The president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Lynn Pasquerella confronts President Trump’s attack on what he calls “diversity, equity and inclusion” at educational institutions: “(T)reating people differently is not always unjust, especially when doing so corrects a broader pattern of systemic injustice. Considering race and gender in the context of historic unjust discrimination to inform policies and practices at colleges and universities doesn’t in and of itself constitute discrimination….”

For what feels like a long time now, the Trump administration has been releasing executive orders which the President believes will protect white males based on their merits.  On February 14th, the acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Craig Trainor sent a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening to deny federal funding to any school or college that considers race in hiring, discipline policy, scholarships, prizes or any other aspect of campus life. The letter expansively interpreted the narrower 2023 Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions as also banning any program or policy that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion and addresses race.  Schools were given two weeks to comply.

Then, on April 3rd, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to all 13,000 U.S. public school districts and to all the states’ departments of education threatening to withhold their federal Title I funding unless within 10 days they certified in writing that they had eliminated all programs and policies relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both demands were temporarily stayed by federal courts, and attempts to enforce the Trump administration’s demands by the Department’s Office for Civil Rights have been made only on a number of specific states and school districts.  For example, the Department of Education has threatened Maine’s Title I funding over its refusal to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports, and the Department of Education has contested a program in the Chicago Public Schools to increase achievement among Black students.  And the administration continues to make demands on Ivy League universities. Trump’s obsession with ending what he calls “diversity, equity and inclusion,”  has not ended.

All along, we have been warned that, unless powerful institutions stand up and refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s demand that our society turn away from 70 years of work to expand civil rights protections for all people, including those denied rights from the nation’s very beginning, the administration’s attack on civil rights will not stop.

Instead, in recent agreements to block the Trump administration from seizing hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants, Columbia University and Brown University both caved in by allowing the Trump administration to monitor their college admissions records to ensure that affirmative action has been entirely scrubbed. After two prominent universities capitulated to Trump administration pressure, we now see another executive order demanding that all colleges and universities across the nation share their applicants’ high school grades, standardized test scores, and the race of every one of the students who has applied for admission.

Brown and Columbia Universities Give the Federal Government their Admissions Data

In the fine print of agreements to block the Trump administration’s seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants that were previously awarded to underwrite academic research, both Columbia and Brown Universities included a promise that the Trump administration could investigate their admissions policies and impose penalties if either university were discovered to have considered criteria besides student grades and standardized test scores when they select students.

The NY Times’ Sharon Otterman and Anemona Hartocollis report: “As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities… the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions… The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions…. The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as ‘merit-based’ processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.”

The reporters add: “The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores…” They quote Yale Law School professor Justin Driver, who bluntly identifies the Trump administration’s goal: “The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country… The Trump administration has celebrated getting this data as part of its war on ‘woke’ university policies such as affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs that it says discriminate based on race.”

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Justine McDaniel further detail the implications of the agreement Columbia University recently signed with the Trump administration: “Columbia University agreed to pay more than $200 million to settle allegations of civil rights violations from the Trump administration. It agreed to a long list of changes on campus. But one concession struck some observers as particularly troubling: an outside monitor to ensure the school complies… Much of the oversight will relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as the Trump administration seeks to stamp out any effort by Columbia to increase racial diversity in its student body, faculty, or staff. The monitor will also be charged with assuring that university programs do not promote ‘unlawful DEI goals’ — a term that is not defined.”

The Washington Post reporters continue: “Under the agreement, Columbia is required to provide the monitor with detailed information about the race of students who are admitted and rejected, including grade point averages and standardized test scores broken down by race. All data related to faculty and administrative staff hiring and promotion practices must be provided to the monitor annually, and hiring data will be subject to a ‘comprehensive audit.’ The monitor is also charged with assuring that the university establishes processes to guarantee ‘civil discourse, free inquiry, open debate, and the fundamental values and respect.’ And the monitor will review data to assure Columbia is meting out discipline without regard to a student’s immigration status… ‘This is definitely a new regulatory state,’ said Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and policy at Stetson University’s College of Law. ‘We’re moving more towards a central command relationship with the federal government over higher education. Central control of content, curriculum, hiring, conduct, discipline and processes.’ ”

On Thursday, the NY Times‘ Claire Cain Miller followed up these reports with academic research utterly contradicting Education Secretary Linda MacMahon’s promise that these agreements will ensure that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”  The administration’s understanding of merit as measured by statistics like test scores and students’ grades neglects to consider the role of family wealth for shaping children’s opportunities.

Miller explains: “A recent study showed just how much having rich parents benefits applicants… Students from rich families benefited for three main reasons, the researchers found: The colleges gave preference to applicants who were athletes, legacies (typically children of alumni), and attendees of private, nonreligious high schools. The researchers, from Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard, obtained internal admissions assessments from several elite colleges… (that) showed students from the richest families were much likelier to have high SAT scores in the first place: Children whose parents earned in the top 1 percent were 13 times as likely to score 1300 or higher compared with those whose parents earned in the bottom 20 percent. This reflects, in part, how poor children receive vastly different educations, in school and out, than rich children. Those with high-earning parents tend to go to schools with more resources, and grow up with less family stress and more opportunities like extracurricular classes and tutors. Among American schoolchildren today, research shows, achievement gaps are driven by family income, not race. Elite colleges favor students from rich families no matter their race.”

After Columbia and Brown Universities Caved In, Trump Issues New Executive Order Imposing Nationwide Monitoring of College Admissions

First came an action by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Inside Higher Education‘s Johanna Alonso reports that, on July 30, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo declaring “diversity, equity and inclusion practices are unlawful and ‘discriminatory’.” While most legal experts have interpreted the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court decision narrowly as banning affirmative action in college admissions, Bondi articulates what has become the Trump administration’s expanded interpretation of that Supreme Court’s decision: “suggesting that programs that rely on what they describe as stand-ins for race, like recruitment efforts that focus on majority-minority areas, could violate federal civil rights laws… Other examples of ‘potentially unlawful proxies’ include requirements that job applicants demonstrate ‘cultural competence, lived experience, or cross-cultural skills’ or narratives about how the applicant has overcome obstacles…. This interpretation of federal law could present new challenges for colleges that have relied on tactics like place-based recruitment to create diverse student bodies since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023. For instance, some colleges have guaranteed admission to students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high schools.”

Then last Thursday, August 7th, President Trump released a new executive order demanding that all colleges and universities make their admissions data available for inspection by the federal government.  The NY Times‘ Michael Bender and Anemona Hartocollis report: “President Trump on Thursday ordered his Education Department to begin collecting detailed data on the race and gender of college applicants, as well as test scores and grade point averages, a shift that would allow the government to closely scrutinize whether universities are giving minorities preference in admissions… Admissions data has increasingly become a focus of the Trump administration as part of its effort to shift the ideological balance of academia, which the president views as hostile to conservatives.”

The Associated Press’s Annie Ma and Jocelyn Gecker describe Trump’s broad interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions case as mistaken. While the case does narrowly ban affirmative action based explicitly on race, they quote Chief Justice John Roberts’s words in the Court’s majority opinion: “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

Bender and Hartocollis quote Yale Law School professor Justin Driver describing the new executive order as, “another catastrophic blow in the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on American higher education… It signals the Trump administration’s efforts to… intimidate universities into decreasing Black and brown enrollment.”

Bender and Hortocollis conclude: The government’s recent agreements with Brown University and Columbia University already gave the Trump administration access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, as well as information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter their competitive college admissions process.  Harvard’s compliance with the Supreme Court decision is also a major focus of White House negotiations to release billions of dollars in halted research funding for the university.”

What will Harvard do?