, the use of students as political ornaments — should be reported, investigated, and preserved in the record for all to see. Hence, I have, and will continue to, report their conduct to the federal government. I encourage those reading to do likewise.
Young / Aug 19, 2025 at 2:41 pm
Anti-wokeism and wokeism, pro-D.E.I. and anti-D.E.I. are honestly two sides of the same ideological coin. If policies aimed at recompensation and reparative justice for historically marginalized groups are deemed inherently racist (based on the unchallenged assumption that affirmative action is always wrong), then policies rooted in white victimhood must also be recognized as racist.
Anti-wokeism and anti-D.E.I. mirror the very ideologies they claim to oppose. Beneath the rhetoric of ‘true’ equity and fairness lies a push for corporate interests, the reinforcement of elitism, and the cultivation of a new dogma aligned with contemporary authoritarian regimes. It’s remarkable how some fail to recognize when they’re engaging in the very partisan grandstanding they accuse others of. (Side note: one must wonder — with so much spare time to report perceived school transgressions to the federal government — if it’s only the irrelevant lackeys who engage in this as a bid for relevance.)
To those reading this: remember that ideals can always be betrayed; pigs will gladly sit at the human table if they believe the feast is theirs to claim.
You are foolish / Aug 21, 2025 at 2:36 pm
Oh dear, more incomprehensible shriekery from the grievance set. I will attempt to parse your bile.
First, you flatter yourself with the pose of balance—“two sides of the same coin”—but that is the refuge of the unserious. It allows you to avoid the fact that DEI was not merely “one ideology among others,” but a machinery that rewrote admissions standards, degraded scholarship, and institutionalized racial preference as dogma. To claim that opposition to this is the “mirror” of wokeism is an abdication of reason; correcting malpractice is not the same as committing it.
Your invocation of “recompensation” and “reparative justice” is semantic laundering. The fact remains that preference by race, no matter how adorned with euphemisms, is racial discrimination. That you pretend otherwise shows cowardice: you cannot defend the practice in plain language, so you veil it in rhetoric.
The accusation of “white victimhood” is a convenient smear, but it collapses the moment one notices that many of the fiercest critics of DEI are themselves minorities who resent being reduced to optics. What you call “victimhood” is simply the insistence that merit, not ancestry, determine access. If that principle strikes you as reactionary, it is because you have grown too comfortable with mediocrity excused as justice.
As for your claim that anti-DEI is in thrall to “corporate interests” or “authoritarian regimes”: it is projection. The only authoritarianism visible on campus these past years has been DEI itself—the inquisitions, the thought-policing, the bureaucratic tribunals against dissent. That regime is collapsing not because of some sinister corporate plot but because it produced nothing of intellectual value and much of institutional harm.
The pigs were already seated, gorging themselves on unearned salaries, pseudo-scholarship, and the borrowed prestige of the university while students paid the price. What you call “equity” was nothing more than sanctioned corruption. To mistake the end of that charade for “authoritarianism” is the final proof of your inability to tell reality from ideology.
Edward M Cragin / Aug 13, 2025 at 9:54 am
It appears to me that positions advanced by all sides have merit and will be discussed for many years. People get stuff they do not deserve versus people getting stuff due to an attempt to rectify long time systemic bigotry. Fabulous. I get it. But thinking that such an initiative advanced by the Trump administration is anything other than White Christian Nationalistic nonsense is delusional. One need only look at Trump’s cabinet to see how truly uncommitted to meritocracy the administration is. Right wing victimhood apparently severely reduces critical thinking skills.
Jeremy M / Aug 14, 2025 at 10:45 pm
You concede that both unearned advantage and systemic bias are real, yet reduce any critique of D.E.I. to “White Christian Nationalism.” That isn’t reasoned argument. It is at the same time true that Trump’s cabinet is indifferent to meritocracy as is any framework that allocates opportunity by demographic fiat. To pretend this is a uniquely right-wing vice is to abandon principle in favor of partisanship.
John Doe / Sep 20, 2025 at 1:10 pm
This thread is very old so I’m sorry to comment but I couldn’t resist… Jeremy is hilarious. With all his pseudo-intellectualism and pontificating (this isn’t reasoned argument… okay Kant) it makes reading this silly response so amusing. Edward writes, “but thinking that such an initiative advanced by the Trump administration is anything other than White Christian Nationalistic nonsense is delusional.” Jeremy responds that Edward has “reduc[ed] any critique of DEI to ‘White Christian Nationalism.'”
With all your bluster and over-polished writing you nonetheless still participate in a teenager Reddit discourse that willfully misconstrues statements that are very plainly and clearly written, for all to see. Through Jeremy’s magic act, criticizing “an initiative advanced by the Trump administration” suddenly becomes a criticism of any critique of DEI initiatives, whatsoever. The Trump administration is, apparently, the only source of DEI critique on the globe. Bravo Jeremy! Can’t wait to see what’s next in your magician routine er… I mean… reasoned argument!
