There is a long tradition - known as academic freedom - which allows universities to be self-governing - within limits. Those limits are posed most broadly by the federal civil rights laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, barring race or national origin discrimination, and Title IX of the 1972 Act barring discrimination based on gender.
The Civil Rights Act transformed American education, removing legal `de jure' race discrimination, and then barring gender discrimination. Defenders of the status quo lamented Constitutionally mandated federal intervention. But no one has ever seen intervention of the sort the U.S. Department of Education has attempted to take effective control of Harvard University.
