The administration has revoked funding for bike paths, and encouraged removing some. A cycling advocate said it is playing on the idea of “that dork on a bike.”
Page A6From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
DOJ's Civil Rights division spars with Harvard while confirming that D.E.I. bike paths exist.
As it ran on the front
The Department's Civil Rights division is doing exactly what its name says it does: defending civil rights, aggressively, against every threat, urban or two-wheeled. This week that meant a public dispute with Harvard University, a fight over discrimination law the division is fully entitled to have, and it also meant, separately, answering a question that had apparently been open long enough to require an answer: do diversity, equity, and inclusion bike paths exist. The division's position is yes. That is a serious answer to a serious question, and anyone laughing at it has clearly never had to write a legal memo on infrastructure.
Now, is a bike path capable of holding a diversity policy? A bike path is asphalt. It goes where the city puts it. Saying a bike path can be — that does sound, phrased like that, like a strange thing for a federal civil rights division to be spending time confirming, while also carrying an active dispute with one of the country's oldest universities over its admissions and discipline practices. Let me rephrase: the division has finite hours in a day, and this week some of them went to Harvard and some of them went to bicycle infrastructure, and I am told by people who track these things that only one of those categories has ever produced a discrimination lawsuit.…
…(cont) But look at the bigger picture. A civil rights division willing to investigate anything — a university's admissions office, a city's transportation department — is a division taking its mandate seriously. That the mandate now apparently extends to confirming or denying the ideological content of a bike lane is not evidence of drift. It's evidence of thoroughness. Possibly excessive thoroughness. I'm not going to sit here and defend the bike path finding specifically, I'm going to defend the division's right to have made it.
The Harvard fight is the real fight — colleagues inside the department reportedly disagree with how it's being run, which happens, disagreement happens, that's healthy. The bike path finding is a separate matter and should not be read as representative of the division's overall — it is representative. It's in the same week, from the same office, under the same letterhead. That's the whole story, whether the division wants it read that way or not.
“They put the words 'civil rights' on the letterhead and spend the week arguing with Harvard about whether a bike lane has a diversity agenda. That's not enforcement, that's a distraction with a badge on it, while the actual case work waits.”
“The division is simply following the evidence wherever it leads, and if that evidence happens to include municipal bike infrastructure, that's due diligence, not distraction. Is this the best use of a Civil Rights division's time? That's — yes, obviously, next question.”
The receipts
Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, has extracted flashy agreements and personnel moves from big universities and sought to force states to turn over confidential voter data.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.