Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched investigations into more than 50 colleges Friday over allegations that their programs and scholarships have race-based restrictions, a move in line with the agency’s broad crackdown on diversity initiatives.
- The civil rights investigations include prominent private colleges, such as Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as dozens of large public institutions, including Arizona State University and University of California, Berkeley.
- The investigations follow the Education Department’s Dear Colleague letter last month that says colleges are barred from considering race in their programs and policies. The guidance has drawn at least two lawsuits that accuse the letter of being unconstitutional.
Dive Insight:
The new investigations are just one of the aggressive moves the Education Department has taken to carry out President Donald Trump’s policy priorities to reshape higher education.
Trump and his administration’s top officials have not only threatened to pull funding from colleges over their diversity initiatives but also over the way they handle student protests and if they allow transgender women to play on teams corresponding with their gender identity.
Friday’s announcement escalates the Trump administration’s threats to pull federal funding over diversity efforts.
The Education Department said it is investigating allegations that 45 colleges have partnered with an organization for doctoral students that has race-based eligibility criteria. It is also looking into allegations that six have race-based scholarships and that one has a “program that segregates students on the basis of race.”
The probes follow the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter, which interpreted the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against race-conscious admissions to also mean that colleges were prohibited from considering race in their policies and programs, including scholarships and housing.
The letter panned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, describing them as discriminatory practices aimed at “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.” The guidance threatened to pull federal funding from colleges that didn’t comply with the Education Department’s interpretation of civil rights law.
At least two lawsuits have challenged the legality of the guidance, arguing that the letter is unconstitutionally vague, undermines academic freedom and violates free speech rights.
The plaintiffs and other critics have pointed out that the 2023 Supreme Court decision only touched on admissions.
“OCR’s letter goes beyond that in a way that is simply off-base, encompassing virtually all programs at schools and universities, including race-neutral policies,” researchers at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, said in a post this week.
Both The Century Foundation and some legal scholars have cautioned colleges to not overly comply with the letter.
“It is important to ensure that educational policy is not changed based on a letter that oversteps legal boundaries,” Liliana Garces, an educational leadership and policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in a February op-ed for The Chronicle for Education.
Two weeks later after the Education Department issued the Dear Colleague letter — amid widespread outcry — the agency appeared to walk back some of the most contested provisions of the guidance in a Q&A.
For instance, the Education Department said using words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” would not necessarily mean colleges are violating civil rights law. The agency also noted that it doesn’t have the power to control classroom instruction.
Yet the American Federation of Teachers, one of the groups suing over the guidance, said the Q&A only made the letter “murkier.”
The Education Department’s new round of investigations also follow dramatic cuts at the agency, which eliminated nearly half its workforce through mass firings and voluntary buyouts. Department leaders concentrated many of the cuts in OCR, the very division responsible for carrying out the new civil rights investigations.