In response to Naomi ... TW / Jul 31, 2025 at 1:31 am
Quoting test scores without disaggregating by subgroup or admissions cohort is at best disingenuous, and at worst malicious. You conflate the band of high-performing applicants responsible for high GPA/test score medians with the general pool, then present the result as indicative of rising standards. The claim wasn’t that recent classes lack academic ability in absolute terms, but that preferences based on race have displaced worthy candidates by parachuting underqualified ones in. The shortcomings of DEI beneficiaries are obscured by the aggregate, allowing mediocrity to masquerade as merit through the statistical camouflage of the group. (****This is not to say there are no worthy DEI admits.****)
Your reverence for “holistic admissions” is telling. That euphemism exists to obscure the very engineering under dispute…an opaque calculus of pigmentation, passport status, and rhetorical conformity. The admissions office will never publish the delta between the median major in, say, physics, and the lowest-scoring admit in a “strategic priority” category. But rest assured, those gaps exist, and they are wide. (Leaked admissions data from “peer” NYU exposed nearly a 200‑point SAT score difference between Asian and Black admittees—Asian students averaging around 1485 versus Black students at approximately 1289. This was during the 2024—25 cycle, i.e., post the recent affirmative action SCOTUS ruling. Further evidence that discrimination in college admissions is alive and well. It is no wonder UChicago is antipathetic to sharing such data.)
The logical structure you offer—either DEI has no effect or DEI hasn’t been used—is weak. There is a third possibility: it has been used, and it has compromised standards in ways you’re ideologically unwilling to acknowledge. Evidence? Look at the proliferation of remedial and blowoff coursework (pre-calculus, Physics for Future Presidents), the metastasis of DEI administrators with no academic mandate, and the conspicuous silence when it comes to publishing departmental performance data broken down by demographic category.
Raining pain / Jul 30, 2025 at 2:59 pm
A victory for common sense. Our reports to DOGE have not gone unnoticed.
The University will pay for decades of institutionally sanctioned discrimination against high-achieving Asian and white applicants. We will make sure of it.
I implore every aggrieved applicant, parent, and alumnus to scrutinize, expose, and escalate with us.
Christine / Jul 29, 2025 at 4:14 pm
They should focus on the wonderful education received here and the cutting edge research done here.
Local Pleb / Jul 28, 2025 at 8:50 am
Can’t you all ask Leonard Leo for a favor?
Divine Justice / Jul 26, 2025 at 4:39 pm
Is it wrong to say this brings me immense joy?
Revised article title: The mandarins of Hyde Park face federal scrutiny / Jul 26, 2025 at 12:09 pm
Is accountability symptomatic of fascism? Only to those who built their entire worldview on exemption from it.
This is the inevitable reckoning for an admissions regime that has bartered merit for cosmetic “diversity.” For decades, we—students, alumni, community members still grounded in reason—warned that racial patronage and opaque international pipelines would provoke such scrutiny. For that, we were vilified. We were lectured, relentlessly, that DEI policies were not only benign, but *insufficient*! The party line was clear: more identity sorting. More demographic engineering. More race-mongering. Lies stacked atop lies, force-fed as virtue, defended as progress.
Now the façade is cracking. The very machinery that elevated mediocrity by way of pigment and citizenship status is being exposed for the racist, anti-meritocratic patronage system it always was. Fortunately, the pieties about “inclusion” can no longer shield the university from the balance sheet, or the law.
Consider this a footnote to our earlier prediction: indulgence in identity engineering carries a price. The bill has arrived. We owe this denouement to the foolish faculty ideologues, alumni patrons, and student acolytes who mistook identity liturgy for academic purpose.
Naomi Rivkis / Jul 29, 2025 at 10:42 pm
I would expect more intellectual honesty from a member of this academic community. You use many emotionally-laden words, but with no facts to back them up. From what evidence, precisely, do you derive the premise that an ethnically diverse class is inherently mediocre? The test scores and other objective academic characteristics of recent entering classes at the University have been demonstrably better than those of a generation or two earlier. If you claim that the University has been indulging in “anti-meritocratic” selection methods in recent years, surely such methods would necessarily result in less meritorious students in the more recent entering classes?
And yet, they didn’t. Our recent students have been far stronger than those of my generation, or my father’s. I’ve done alumni interviews for the Admissions department for many years, and the academic quality of the students who make up our recent entering classes is impressive in every possible way.
Logically, this leaves only two possibilities: either Admissions has not been making its choices based on DEI factors to any significant extent, or choosing a student body based partly on DEI factors does not have the “anti-meritocratic” effects you think it will.
Either way, I respectfully suggest that you look to your argument. A great deal of rhetorical noise without facts to support it may be considered adequate at some universities, but it won’t keep up with the first year students who will be entering ours this fall.
dentistadjunct / Aug 3, 2025 at 11:10 am
I would expect more research an proof. But these things have been eliminated in “academics” for postmodern clownery, DEI grift, and outright subsidized fraud masquerading as research.
But thank you for proving the point.
Young / Aug 19, 2025 at 2:19 pm
“Outright subsidized fraud masquerading as research” – bold fighting words with little data to support. Where is the evidence supporting this thesis? Which exact pieces of work are you referring to? Where is the counterargument?
Is this the kind of writing that the UChicago education has cultivated? If so, then you are a demonstration of why the academic system has failed.
You are a fool / Aug 21, 2025 at 2:39 pm
It is not a question but a sneer, the sort of juvenile posturing one expects from someone unable to confront the argument itself. The irony, of course, is that it is your reply, all form and no substance, that displays the failure of the academic system: endless quibbles about tone and citation while the institution subsidizes mediocrity.